Hit up a local car museum for the first time today. Had a couple pretty cool / relevant cars for this group:




Not a Monte / W body, but an important part of 3800/4t65 history. This is the Spirit of Bonneville - the first production based front wheel drive car to break 200 mph. I dont remember much about the engine as it's been so long (and the signage wasnt detailed enough - although they did have an engine bay picture on the wall) - but it was one of the earliest big 3800 builds - one of only a handful with the Kenne Bell supercharger along with Doug Thorley headers (before 3800 headers were mainstream items - same place that ultimately did the LS4 car headers).

Edit - found a bit of info on the original (pre KB Blowzilla) build:


Looks like their goal was to break the existing 209 mph record set by a Firebird (I presume for some kind of specific class as clearly there were faster purpose build salt flat cars back around 2000) with a 210 mph pass. Sadly, I dont think it ever made it - I want to say it peaked around 204.

​​​​​​​I do wonder if this holds the record for fastest 4t65 ever as well. That GM racing Cobalt drag car (Ecotec / 4t65) was only about 1200 hp at its peak, so I cant imagine it was doing more than 160s limited to the quarter mile.

I really wonder how they set up 4th to handle the power in this Bonneville for extended WOT pulls.



And one perfectly applicable to this group. Im sure everyone has seen plenty of them on the various auction sites - but it's still neat to see in person too (and was their only Monte). Cool to see one in absolutely perfect condition.

Dash and the paperwork are both signed by John Moss.

 

A friend of mine and a member on here had one Sidestreet was his handle. We went to a Carshow north of Omaha town called West Point together once. But his car suffered from the timing belt thing and took the car out. to bad that happened its always fun to have multiple MC owners at a show.
https://montecarloforum.com/forum/me...oint-ne-60170/

 

I'll admit, I didnt used to like that theme (purple is near the top of my list of least favorite colors). But as Ive grown older this specific car / scheme has really grown on me.

That's too bad about his timing belt - I sure am glad most cars have gone away from that these days.

 

Cool stuff! I noticed an early 90's W-body Grand Prix in the back ground.

 

Good eye!

Yep, IIRC it was some kind of Daytona safety car or something like that (of course with like 10 original miles on it).

Ill admit I didnt really look much at it. I spent a ton of time with Grand Ams of that era, but nothing older than 97 for Grand Prixs - so I know virtually zero about that gen.

This museum is a bit of an oddball in that probably half of the cars are open for you to sit in - so I spent an obscene amount of time sitting in the cars that were open - especially the really old + weird stuff. It's a vantage point that Ive never had before and a really cool way to experience the cars. So I breezed by other stuff a lot more than I normally would.