THE GREAT CHEVY KILLER

By RON JACOBS

CAR & DRIVER, MAY 1999

In this Fifties memoir, the first Bonneville coupe gobbles up the ruling ’57 Chevys. Uh, with a little help from some friends.

It was 1957, and for a guy who was just 20 and a high-school dropout, I wasn’t doing badly. I was a hot-shot deejay on KHVH-AM in Honolulu at the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll, making more money than I’d ever dreamed of. I even owned one of the coolest cars of that or any other time—a ’57 Ford Skyliner, the car whose steel top retracted into the trunk sort of like Mercedes SLK’s.

Fast cars were my weakness. My problem was the shortage of paved streets on our little island of Oahu—exactly 58.82 miles. And the highest speed limit was 45 mph.

Most drag racing in those days was conducted—illegally, natch—in the cane fields far from Honolulu. Although there were no freeways in operation, the first stretch of the planned Lunalilo Freeway in town had been completed. Of course, street lights hadn’t been put in place, so in the late ‘50s it began to be used as a moonlit race strip.

One of my friends at the time was a guy we called “Big Z.” His father owned Kapiolani Motors, the only Pontiac dealership in the Territory of Hawaii (statehood was about a year away), and Z was its general manager.

Some nights, Big Z and I would sit parked in one of his demo cars at the end of the strip of freeway and watch the “power pack” ’57 Chevy V-8s destroy all comers. The growing arrogance of the Chevy crowd was beginning to annoy Z and me. It anyone was going to develop some snotty drag-racing arrogance, shouldn't it be the hotshot deejay? Big Z was annoyed because Pontiacs were cars for dentists’ wives.

Then one day just before Christmas of 1957, an excited Big Z called me at the radio station and told me to get over there immediately. I was soon walking across the marble-floored showroom, and there it was.

I was staring at a 1958 Pontiac Bonneville Custom Sport coupe, decked out in two-tone green, a dark “Darby” color and the lighter “Seaforth” shade. That model year, Pontiac offered four V-8 choices in the Bonneville: two with four-barrel carbs making 255 or 285 horsepower, a 300-hp engine with three carbs, and the fuel-injected Tempest 395 that put out 310 horses and 400 pound-feet of torque.

I know that data today having looked them up but was ignorant of those offerings back then. The fact that the Bonneville before me was the e 285-hp four-barrel version, and not the big fuel-injected version, didn’t put me off at all. Besides, the ’57 Chevy’s fuel-injected V-8 put out two fewer horses, although it was about 600 pounds slimmer than the Pontiac.

But that Bonneville was the coolest. It was big and long—riding on a 122-inch wheelbase—but its curves, like the best hula dancers’, were in all the right places. The recesses in the rear-fender sheet metal suggested Corvette bloodlines and looked as though they were intended to hold rockets. The little chrome ribs inlaid down the trunk were sharp. What gave it real style was its hardtop-coupe design without B-pillars. Its two-tone paint mirrored the tropical foliage steel still generously visible in those days before skyscrapers. It’s amusing to recall that it all ran on skinny little 8.00-by-14-inch white-sidewall tires.

Inside, this ultra-50s masterwork it was a riotous array of chrome and steel and paint. The big two-tone rear leather seats had a center armrest that could be lowered. Chrome, real leather bucket seats wrapped the upholstery and a wire mesh of it was set into the dash. The gas and brake pedals were chromed. On the floors were “loop-pile Lurex flecks carpeting.” And not least of all, the Bonneville had “dual ashtrays” up front. It had 21 miles on the odometer.

And before I was 22-years-old, I would own it, handing over the endorsed pink slip to my 1957 Ford Skyliner as a hefty down payment. It was a big price for those days: $3481, plus freight to Hawaii. In no time, it would become known on Oahu streets as “da Bonnaveel.”

We took it for a drive on the H-! freeway when it was known as the "Mauka Artial." This innocuous looking baby had great power, but the Hydromantic transmission, and its girth, gave me second thoughts about my chances of becoming the Great Chevy Killer. Big Z and I decided to load this stock car to the gills.

To this day I don’t know what exactly went on in that far corner of the Kapiolani Motors shop where Z’s gleeful mechanics fought to work on “da Bonnaveel.” Z’s father spent considerable time mollifying dentists’ wives and other patrons since work in the shop had mysteriously slowed down.) Parts were ordered from mainland hot rod shops and flown in Special Delivery.

I do know that in the next two weeks, as I waited anxiously, the engine’s displacement of 375 cubes was bored out to “400-something.” Aluminum racing pistons replaced the stock ones. Solid lifters were swapped for the factory hydraulics. What the hell’s an “Isky cam”? The “Tri-Power” package, involving three two-barrel carbs, replaced the four-barrel. Later, even that was replaced by a log manifold, which was the next closest thing to fuel injection at the time. Goodbye, Hydromantic.

Hello, four-on-the- floor. Hello, big stiff truck clutch. And hi to the new rear-end gears, 4.10:1. The Bonneville was lowered a bit and a tach was installed.

The point of all this was to sandbag those Chevy showoffs. I could just hear them when they saw “da Bonnaveel”: “We goin’ keek dis big peeg’s ass!”

Hawaii’s most notorious street vehicle debuted of what would become a Saturday night at Honolulu’s most popular drive-in restaurant. called “Kau Kau Korner” (“kau kau” means food in tourist Hawaiian. The kosher word for food is Meaʻai.)

I hadn’t come alone. With me were Pigsy, Ba-Boo, Bobby Evans, and Big Al, who always threw a loaded Colt .45 into the glove box when he came aboard. After parking front and center at Kau Kau for an hour, nursing coffee, trying to appear aloof—and really enjoying all the commotion we were causing—it was time to pop the hood. And then teasingly close it as soon as anyone ventured near it enough to peek inside. That was tradition. Within the next hour, hot cars from all over the island were arriving for a look-see.

Folks in Hawaii have a unique system of communicating with the arch of an eyebrow, the shrug of a shoulder, the flick of the head. A smirking quartet of local Japanese guys in a turquoise and white ’57 Chevy indicated they’d like to meet us up on the west side of the freeway where the paving was complete. The finish line was about a quarter-mile away at Bingham Street near the UH. This always made for excitement because an overshoot could propel a speeding car into the rear wall of the Varsity Theater.

Those were low-tech days. The Honolulu police broadcast on a high-frequency AM band, a bit past 1550 kilocycles. All serious street racers tweaked their radios to monitor the HPD whose call letters were KUA-205. We knew where they were. And all they knew was where we weren’t. Heh-heh.

Even though I was terrified—days before, Evans had snapped an axle shaft on a test run and the truck clutch was a bitch to work smoothly—it was my duty to drive the Bonneville’s inaugural race.

Headlights at cockeyed angles lined both sides of dimly lit virgin road. I moved up, torquing starboard whenever I revved the monster. Sounds of elephant orgasms. The pavement whizzed underneath at what seemed like Sputnik speeds. King of da Road!

And then in the murky macadam distance, a guy waved a flag. Taking my time with the clutch, the competing Chevy left me like I was a tractor in mud—for the first 100 yards. The only time I saw it again was when I blew past it with still some rpm to go and a lot of third and fourth gear left.

We drove triumphantly back to Kau Kau Korner. It would be the high of my automotive life. Big Z said he felt like his idol: Aga Kahn III, the Mideastern playboy millionaire.

“Da Bonnaveel’s” legend increased; we beat all comers.

Then one night in the summer of ’58,, while we sat parked in another drive-in near the airport, a shabby-looking Triumph TR3 wearing a sloppy coat of primer crept back into the back row of the joint. An emissary arrived with a challenge. How could we have known it was powered by—aarrrgh!—a Chevy V-8. Its driver was one of Hawaii’s top pro racers, Moki Maemori himself, he who raced against the Unser boys in old Honolulu Stadium, which was converted into a racing oval within 24 hours of a football game.

This “make ass” desolate defeat was even more ignominious when I popped that dreaded clutch and gave birth to a puddle of metal on the road. I could hear all the car horns celebrating the demise of the Great Chevy Killer.

By October 1958 I was bored with the car and the 8-mpg it sucked up. Still, I was oh so saddened when the car was stolen, stripped and burned. With the insurance money I bought a stock black 1959 Catalina coupe. We dechromed it, tinted the windows, and lowered it a bit.

It carried “da Bonnaveel”s” reputation. And it never lost a race—mostly because no one ever dared to challenge its successor.

Much mahalo to Paul Maddox of Holualoa on the Kona side of Hawaii island--who has done much of the graphics on various projects together--and who pushed me for ten years to dig up this story and deal with it for use on his terrific site. With photos and other neat stuff, including all the original text, which was updated with this post. Check out http://www.hawaiimotorbeat.com/