orking on a custom car of your own is always a gratifying experience, but the process can be much more enjoyable when you include a couple of your best friends. This 1967 Chevy Nova wagon was a collaborative effort by a group of three pals: Mike Wahl, Manny Llamas, and Jose Ybarra—guys who grew up in Southern California’s custom car culture. Now, if you are familiar with these guys, then you know that whatever they pour their time and effort into, it’s bound to be killer!

ike most muscle car guys, Dave Hergenrader can trace his automotive affliction back to childhood. The addiction usually starts innocently enough: a cool older brother, a loud V-8, and a willingness to get dirty. Before long you’re hooked. But before we dig into this 1989 IROC-Z Camaro we’ll roll down the window to how it all started.

For Dave, a custom cabinet builder from Lincoln, Nebraska, the introduction came at age 13 while helping his older brother wrench on a 1967 Chevy Impala. It’s the car that lit the fuse. By high school he had a 1964 Chevy of his own, the kind of car that teaches young gearheads the difference between necessity and opportunity. If something broke, you fixed it because Monday morning was coming.

anny Grella remembers the moment he was bit by the Bowtie bug. “While I was growing up, many of the guys in the neighborhood drove muscle cars. It immediately created a passion in me, as I was drawn to their looks and the sound of their cars rumbling down my street,” Manny says. However, there was one particular car that really made an impression on the youngster. “When I was a kid, my grandpa drove a ’71 Chevelle Malibu, a car that he bought new off the showroom floor. It was red and had a black vinyl top. This car solidified my love for the model, and I knew that someday I was going to have one of my own.”

Now, Grandpa’s car was a base model powered by the workhorse 307ci small-block, so this Malibu wasn’t going to blow the doors off any of the more potent rides on the streets of Long Island. However, it was a good starter car for any burgeoning muscle car aficionado. As luck would have it, when Manny turned 16, the used A-body was passed down to him by his grandpa. “When he handed me the keys, he told me to take good care of it,” Manny fondly remembers. “The car was always garaged from day one, so I did the same and kept the Malibu out of the weather.”

ome say that one man’s misfortune is another man’s good fortune, which is only partially true in how Dale Golucke ended up finally scoring a 1966 Chevelle, a car his twin brother had back in high school. Actually, this story is more along the lines of “there is luck in bad luck.”

Dale was renting some garage space next to a body shop on the edge of El Paso, Texas, where the carcass of a 1966 Chevelle was parked. Being in far west Texas, the body was decent but the engine and trans were long gone, the interior was completely hollowed out, even the glass was missing. The good news was the car was a true Super Sport, it still had its 12-bolt, and there were a few new parts in the trunk. Of course, it wasn’t for sale.

here’s a certain kind of car story that sounds too strange to be true until you’re standing in the middle of it, brushing dirt off quarter-panels while opening doors that haven’t creaked since Duran Duran ruled MTV back in the early ’80s. This 1961 Chevy Bel Air was one of those stories.

This one came to Paul Marcinek as a bit of a surprise as his brother had been car hoarding classics without his knowledge for decades.

ome might say the glory days of drag racing are long gone, but there is an organization that thrives on honoring the gassers and super stock racers of old. It’s the Southeast Gassers Association, and it has been the most authentic representation of vintage drag racing action for more than a decade. The group features a championship points series at eighth-mile tracks around the Southeast, and it’s known for its high-rpm, door-to-door, heads-up action.

Event organizers work hard to develop rules to keep racing tight without the use of dial-in, breakouts, or time indexes. True heads-up racing is part of the successful formula for the Southeast Gassers Association, as the action is intense from the moment the cars hit the track until the final pair goes down the track. The cars are split into multiple classes: A/Gas, B/Gas, C/Gas, and Super Stock are part of the points championship, while H/Gas (four- and six-cylinder cars) and A/FX are exhibition classes.

The rule book is long and extensive, but the general idea for the class breaks includes a basic pounds-per-cubic-inch guideline. A/Gas is 6 lb/ci, B/Gas is 8 lb/ci, and C/Gas is 10 lb/ci. C/Gas is the easiest to illustrate because the math is easy: a 3,000-pound car can run a maximum of 300 ci. No matter the class, every car in the Southeast Gassers Association must have a manual transmission. That means big time rpm and hard-charging action as the drivers bang through the gears.