Re: 1971 LS6 Chevelle SS Production
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Very true. It does not mean it made production. But if you owned that test car today - say someone hauls it out of a barn next week with some of the road-tester's handwritten notes in the glovebox - it would be considered a factory built 1971 LS6 Chevelle. That is all I am saying.
[/ QUOTE ]
But that's where I disagree again - there's no saying what the car started out as. For all we know, it could have been a regular Malibu 350 that was converted to an SS454 for more promotional purposes.
[/ QUOTE ]
The first HemiCuda started life as a small block Gran Coupe dev mule. It was later rebuilt, revinned and sold new as a Hemi car. So is it still a HemiCuda?
Factory re-V.I.N.ing was not all that uncommon. If they made a mistake in building a vehicle that had the wrong equipment for that model, they simply did it to reflect the model they had built or the closest to it. It was the most economical thing to do. We always think in terms of the hipo cars we love, but it happened to 4 doors too, just no one pays any attention to the detail of these cars.
About the only vehicles that actually got destroyed were the ones that had new "technology" of the day that may or may not have reached the public later as regular production. The manufacturers were in business to make money. If a car was built as something that was never to make it to regular production, but met all the FMVSSs, then you can bet that they sold it to some dealer somewhere.
Even the vast majority of cars that had all of the experimential race stuff that later became available as RPOs got sneeked out the back door to some favored racer even though Chevrolet was not publicly sanctioning racing.
|