[Greg Reimer 7376]

Joe, I was talking about a stock as produced body shell. Yours as described was tied together and stiffened pretty well. More of those should have been done that way. The once common V8 conversion Vegas and all, most were street driven and weren't done to that extent. About 15 years ago, my neighbor across the street got a wild hair to build a Vega with a 350. He found a couple Vega wagons and he went to town on it. He even found new left and right panels to convert the wagon into a panel express. The end result was a very insanely fast car for the street. He got some crate 350 with some aftermarket heads and intake and with whatever cam he selected, a built 350 trans and a somewhat loose converter, and he ran around like this until he lit 'em up and absolutely demolished the rear end. He then found an 8 1/2" 10 bolt that had been in somebody elses'Vega, so he bolted it in and was done with it at that point, but he still had the stock front brakes on this thing. I know from a few road tests he took me on that it seemed like all that power was trying to twist the car in half.He got tired of it and sold the car to somebody from Phoenix, they ran around in it, and ran it one night at Firebird and it went low 11's. That's definitely fast enough to need some chassis engineering.