750hp Drag Car As A Daily Driver?

You may have heard some cool gearhead stories, but I doubt you’ve heard a story quite like this one, as told by Pete Gentile, the owner and driver of this slick gasser-style 1955 Chevy.

While Pete’s car certainly looks the part of a nostalgia gasser, but it’s actually the car that Gentile himself drives daily. Looking at the car, you don’t think it would ever see the street, but in it’s current state, it actually only sees the street and hasn’t been raced in years. Instead, the car literally serves as Gentile’s daily means of transportation.

The car began life as a shell, destined to serve a life of quarter mile duty, but Pete managed to score the ride for $400 and went to work putting the car together. Gentile first built the car for the track and campaigned it successfully from 1965 through the end of 1971. The following year, Pete disassembled the car and stored it in a chicken coop, where it would sit for quite a while before being reassembled for daily use.

Dropping in a carbureted powerplant would give Pete the ease and reliability needed to haul the grandkids around without worrying about over complicated systems wreaking havoc and causing reliability issues. The car has a supercharger under the hood and could crank out about 750, though Pete has it detuned to around 600 for for now since the carb and cam won’t quite support the full output of the blower.

As you could imagine the car draws a lot of looks and comments, considering it looks very much like it was driven straight off the track and onto the streets. Gentile even takes his grandkids out for ice cream, proving just how much he trusts the car to get the job done. This is an amazing story with a couple of twists that really make for a great story.