1961 Chevrolet Impala SS409 - Car And Driver

From the August 1995 Issue of Car and Driver

In the winter of 1961, without much fanfare, Chevrolet introduced a V-8 model with an engine of considerable proportion: 409 cubic inches. That February, a Southern California drag racer named “Dyno” Don Nicholson entered a 409 Impala at the Pomona Winternationals and promptly chewed up the entire field.

About 1500 miles to the north in far away Canada, the news would have a life-changing impact on a young mechanic who owned a small shop in Calgary. Dale Armstrong was only 20, but until the 409 Impala turned up he’d been a staunch Ford and Olds man. Now Armstrong had to have an Impala 409, though he knew he couldn’t buy one from the meager revenues of his repair shop. And he certainly couldn’t afford the $3378 price of the 409 with the Super Sport package—a model then so rare that few auto buffs even knew it existed.

A quarter century later, Armstrong would finally acquire the keys to what may be the first SS409 ever built. The wait cost him about $47,000, but Armstrong could afford it—in the interim, he’d become the crew chief for Kenny Bernstein's championship Funny Car.

For Sale Near You

See all results for 1961 Chevrolet Impala for sale near r3r 2r1

• Chevrolet Impala Research: Tests, Photos, Info, and More! • Comparison: 2014 Impala LT V-6 vs. Five Other Mid-Sizers • What Would You Change About the 2014 Chevrolet Impala?

Armstrong grew up in the tiny prairie town of Holden, Alberta, and he can remember helping his dad keep the family tractor alive. "I've been mechanically interested forever," he says. When he was 15, his family moved to Calgary, and soon he bought his first car, a 1936 Ford coupe, for $5. It had one small drawback—the engine block was cracked. "I just took it home and went at it," he says.

Armstrong did not go to an automotive mechanics school. His first job was wrenching cars at an Esso station, and he describes the pay scale thusly: "The owner would give me a few bucks now and then." After graduation from high school in 1959, he worked for a year as a yard hand for the Canadian-Pacific Railroad, on the grave­yard shift. During the day, he worked on the cars of his friends—much more fun than sleeping. A year later, he quit the rail­road, rented a small garage, and opened his own repair shop.

Like many young car buffs in those days, Armstrong was drag-racing his daily transportation, a 1954 Olds Eighty Eight sporting a '59 Rocket V-8 and a McCul­loch supercharger. But he and his racing pals were restless. "You were always reading about Southern California and all the drag racing down there, so a couple of buddies and myself decided to drive down around Easter of 1962." To farm boys from frozen Calgary, Southern California might as well have been on another planet. "There were cars and car stuff going on everywhere." He returned to his shop determined to build a car to compete in the 1964 Pomona Winternationals.

View Photos

Then a strange thing happened. A 1962 Impala SS409 two-door hardtop turned up at a used-car dealer in Calgary. It had been shipped from the east, and the engine block had cracked enroute in the bitter winter. Although less exclusive than the '61 orig­inals, the '62 car was a find in Calgary. "Nobody had parts for it, or knew how to work on it, so the used-car lot let go of it for fairly cheap," Armstrong recalls.

He traded in the Olds and got his par­ents to co-sign a $2400 loan for the Chevy. He turned the repair business over to a friend—"it didn't amount to much of any­thing, anyway"—threw as many tools as would fit into the trunk, and took off for paradise, which turned out to be an apart­ment in Redondo Beach near L.A.

Armstrong worked as a mechanic for two Chevrolet dealers—Lee White in Redondo Beach and Dana Chevrolet in South Gate—and both sponsored race "Canuck," one of the earliest of a new form of drag racing called "Funny Cars." It was a 1963 Chevy II that Armstrong cooked up and White sponsored. These new Funny Cars (so named because they were often wildly modified) "were home-built pieces, and pretty crude," says Arm­strong. "I'm surprised we didn't kill ourselves. In one race, I had a transmis­sion explosion that blew shrapnel through the roof. Rather than fix it, I just cut the roof off and made a roadster out of it."

• A Brief History of the Chevrolet Impala • Instrumented Test: 2014 Impala 2.5 LT • Instrumented Test: 2014 Chevrolet Impala 3.6L V-6

In 1970, Armstrong opened his own Union 76 service station. Two years later, he moved to a rented garage in "Gasoline Alley West," a collection of garages and shops on Normandie Avenue in Torrance assembled by race safety-equipment maker Bill Simpson.

At Gasoline Alley, he was experi­menting with fuel-injected alcohol Funny Cars when the National Hot Rod Associ­ation created the flexible Pro Comp class in 1974. The kid from Calgary was gaining a reputation in West Coast drag racing as a savvy innovator willing to try anything to go faster. He raced alcohol-fueled blown dragsters and nitromethane-fueled unblown dragsters, and he tried mixing nitromethane in with nitrous oxide. He experimented with weight, engine dis­placement, body types, and drivetrains. In 1975, he won the NHRA’s Pro Comp championship. Two years later, he took the Grace Cup, a year-long points accumula­tion award from the NHRA.

By 1980, Armstrong was driving an AA Funny Car for Mike Kase of Pennsyl­vania. He finished fourth in the NHRA's points total that year and seventh the next. It was the beginning of the era of big money in pro drag racing, when racing became more of a business and less of a sport. Big-dollar sponsors were pushing speeds and dropping elapsed times pre­cipitously. By the end of 1981, Armstrong says, "We could see the writing on the wall. Kase and I were supporting our car off the winnings alone, and we weren't winning all the time. We didn't want to be also-rans, either." Armstrong decided to go back to his race shop to build engines for other teams. And then, the phone rang.

Specifications

VEHICLE TYPE: front-engine, rear-wheel-drive, 6-passenger, 2-door sedan

PRICE AS TESTED: $3986 (1961)

ENGINE TYPE: pushrod 16-valve V-8, iron block and heads

Displacement: 409 cu in, 6702 ccPower: 360 hp @ 5800 rpmTorque: 409 lb-ft @ 3600 rpm

TRANSMISSION: 4-speed manual

DIMENSIONS:Wheelbase: 119.0 inLength: 209.3 inWidth: 78.4 in Height: 55.5 inCurb weight: 3700 lb

C/D TEST RESULTS: Zero to 30 mph: 2.7 sec Zero to 60 mph: 6.7 sec Zero to 100 mph: 17.3 sec Top gear, 30-50 mph: 7.3 sec Top gear, 50-70 mph: 7.0 sec Standing ¼-mile: 15.2 sec @ 94 mph Top speed (C/D est): 135 mph Braking, 70-0 mph: 253 ft