JAMES GARNER AND THE GOODYEAR GRABBER BAJA AND BANSHEE OLDSMOBILE 442
Description
We put together a video of the off road baja Olds Cutlass and 442 cars that Garner drove. There seems to have been at least three of these cars made as one of these photos shows two 69s and a 70. Im thinking 350 Olds engines were used in the two 69s and a 455 engine were used in the 70. From what the info I found these cars were raced for three years until 72 and then a Banshee was built as a mid-engine, rear-drive behemoth, and the handiwork of Baja legend Vic Hickey. Hickey built the car for the desert racing circuit. His driver was a Maverick, also known as Rockford. The Banshee's pilot was actor James Garner. ''We'd run a regular Cutlass, stock configuration with beefed up suspension, for three years," recalls Hickey. "Garner was doing a good job, so I figured he could use a quicker car." If Oldsmobiles seem to be rather strange material for off-road racers, it's stranger yet that Hickey ran them without any official affiliation with the company. He had been a manager at GM, and he'd had a long relationship with George Hurst (as in shifters), who was a key Olds supplier at the time. Those connections gave Hickey access to some of Olds' hottest parts. Hickey was a senior research engineer at Chevrolet from 1959 to 1969, when he developed the first Blazers. Today Hickey is 77. But at the height of his off-road days, Hickey worked out of a shop in Ventura. He built the Banshee quickly - just 45 days from start to finish. Its fiberglass body was based on a stock metal <b>...</b>
Keywords
OLDS, 442, OLDSMOBILE, W-30, BANSHEE, JAMES, GARNER, ROCKFORD, FILES, CUTLASS, DR, DALE, SMITH, JOE, MONDELLO, DICK, MILLER, BEREJIK, BAJA, RACING, DIRT, TRACK, STOCK, 455, 350, GOODYEAR, GRABBER, VIC, HICKEY, GEORGE, HURST, JOHN, BELTZ, 400, PONTIAC, 1979, 79, TRANS, AM, FIREBIRD, BLOG, 1977, 77, SUPREME, CHEVY, CHEVROLET, 403, LE, MANS, LEMANS, CALIFORNIA, EMISSIONS, FORMULA, BLAZER, OFF, ROAD, ron, johnson, mint
Related videos Experimental
