Here is the oldest picture that I have of me and my 1969 Nova SS396 -350 horsepower. This was taken in 1979, I had just spent about two hours peeling some red stick-on pinstripes off of the sides of the Nova. My little brother had stuck them on while I was out to sea in the Navy. After that I had gone for a little drive, and as you see I managed to splash some Oregon mud all over the sides of the car.
The car was quite a handful, it had a radical Crower monarch camshaft and 4.33 gears. With its manual steering and those gears it was a lot like driving a truck once it was at speed. But every launch was a drag race, what a blast. You can see most of the exhaust system that it had in this shot. There were headers and mufflers that bolted straight to the collectors, and that was it. The header mufflers were glass packs, the type where you can look straight through from the end and see all the way through.
A few people tried to buy it from me at stoplights. I was driving down the street the same day that this shot was taken, and a bunch of teenagers on the sidewalk noticed the car. They started shouting 396! 396! I was amazed a few years later when I read the test report on a Big Block Nova in Car and Driver magazine, and the exact same thing happened to them. Over 20 years later, I still think that Big Block Novas are the coolest cars ever built.