Mr. Chevrolet
When GM quit racing, one man became the brand's unofficial presence, and built the cars the dealers put their names on.
The dealer-tuner Camaros are filed under the dealerships. Yenko. Nickey. Dana. Baldwin-Motion. Those are the names on the badges, in the auction catalogs, on the fender stripes.
The engineering behind several of them was the same man, and his name is on almost none of them.
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The vacancy
Dick Harrell was born in 1932 in Phoenix, Arizona, and raised in New Mexico, and by the early 1960s he was winning. He was NHRA Super Stock class champion in 1962. In 1963 he won the AHRA Winter Nationals and that May set an AHRA speed record of 118.57 mph in A/SM.
He picked up the nickname "Mr. Chevrolet" after GM withdrew from factory racing in the mid-1960s, and it is a nickname describing a vacuum as much as a driver. Officially, Chevrolet was not at the drag strip, and it had no factory team or factory money on the table. Harrell was there, in a Chevrolet, winning. To the crowds in the grandstands he was the closest thing the brand had to a representative, and to the people inside Chevrolet who still cared about performance he was useful in exactly the way an unofficial man is useful.
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The problem he solved
The first Camaro arrived in the fall of 1966 with a ceiling on it. The 1967 model-year range came to include the SS396, but Chevrolet offered no 427 through regular Camaro ordering. The later factory-built 427s used COPO special orders. Meanwhile the Corvette down the hall had a 427. Anyone who has ever owned a fast car can see what happened next.
The dealers did it themselves. Buy a new Camaro, pull the engine, drop in a 427, sell the result off the showroom floor with a warranty of sorts and the dealer's name on the fender. It needed three things: a dealer willing to take the risk, a market willing to pay for it, and someone who knew how to make a 427 live in a car that was never engineered for it.
Harrell was the third thing.
Nickey, Yenko and the rest
From 1966 he engineered and built high-performance cars for Nickey Chevrolet in Chicago, one of the biggest performance-parts dealers in the country, working alongside Bill Thomas Race Cars. He is widely credited with putting the first 427 into a Camaro sold as a dealer-installed new car, in 1967. Every source that says so hedges it the same way (it "is believed"), and Dana Chevrolet in Los Angeles, where Dick Guldstrand engineered roughly fifty 427 Camaros between 1967 and 1969, has a competing claim to the same first. Neither can be settled from what survives.
He later engineered 350 and 427 conversions sold through Span, Inc. as street-or-strip cars, and he was involved with Yenko Chevrolet in the effort that became COPO 9561: the 1969 order that got the L72 427 installed on Chevrolet's own assembly line, with no engine swap required. That is the moment the dealer-tuner trade turned into something else. Once the factory would build a 427 Camaro, a dealer no longer needed a man like Harrell to do it in the service bay.
In 1968 he opened his own shop, the Dick Harrell Performance Center in Kansas City, building 427 Camaros, Chevelles and Novas through authorized Chevrolet dealers. No complete production record survives for any of it, which is why his cars are so hard to authenticate and so rarely cited.
The factory connection
His link to Chevrolet ran deeper than conversions. Harrell is credited with development work on the all-aluminum ZL1 427, the engine in the 69 COPO 9560 Camaros, the most extreme thing Chevrolet ever quietly sold. One of the first two ZL1 Camaros went straight to his Kansas City shop to race at the AHRA Winternationals.
The ZL1 order had come from Fred Gibb, a small-town dealer in La Harpe, Illinois, who went to Vince Piggins in the summer of 1968 asking for a purpose-built drag car. Harrell built competition automatic-transmission 427 Novas out of Gibb's earlier COPO 9738 order, specifically to establish NHRA's automatic class. It says a good deal about his standing that the factory's most secret performance program ran some of its hardware through a racer with no formal job at Chevrolet at all.
The funny car years
By the end of the decade Harrell had moved up to fuel funny cars, and he was good at those too. AHRA named him its 1969 Driver of the Year in the class, and in 1970 he was named Driver of the Decade. The fullest record of these titles is the revived Dick Harrell Performance Center brand's own history, which is not an independent source.
On September 12, 1971, he was killed at a drag strip in Toronto, driving a fuel funny car. A front tire let go at speed and put him into a light pole. He was 39.
The name on nothing
The dealer-tuner era ended within a few years of his death: Nickey was sold in 1973, and Baldwin-Motion stopped in 1974. The badges survived. Nickey's name came back as a performance brand with the fifth-generation Camaro, and Yenko's on licensed modern Camaros. Harrell's name was revived too, as a performance brand, but it has never carried the same weight on a fender.
He has no entry in most Camaro histories. The cars do.
More on Dick Harrell, Fred Gibb, Vince Piggins and the cars themselves.
Did you know
- Harrell is credited with helping start Pro Stock. NHRA's Division 4 Hall of Fame says he was at the forefront of convincing AHRA president Jim Tice to run a heads-up class of carbureted, pump-gas cars. Dick Landy, Eddie Schartman, Grumpy Jenkins and Don Nicholson became Grand American Series regulars, and NHRA later turned Super Stock into Pro Stock.
- Before Kansas City, Harrell ran a shop in East St. Louis, Illinois, where he built his Span, Inc. conversions for Yenko Chevrolet. It's also where he met Herb Fox, the driver of Fred Gibb's 1967 Z/28, which started the Gibb connection.
- The 427 Camaro built for John Penso left Kansas City with a trunkful of parts to fit at home, including 4.56 gears, slapper bars and a cam from the ZL1. Its "Dick Harrell" badges were put in the glove box so rival racers wouldn't figure out what was under the hood. Old Cars Weekly, repeating the car's owner, calls it one of 10 new 1969 Camaros Harrell converted; no Harrell record backs that count.
- Harrell's 1969 nitro Camaro, run under Fred Gibb and Quaker State sponsorship, reportedly hit 209 mph in the quarter-mile. A plastic model kit of the car spread his fame.
Sources for these details
- NHRA Division 4 Hall of Fame, "Dickie Harrell" Hall of fame
- Greg Zyla column, Hannibal Courier-Post, Feb. 26, 2012 (quoting funny car racer Dale Pulde) Newspaper
- Dick Harrell Performance Center, "About Dick" (brand's own history) Reference
- Old Cars Weekly, "Car of the Week: 1969 Chevrolet 'Dick Harrell' Camaro" Reference
- The Supercar Registry, Dick Harrell Performance Center page Club/registry