There are two main ways to restore a classic car. The first — and the one favored by the purist crowd — involves painstakingly bringing it back to showroom condition using all-original parts. The second consists of completely ignoring tradition and doing whatever you please with the body, the interior, and the engine. A Nova that belches out a 3-foot-long flame falls into the second category.
Meet Goliath 2.0, the brainchild of drag racer David Comstock.
A supercharged 8.8-liter V8 engine engine pokes right through the Nova’s hood line, which required some crafty fabrication work to cover up. The monster of an engine burns methanol instead of regular gasoline to deliver 2,269 horsepower at 8,500 rpm and 1,469 pound-feet of torque at 7,800 rpm, according to Epic Speed. That’s over four times as much power as a Porsche 911 GT3 RS, which explains the fire-breathing nature of the beast. The flames would persuade Bowser to gently put down Princess Peach and go home.
The engine is undeniably the centerpiece of this hot rod, but the body has an interesting story, too. The donor shell was given to Comstock after he wrecked his original Nova-based drag racer. Not one to admit defeat, he modified it to look like the original Goliath, dropped in the new engine and transmission, and named it Goliath 2.0. He wasted no time in returning to the track to pick up where he left off.
In the 1960s, the Nova was Chevrolet’s compact model; it occupied roughly the same spot as the Cruze. Today, it’s popular among speed junkies because it’s affordable, and it’s relatively easy to tune. It will be interesting to see if any of the Bowtie’s current models follow that path. We would love nothing more than to see a Sonic with an engine far too big for its own good shoot out flames like a medieval dragon.
