There are some combinations that just don’t sound like they’d work together, but that’s not going to stop people from trying to put them together. Ben Bowman created one of these combos by grafting a 1966 Corvair body onto the chassis of a 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass. If that wasn’t enough, Bowman stuffed a 1,000 horsepower-capable LS combination under the hood for good measure.
Bowman’s path to becoming a mad scientist with a wrench began when he was 14 years old after he purchased his first car, a 1968 GTO. The Pontiac became the central focus of Bowman’s life and he spent whatever money he could earn restoring the car.
Bowman worked on the GTO with his father, who was a racer himself, and that led to another experience that would change Bowman’s life.
“When I was 14, my dad put me in his Chevelle drag car to make some passes at the track. I was pretty tall, so nobody asked any questions, but if they did, dad told me to tell them I had a driver’s license. The car wasn’t super quick, but it was cool as a 14-year-old,” Bowman says.
The GTO Bowman restored with his father is a nice car, so when it came to start another project, Bowman wanted something different. Bowman started searching for a first-generation Pontiac Firebird with some cool patina that he could build into a driver. The quest for a Firebird wasn’t going as planned, but striking out in that area allowed Bowman to go a different and non-traditional route.
“This car came into the picture when I was talking with a friend who happened to have it sitting behind his shop. He was going to scrap it, so I asked him how much he wanted for it, and I got it for $50. It already had the cool patina that I was looking for, and that sealed the deal. I started doing some research and found that somebody had in fact put a Corvair body on a G-body chassis, so I knew it could be done. I found a wrecked Cutlass, bought the car, parted it out, and made my money back just keeping the frame,” Bowman explains.
So, Bowman now had two cars he needed to morph into one, a rough plan, and plenty of motivation. When you look at the Corvair there are plenty of cool custom touches you can see, from the badges Bowman made and the hand-built firewall. What you don’t see are things like the floor and transmission tunnel that he fabricated to make the car easier to work on, and to get the Corvair body to fit on the Cutlass chassis.
For Bowman, the best part of this project was figuring out how…
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