In the classic fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast,” a handsome prince is cursed to live inside a monstrous body. With Andrew Nelson’s latest creation, an MGB roadster motivated by a bloodcurdling V8, it’s the other way around: The beast is under the hood, while the body gets the royal treatment.
Once Upon a Scrap Heap
Andrew began with the roll cage and bodywork, and in the spirit of low-buck racing, he did everything on the cheap. Nearly every piece of steel that wasn’t originally on the car was someone else’s scrap, including the cage.
“I’ve picked up in the last two years five or six roll cages that were just going out for junk,” he explains. Andrew hails from York, Pennsylvania, where many local racers have been upgrading to chromoly cages. As a result, scrapped mild steel tubing is currently available there for next to nothing.
All this extra scrap allowed Andrew to build an extremely robust cage, which he incorporated into the MGB body with large square tube running along the floor pan. This provided him with a very stiff chassis, which is an important foundation for any car.
Next, the Nelson family mounted the car to a rotisserie, stripped off all the paint and removed the rust. The fiberglass hood scoop was a cast-off part that had wallowed in Andy’s barn for 15 years; the MGB project seemed like as good a use for it as any.
When the foundation was clean and complete, they sent the car to friend and teammate John Valentine to be beautified with body filler and an inexpensive coat of fresh Ford Blue tractor enamel. Now the car simply needed its driveline.
Different Exterior, Same Heart
Andrew is smart in more ways than one. While he has built several amazing cars for our Challenge events—for example, he showed us how to turn a VW Bug into a Ford hotrod worthy of “American Graffiti”—he keeps reusing his tried and true small-block Chevy. It works because he sweats all the details and cruises the area swap meets for components deemed no longer good enough for the local circle track racers.
The actual parts are hardly exciting, as the engine’s foundation is a cast-off 350 block that’s been bored over by 0.060 inch and fitted with…
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