Originally Posted by bentwings

Pretty much as stated above. yenko advertized inthe magazines and must have sold a bunch of these cars nationwide. If memory serves me they were about double the price of the SS models. I bought a 67 Chevelle SS396 for $3000 and ordered it just the way I wanted it. The Yenko's were about 6k or so. That put them in the rich guy bracket. We had a couple come into the hotrod shop I worked in a few times but I think both of them were wrecked as were a lot of others. They really didn't handle that well even with the heavy duty suspension and brakes. Many blew up motors and were replaced with SBC and even PG of the day. Many were rusted and faded and repainted and simply disapeared. These didn't have 7 year rust out like now. 3 years in Minnesota winter and you had holes in them even with the best of care. They were real street racer however. I saw the remains of one last year that still had the original trim when the guy found it. He didn't know at the time what it was. It had a blown up SBC and PG in it and was in pretty rough shape. He sanded off the trim and didn't take pictures and tubbed it and added a big roll bar and a BBC with an electric od. Goes like crazy but seems like a waste. He might have restored it but not with matching numbers. Each to their own.

You could get some pretty hot stuff back then if you knew about them. I think most of these type of factory hotrods were bought by a little older guys that had better incomes as most of us kids were fresh out of school and really didn't have the best jobs. It was actually hard to build a faster car than these as there just wasn't as many motor choices as there is now and the technology had not been developed. I think 450 hp was about as high as they got. Aluminum heads were very rare and even a good porting job was very expensive and of questionable value as there weren't many places that could flow test either. We had one ofthe first BBC crate motors in 66 in our dragster. It was hard to work with as the race stuff was just being developed and we were the test beds. there weren't Merlin blocks so blocks split regularly and bearings went out for no good reason even with constant checking. In the end these were era cars as were a lot of the factory hot rods. They were pretty much gone with the gas crunch in the early 70's. I wouldn't pay 1/2 mill for one today that's for sure even if I had it to burn.

Originally Posted by 72'SYC

A yenko had a big brute 350! punched out to a 396

Originally Posted by 72'SYC

Yenkos had a crate tranny, 9 inch rear with 7.37 ratios,