1966 marked the beginning of the serious, off the show room Super Sports for the Chevelle line. These Super Sports held a massive 396 cubic inch engine, with upwards of 360+ horsepower. While the car is a piece of beauty in it’s own right, very few people leave them stock. That begs the question, what’s the car like, right off the showroom floor?

Since the car rolled off the assembly line nearly 50 years ago and we don’t have a time machine, that’s going to be hard to accomplish. What we can do, is take a look at an article hosted by Wild About Cars, which has an article from when the car was new. The initial review was a bit of shock from the reviewer, “the first sounds were different from what we expected. The engine idled at a smooth 550 rpm, as if it was a engine for a luxury car. Tromping the throttle a few times, the situation changed.”

They made some tweaks to the motor, to help waken it up. This included tweaking the secondaries on the carburetor and adjusting the valve lash. But like any car guys, they wanted to head to the track and see what the car could really do. They drove the city streets to familiarize themselves a bit, and gave a brief overview of the car.

At the track, they suffered from a lack of traction-no surprise there. They seemed to have fought that issue, but on the skinny factory tires, that would be expected. After completing lap after lap, the car run its best at 14.42 seconds and just reached triple digits at 100.22 mph. Pretty impressive we would say.

Be sure to click here and see the full review, the advertisements are cool to check out as well!