Is it strange for a motoring enthusiast to restore an old station wagon? Not if you consider restoring classic trucks strange, and there are plenty of us out there who restore old trucks every day. No, nothing strange there, but with this ’66 Chevelle station wagon, there is something lurking beneath.

Now at this point I know what you’re probably thinking: There were plenty of motor enthusiasts back in the 1960s who knew how to read the fine print when they were ordering a new car. Hell, anybody back then could’ve ordered an Impala wagon with a 427 and a 4-speed, a Caprice sedan with a 396 and so on. That’s what made that era of car-building different from our own, that there was literally no bounds to what one could build, provided one had the funds.

When Chevy first introduced their 327 V8 in 1962, they offered the motor with four different horsepower outputs, depending on the fuel delivery and performance package that was available. Initially, the three carbureted versions of the 327 that were available produced from 250 up to 340 horsepower, and a fuel-injected version of the 327 that was introduced for that year produced 360 horsepower.

For the 1963 model year, the 327 options stayed the same, but in ’64, the most top-end, carbureted version of the 327, known as the L76 motor, was hopped-up to 365bhp, while the fuel-injected, L84 327 received a 15-horsepower increase, bringing its total output to 375bhp. While the L76 and L84 versions of the 327 small block were by far the fastest from the “box,” Chevy also introduced, for the 1965 model year, a 4-barrel version of the 327 that produced 350bhp, a small block known as the L79 engine.

Though the L79 small block was made available for custom order in everything from Chevelles down to post-sedan, Nova IIs, the owner of this ’66 Chevelle wagon claims that the L79 mill was never offered in the station wagon versions of the car, though his has an original L79 motor under the hood. Though the car is apparently not one that is numbers-matching, the old-school 327 under its white hood looks right at home.