Out Of Hand

The Outrageous '65 Impala Was Chuck Schroel's First Car, And His Parents Agreed To Let Him Buy It Because It Wasn't A "Muscle Car"!

- Richard Prince

Chuck Schroedl came of age before teenagers had 400 channels of cable TV, endless video games, and unlimited cell phone data to monopolize their attention. That left a lot of brain power to focus on cars, and as he approached driving age Schroedl devoted all of it to thinking about fast cars. His parents, however, were not nearly as enthusiastic about muscle cars as he was.

“My parents wouldn’t let me have a muscle car,” he recalls. “But they were perfectly happy with me driving this Impala, even though it had a 396 big-block.”

Schroedl’s high school ride had only 21,000 miles on the odometer when he bought it from the original owner on April 1, 1978, and was in nearly new condition. Its stock 396 had sufficient power and torque to move the 3,800 plus pound car along at a decent clip but the youngster from Milwaukee wanted more. So at the tender age of 16 he swapped out the cam and replaced the stock intake and exhaust manifolds with an aftermarket intake and headers. The following year he installed a tunnel-ram and then a cross-ram setup, but after struggling to get the throttle linkage to work properly he switched back to a single four-barrel on an aluminum intake.

In 1981, Schroedl bought a Nova, which was considerably lighter than the Impala, and hatched a plan to make it wicked fast. He pulled the Impala’s original 396, stripped it bare, built it back up with a 0.030-inch overbore and 4.500-inch stroker crank to get 496 cubic inches, and crowned it with a staggered-tube Crower injection setup. The Nova was fast indeed, and the Impala went into deep storage in his grandpa’s garage.