There’s a 1967 Chevelle somewhere in Ewing right now with a story that spans three generations.
The vehicle might look like it’s seen better days, boasting a rust-colored exterior that matches its battered visage. But that same vehicle has ushered a father, nephew, and son to Ewing High School since the late ‘80s—and most recently, it traversed a five-track, three-state journey to hold its own in the recent Hot Rod Drag Week before taking a figurative victory lap around some painstakingly preserved vintage autos to be the sleeper hit at a local car show.
Lifelong Ewing resident Scott Franks Sr. says that when he was born, his birth was announced at the legendary Old Bridge Raceway Park (better known as Englishtown Raceway) because that’s where his father was. It was an early indicator that he was destined to inherit his dad’s and uncles’ love of cars—which would include that very same ’67 Chevelle nearly two decades later.
“My love of cars and racing is definitely a family thing: My father and a lot of his brothers and cousins are into drag racing. My father was at Englishtown the day it opened to race his mother’s vehicle—she thought he was at the drive-in movie theater,” Franks laughs.
Under his dad’s tutelage, Franks learned the ins and outs of making a vehicle hum while fostering a genuine love of cars. But when that Chevelle came into the family, he knew it was something special.
“I was thrilled when my dad started working on another car: I never wanted him to cut that Chevelle up into a racecar because I had always hoped I’d own it,” Franks says. “After my Uncle Ronnie, his brother, acquired it in 1976, my father bought it in 1981, and then I got it in around 1989.”
When Franks’ own sons—Scott Jr., who’s now 22, and Michael, 17—were born, he passed the vehicle along to his nephew from ’99 to ’03, only to have it come back to him and “sit here on jack stands, with no motor, no transmission, no rear end and basically be abandoned for 16 years.”
That all changed when the very same Hot Rod Drag Week that Franks and his sons had watched unfold from afar for years finally came to the Northeast. When registration opened up back in February, Franks didn’t hesitate to claim his family’s place in the ultimate street-legal drag race—and just made it.
“The race sold out in less than five minutes,” Franks recalls. “There were 400 entries and it’s $400 to enter, and I got my stuff in at, like, the four-minute mark.”
From that point on, Franks says that he and his sons poured “every spare moment” they had into restoring that ’67 Chevelle, as well as about $8,000—which Franks calls a bargain.
In fact, Franks gives his sons credit for getting the essentially cinderblocked car not just road-ready but roaring in a matter of months: “This project isn’t really about me: It’s about them.”
“My youngest son is a builder and he’s into welding, so he welded several brackets, manufactured some brackets for the car, did the entire exhaust system,” Franks said. “If it wasn’t for him having off from school this summer and getting the stuff done that he needed to do, we would have never gotten to the point we were at. He was a critical part of this.”
As for Scott Jr., Franks says that his older son hunted down crucial parts, like a turbo system, motor and transmission through the likes of eBay and Facebook Marketplace, which kept costs low, while “doing all the work on the car engine-wise.”
“We had to put a fuel cell in it with a fuel pump, because a fuel-injected motor requires more fuel pressure than what a mechanical pump can put out—it basically took the space in the trunk, so now when we get gas, we pop the trunk,” he laughs. “But now we’re making a ton of horsepower in something I wouldn’t believe can actually do this.”
As for the exterior of the car, they decide to keep it deliberately “junky.”
“We see the beauty behind the rust,” Franks says, adding that his wife even got in on some of the repairs, such as decorating the mobilized repair station contained within the trailer that the Chevelle would haul along its journey between the five drag-racing tracks. But she wasn’t allowed to touch the car since “she is way too much of a perfectionist, and we didn’t want her making things look too good on this one.”
When all was said and done and Hot Rod Drag Week had arrived, Franks, Scott Jr., their Chevelle, and its trailer set off for Virginia Motorsports Park, the site of their Sept. 8-9 debut. From Virginia, they headed to Maryland, New Jersey’s Atco Dragway, and then back to both Maryland and Virginia.
Franks describes his family’s Chevelle as a “sleeper” car that—despite an outward appearance that the announcers at Hot Rod Drag Week picked on all week—absolutely flies on the race track.
“It is a car that does not look like it should be able to do what it does,” Franks said.
The racing was just part of an overall experience that Franks describes as “kind of like a scavenger hunt,” though.
“You make your run at the raceway; once you’re satisfied with the run you’ve made, you turn in your time slip and, every day after racing, they give you directions so you can head to the next track,” Franks said. “You had to follow specific directions so it’s equal for everyone from track to track—you cover roughly 1,000 miles during the week with this car that you’re racing it. On your way to the next track, you typically had two spots where you had to stop and take pictures to prove that you were at those certain places along the way.”
To keep things as fair as possible in a competition where “the whole point is that you drive from track to track,” participants had to carry their own spare parts, tools and other items for on-the-fly repairs in a trailer hauled by their racing cars.
“You have to be self-sufficient—you can’t even have a vehicle following you, like any kind of team effort that would be considered outside assistance,” he says.
Racers are allowed to help each other, however—and the Franks’ car benefited from help provided by the so-called competition.
“We did have some issues with the rear brakes. An item was rusting away, and along the way, another driver actually had a welder that they let us use so we could weld up the backing plate on the rear drum brakes that was pulling away.”
Franks says that he and his son were no strangers to sleeping in the car overnight—“for a 54-year old car, the bench seats are pretty comfortable so it wasn’t that bad because the car is huge by today’s standards”—before heading off to the track in the morning, and that all that time together was a bonding experience neither of them will forget.
“It was an awesome experience that I still don’t really know how to put into words,” he admits. “Someone had asked what my best experience in this car was, and it was all the time my sons and I spent together leading up to the race, and the journey getting there while cruising with my oldest son—I only wish my younger son could have been there, but he made the right choice by going to school.”
The Franks have already decided that they’re all-in for next year’s Hot Rod Drag Week in the Midwest. Until then, they’re satisfied with knowing the Chevelle’s reputation precedes it.
“We actually won that car show,” he said. “There were tons of people around it checking it out. It’s really cool when we park this next to beautiful cars and everyone’s looking at our junky one. They acknowledged it at the end of the night and gave us the highest award of the evening. We didn’t even go up to listen because who would’ve thought we’d won an award? We were still chatting with some people about the car because they came up to us and said, ‘Hey, you did drag week. I remember seeing this car!’ The car is more famous that we are!”
Scott Franks Jr. (left), Michael Franks, Hot Rod Magazine editor Michael Finnegan and Scott Franks Sr. at a car show in Carlisle, Pennsylvania last year.,
