For The Adventure – Participant Stories from The Road: James Hart’s ‘72 Chevrolet Nova
With as much as Sick the Magazine has grown, we are looking to expand our coverage even more in 2024! What can you do to help? Tell us your story, and we might share it here on “For the Adventure – Participant Stories from the Road!
We’re looking for you to contribute to the Sickness with stories, articles, event coverage, and more! You don’t need writing experience, just a desire to share your stories. It can be about a build you’re doing in your garage or driveway, your experience on a drag-and-drive (from a participant or cruiser perspective), or even an article about your plans to participate in a drag-and-drive.
Interested? Send your submissions to info@sickthemagazine.com and check your e-mails and spam folders. We might select your story, and will send you a follow up before it gets used! We will publish one story each week on the Sick the Magazine website on Thursdays! We can’t read your stories until you submit them, so get on it!
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This week’s submission comes from James Hart:
My name is James (Jimmy) Hart and I call my car Chip. Every year since Sick Week has started, I’ve wanted participate but, things just never lined up with buying my first house to just simply work and some other things I’ll get to. I live in Palatka so I would offer participants access to my personal garage, lift, tools and always be there at the hoot owl ice cream shop cheering folks on.
Well, 2024 was my time to go even though I wasn’t racing, Sick Ward seemed like a good place to start. I had made my mind up that I need to do it because tomorrows aren’t a guarantee. So, I purchased a rusty ‘72 Nova that truly wanted to stay retired and decay. It was bitter sweet building the car, as I’m so used to having old army friends around, as we would build our cars and even some that just liked being around to help that had no interest in cars.
A couple of those friends didn’t win the mental battles they faced, and the rest are scattered all over the place, from Texas to Ohio to Germany and Italy. Building a car alone just felt sort of off, so I started recording to put the build on YouTube for them to kind of be part of the build or at the very least talk trash.
The car didn’t get named Chip until I was at around day three out of the 20 I had to have it ready to make the cruise with no motor, subframe, front clip, wiring and floors that you could see through. Plasma torch was my best friend, and as I was cutting the rusted pieces out throwing them into the metal pile, I looked at the car and said “see that Chip; I’m throwing your war metals off the bridge,” and Chip just stuck.
A friend flew in from Italy (Michael Sachon) to copilot a day before the event started, and I was still struggling to get things done. We ran clear through the night trying to make it; everything was as good as we could make it; fired the car up, bent axles that we had no idea were bent because you know the car didn’t run since at least 1986.
Posted on Sick the Mag group page and asked; sure enough Andrew Mikos has them, and is only an hour from me. Drove straight there, grabbed them, tossed them in, and hit the road fixing things as we went to Orlando on a truly unrest car. Tires were scrubbing the quarter panels, so we pulled over and used a turn down pipe that didn’t get installed to roll them. We pull into Orlando way late, and sign in was already gone. Got told to be at Bradenton early and we could get signed in.
So we head out doing checkpoints, and our phones and extra charger were not doing well on battery, so we had to find someone to follow. Lucked out someone cruising around 55 mph because with our unbalanced tires, 60 mph was a bit shaky. Bradenton, we got signed in and the adventure was official. We both knew zero about how to tune or use a carburetor/distributor, so we were getting tips and tricks to get Chip to drive and start better during the day.
We left for Gainesville, and at the first checkpoint the fire extinguisher pin had fallen out, so it let loose inside the car going everywhere on everything. The Coney Island check point is my home town, so family was able to see the parade of all the amazing cars come through, and even my decayed rust bucket.
Getting to Gainesville was such a great feeling; like holy cow we are making it happen, like actually doing it. Left a little early to try and get to SGMP before sundown. Second checkpoint we run into some other guys that were in Sick Ward that were on a similar struggle bus with their car trying to find a place. Josh, Jacob and Anthony from Texas. They locked an Airbnb down and said you guys got beds even got dinner like holy crap hardly know each other’s names but yep, we are in.
SGMP absolutely stoked that we’ve made it this far and made some great friends. So we all start the cruise down to Orlando, and at the Hoot Owl checkpoint (in my town) I say hey you guys want to throw a cam in Chip, and of course Josh says yep let do it. Well that would be the downfall of the cruise and the reason we don’t make it to Orlando day 5. But everyone hanging out in the garage, making jokes and enjoying building a car was everything I’d missed for some time.
Left in the morning to try and get to Orlando, and multiple lifters failed around 60 miles into the drive. Didn’t know I couldn’t use regular break in oil on flat taps. Jacob stayed with me broke on the side of 429, the rest of the crew went and grabbed pizza and drinks, and we hung out waiting on my truck and trailer to show up to take Chip home.
That was my experience, and I can’t wait for next year, to hopefully actually race next time around. But my Sick Ward experiences were more than I could have ever asked for.
Written by James Hart. Photos courtesy of James Hart and BME Photography.
If you have thoughts / feedback / ideas, please e-mail us at derek@sickthemagazine.com