“Somebody had botched the quarters when they put them on,” Turner says. “We had it sand blasted and completely down to bare metal. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Viking Blue with white stripes.”
With the car torn apart, Turner decided to freshen up a 461 Olds racing engine with Batten aluminum heads that he had laying around, a byproduct of his years of racing Oldsmobiles at the local track.
The original engine, Turner says, was a stock 455, but just wasn’t fast enough for someone who grew up around muscle cars. Now, the remade convertible puts 640 horsepower to the wheels.
To make the ’72 more convenient to drive, Turner had the compression lowered so it would be street legal and run on standard gas. Now Turner takes his Oldsmobiles to car shows where he can share them with other enthusiasts and advertise his paint jobs through word of mouth.
“Some of the late-model guys want the FS stripes or the Shelby stripes on their cars,” Turner says. “They want them painted instead of the factory decals. We’ve got a number of jobs lined up.”
Having begun working on cars in high school, Turner says he had his parents’ full support when he began tinkering on his own car and doing work for friends.
“My parents were very supportive, because if I was working on cars, I was at the house and not out doing drugs or drinking and driving,” Turner says.
Turner added that his ideal model now would be a 1968 Hurst, the first GM intermediate-sized car to offer an engine larger than 400ci.
“It was ahead of its time, and would be a neat piece to have,” Turner says. “I’m not sure I would drive it, because it’d be too valuable.”
