A BLAST FROM THE PAST….PAST FEATURE FROM RPM MAGAZINE
“My wife was afraid I was going to crash and kill myself,” shared Kentucky native Richard Talley. Quite simply, that in a nutshell, is how Talley—a former wheelman of a turbo Hayabusa 4-wheeler—found himself shopping for a new set of wheels.
“My wife wished I would get a car because it would be safer. Ok, no argument there,” he exclaims with a chuckle. “It was getting a bit old traveling around to the different county fairs every weekend and being out until the late hours anyway. Doing something local would be great. I had always wanted to build a car, and now I had the green light to do it,” explains Talley.
Now, instead of piloting a quad, Talley turns heads with his brightly colored 1970 Ford Maverick. And you’ll hear it before you see it, as force-feeding the big block Ford engine that Talley has under the hood is a shiny whistlin’ ProCharger. Pretty much music to the ears.“I drove an ugly orange Maverick for a few years in high school and for a while after. It was a six-cylinder with an automatic. I always thought it would be cool with a big V8, like they were doing with the Vegas back then,” Talley reminisced. “I had joined the Army right after high school, and while I was in the service, I had a couple of Fox bodies—an ’82 GT, which was my first real car I bought on my own, and an ’85 GT. So you could say I’m a bit of a Mustang nut.” When Talley began his hunt for a door-car, he originally started searching for another Mustang when low and behold, a Maverick popped up, thanks to a mislabeled title. “So, then, I got thinking, ‘I like different. I want to do something different.’ So, I searched for Mavericks, and found this one in Cleveland, Ohio.
” Richard’s Maverick was an eBay find. Although Talley purchased the 1970 Ford as a roller, the car had previously housed a small block Chevy powerplant. The purists will be happy that Talley did not follow the same path, as he wasted no time and dropped a 529 cubic inch big block Ford into the Maverick with a C6 behind it.
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