Racecars are projects that can take on several different phases and can be passed on to different family members for completion. Steve Marsa took on  1966 Nova project from his late uncle, and took it from what was intended to be a Pro Street-style car to a stunning eight-second street car. This Nova build has allowed Marsa to grow his fabrication skills and honor the memory of his uncle at the same time.

For Marsa, drag racing has always been of interest, but he’d never actually participated. Since high school, he’s spent countless hours watching the sport and tinkering with performance cars, but never climbed behind the wheel until he had completed the Nova. Racing, however, did run in the family; his uncle, Robert Cross, worked for GM in their racing division and that helped drive his interest in racing.

Tragically, Cross was killed in a car accident, but that led to Marsa and another family member taking on the Nova project as their own. “Rob’s brother Lee and I are now co-owners and partners with this car. The Nova was something Rob started 25 years ago and he was going to make it a Pro Street car. Rob was a huge influence in my life and he got me started as a fabricator,” Marsa says.

After Marsa dug the car out of storage he began to assess what the car would need. It had a rectangular tube frame with an older Chris Alston Chassisworks 4-link and other random parts on it. These were not going to work for Marsa, so he removed them and started fresh. “The mild steel 25.4 full chassis is something I built based on an S&W Race Cars blueprint. I changed a few things along the way and bent all of the tubing myself. I spent a lot of time to get the bars to fit up and out of the way so they followed the lines of the car better. This was the first chassis car I built,” Marsa explains.

The original combination to power the car was an LS6 motor that ran 10.50s on pump gas, but Marsa and his uncle wanted more. The current engine is a Wegner Motorsports built 454 cubic-inch LS7 mill built upon an RHS block. The rotating assembly inside the motor consists of a Callies crank, rods, and Diamond Pistons. The RHS heads use T&D Rockers, titanium valves, and the rest of the valvetrain is rounded out with a Bullet Racing Cam, PSI valvesprings, and Trend pushrods. Air is introduced to the motor via an All Pro two-piece CNC intake and BLP 4500 alcohol carburetor. This combination made a stout 830 horsepower and rocked the Nova down the track to an 8.96-second elapsed time at over 147 mph — not too bad for a car that sees a lot of street driving!

Marsa and his uncle aren’t done yet refining the car and are working on some winter upgrades. “Right now we’re swapping the motor over to EFI. We purchased a Holley ECU, Billet Atomizer injectors, and Accufab throttle body. Another addition will be a brand new CID LS7 intake that we ordered with an extra thick intake flange. I milled it down incrementally to get the port alignment right, then port matched the runner transition,” Marsa says.

The plan, for now, is for Marsa’s uncle to keep driving the Nova on the street and bracket racing, while Marsa himself tries to chase better elapsed times when he steps behind the wheel. Eventually, this Nova will receive a different motor to make it better for long cruises, and Marsa will transplant the current mill into his own 1967 tube chassis Nova … with a pair of turbos.