It was a warm, sticky summer afternoon at Maryland’s Capitol Drag Raceway back in the mid-1970s. I was fresh out of high school when a ’63 Chevy II roared up into the staging lanes for a smoky stage.

While converting from drums to disc brakes on the front of many older cars is a sensible upgrade, irrespective of performance gains, we opted to install discs on the rear of our project wagon too. Not ...