[Keith Seymore]

Originally Posted by L78 racer

didn't all '74 Chevies come with radial tires? i worked at a Chevy dealer through most of the 70's and i remember radials on all the '74 and later models.

Originally Posted by 9C1Beater

In answer to the comment about radial tires on '74s...that's an interesting one, and I can answer it. My good friend Harry Hammond from the Nova 9C1 program and builder of the '74 Nova police car prototype, said that he wanted to put radials on that car, but there was an incident that halted that...the death of an Alabama Highway Trooper in late '73 (I don't know the exact date of the accident) that happened when one of the Firestone 500 steel-belted radials on his patrol car suffered a belt separation at a speed around 120 mph, which caused the car to crash into a steel bridge and killed him instantly. GM immediately put a halt to installing Firestone 500s on their cars for several months (I believe Harry said it was sometime around Jan or Feb '74), and Firestone issued a nationwide recall of the tires. The fallout from the trooper's death affected the sales of other Firestone tires, and GM put mostly Goodyear, Uniroyal, and General tires on the remaining '74s. My car came with Goodyear Polyglas E70-14 raised white letter tires (the build sheet shows option "QEB E70-14 LT" for lettered tires...see above photo near the start of this thread). Harry said the bias-ply tires didn't handle as well as the new radials, but he knew they could handle punishing abuse which causes heat (heat was the cause of the Firestone 500 steel belts separating). Firestone put a rush on developing the 125 Kevlar-belted radials, which were ready for installation on the 4th Gen Nova 9C1 police cars in the fall of 1975. The Kevlar-belted tires had no heat-related belt issues.

My '74 Chevelle has the police package, and came with HR70-15 Goodyear "Blue Dot" pursuit tires (RPO QQZ) mounted on 8" wide Corvette rally wheels. They had a thin white stripe sidewall.

K