5,500 Miles In a Rare 1965 Chevelle Two-Door Wagon.

This year was Jack’s ninth Power Tour, and the eighth in his wagon. He made his first trip in 2011, driving a 2005 Chevy SSR. “It was too small for the trip,” he said, “so I started looking for a station wagon.”

Jack bought the rare two-door Chevelle wagon in 2013 for the specific purpose of driving it on HOT ROD Power Tour. The young man whose father had bought the car for him half a century earlier had checked the option boxes for a dash clock and electric windows—and had used the car to haul his surfboards to the beach.

How Rare Is This 1965 Chevelle 300 Two-Door Wagon?

Jack Wear’s Chevelle two-door wagon is one of 1,668 produced by GM in the 1965 model year. There were 1,015 built with inline 6-cylinder engines and 653 with V-8 engines. Of those V-8 wagons, approximately 200, including Jack’s, came equipped with the optional Muncie four-speed transmission.

The Car Comes Out Of Retirement
“The owner had moved to Prescott, Arizona, and wasn’t using the car,” Jack told us. “He said the car wasn’t for sale, but he wanted to hear more about this Power Tour that I was talking about. After I told him about it, he said, ‘That’s what this car should be doing, let’s work something out.’ I bought the car, added cruise control and air conditioning and took off on Power Tour.” Jack has now owned the wagon for eight years and has been a Long Hauler ever since.

In 2020, he transplanted a 350ci Chevy ZZ6 crate engine with Holley Sniper fuel injection backed up by a Hurst-shifted Tremec five-speed transmission. He made the swap one month before the scheduled start of HOT ROD Power Tour 2020, which was canceled due to the pandemic. “So it’s just been waiting for this Power Tour.”

100 Hot Wheels For The Trip
For a lot of HOT ROD Power Tour participants, it’s been a longstanding tradition to carry a bunch of small items like stickers or toys to toss to spectators along the Power Tour route. Chris packed about 100 Hot Wheels cars for that purpose. He noticed that there didn’t seem to be as many kids out this year but everybody likes Hot Wheels and about 100 Power Tour fans, old and young, have a toy hot rod to remember the 1965 Chevelle wagon, and the hundreds of other hot rods, that passed through their town in August.