Troy's First
It's hard to believe it was nearly 21 years ago, in June 1988, when Car Craft photographed 18-year-old Troy Trepanier's '66 Chevelle at the Street Machine Nationals. The magazine staff waited a few months to print the photos, finally giving the future superstar just two pages in the Jan. '89 issue to highlight his first car buildup. It was an odd time in car crafting, with Troy's raspberry Pro Box and its B&M-blown 383 not necessarily riding the cutting edge. The now-iconic and vastly disparate Big Red '69 Camaro had hit CC's pages just a few issues earlier, and the Jan. '89 cover featured a trio of late-model cars, including a turbo four-banger. Styles were about to change.
Troy had mimicked Scott Sullivan and John Buttera's work for his monochromatic look (the result is remarkably similar to Jeff Smith's white '66 painted by Sullivan just a few years later). But as we all know, Troy was soon to lead in dramatic ways, becoming one of the most important and renowned car builders of the past few decades. We remember him when.
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