Every time Gene Wray of Nanoose Bay, B.C. slips behind the wheel of his 1966 W-30 442 he’s leaving the real world behind and living a dream.  It’s not often a regular working guy can own a car with the pedigree bestowed upon this F-85 coupe - it’s one of only 54 factory W-30s produced in 1966. Of those 54 cars, only 16 are currently accounted for.
     When it comes to muscle cars, you can’t get much rarer. "I never thought I’d be able to afford one," says Wray. In a lot of ways,  he still can’t believe he owns the car. "I shouldn’t be in that club - all those guys are (car collecting) heavyweights."
     When  he puts his foot into the 400 cubic-inch factory blueprinted powerplant and starts thrashing through the M-21 Muncie’s four gears and all three two-barrel carbs kick in, he probably realizes no matter who you are, membership has its privileges and being worthy of car has nothing to do with your bank account.
     Sometimes you just have to want it bad enough.  The journey to owning this ’66 W-30 began when Wray was 14 years old and growing up car crazy in Saskatchewan.  The first 442 he remembers seeing was actually owned by the town of  Rolla, North Dakota police department. It was a black 1966 car with a four-speed and a cherry on top.  The car stuck in his memory and his love of Oldsmobiles only grew over the years.
     The first muscle car Olds he ever purchased was a 1967 442 he bought in 1976 from a pharmacist in Richmond, B.C.  The car became wife Linda’s everyday driver until 1990 and they still own the car, though it has well over 200,000 miles and one restoration under its belt. It wasn’t until 1990 that Wray even realized there was such a car as a 1966 W-30. A big reason for that was that Oldsmobile never publicly acknowledged the cars existed.
     The 1966 W-30 program was aimed at making a name for Oldsmobiles in drag racing, but Olds never advertised the option or listed it on any sales literature, which explains why only 54 W-30s were factory built. (The package could be purchased through the dealer.
     The W-30 package took a standard Tri-Carb 400 (L-69) producing 360 horsepower and added 308-degree duration cam, special valve springs, special rearend with 4.33:1 rear gears, a battery relocated to the trunk and most importantly a Force-Air system which included a chrome dual snorkel air cleaner attached to scoops in the front bumper by large tubes.
     The air cleaners were all stamped with sequential numbers. Wray’s car is #18 and was built in Lansing, MI. in the first week of June, 1966. All the factory built cars were built in the first three weeks of June.  Since Olds was trying to keep their W-30 a secret (GM brass had banned factory participation in racing), performance numbers are hard to find. According to OLDSmobility.com, Motor Trend magazine tested a standard 442 tri-carb 400 at 15.1 seconds at  96.56 mph.
     The W-30 version would have been quite a bit faster. Properly tuned and prepared the car could run in the 12s.
     Before Wray learned of the 1966 W-30, the Holy Grail was owning one of the 502 W-30s built in 1967 and he did own one for almost three years, a grey matching numbers car he sold in 1999. Wray actually thought he had #42 bought in 2000. The car was going to auction and the owner had agreed to sell it to Wray for $29,000 if the car didn’t meet reserve. It ended up selling for $42,000. “I actually phoned the auction and the lady said it had just sold. I felt like my whole world had fallen in,” says Wray.
     That car eventually sold at the Barett-Jackson auction for $62,700 in 2003 and has since dropped off the radar. “Nobody knows where the car is,” says Wray.”
     For a while he satisfied his lust for Oldsmobile muscle with  two 1970 W-31 cars, the last one paving the way to owning the 1966 W-30.
     Meticulously restored by his son, Mark Nicoll at Mark of Excellence Auto Restorations in Coombs, B.C., the white ’70 W-31 nabbed a first place award at the 2001 Oldsmobile Club of America Nationals (but finished second in its class by a score of 981 to 984) and was well known in the small, but rabid, circle of Olds muscle carcollectors.
     The W-31 was so nice, that after a concours restoration and the win, Wray couldn’t bring himself to drive the car.  In July 2003, Wray decided he was going to sell it and started his search for a 1966 W-30. He soon found one in Spartanburg, South Carolina and struck a deal that was conditional on selling his 1970 W-31.
     By August long weekend he not only sold the W-31 and bought the W-30, but also set a benchmark for the price of small-block W-31 Oldsmobiles.  The W-31 sold for big-block money at $38,000 U.S. and Wray said when the sale was finalized he was receiving phone calls and e-mails from across North American congratulating him for setting the benchmark.
     Wray bought the car from Bruce Corbett of Spartanburg, but #18 has changed hands quite a few times. The car’s first owner, Allan Maurer, was the son of an Oldsmobile dealer in Wilton Jct., Iowa. (Maurer Oldsmobile and Machine). Maurer raced the car a lot and showed it no mercy, going through four engines on warranty before his dad made him sell it in 1967.
     The second owner, Jim Meekes of Solon, Iowa, was actually the first registered owner. In 1967, Meekes traded in his 1965 GTO and $1,000 for the ’66 W-30. In a letter to Wray, Meekes said the car was never beaten in a 1/4 miles race as long as he owned it, which was until 1973-74. Jim Stohlman also owned the car. Wray picked  the car up at the Blaine, WA border crossing in October of 2003.  "It was riding in a trailer with a Boss 429 Mustang going to Seattle," remembers Wray.  "When it was backed out of the trailer, I had seller’s remorse," says Wray. "I though, ‘I’ve traded a really nice car for one that needs everything for the same money.’"
     Wray’s #18 was in original condition, save for the TT 4.33:1 rearend. The original rearend is now in the #27 W-30 and Wray isn‘t sure he‘ll ever be able to find a replacement. Though previous owner Jim Stohlman had the car painted in 1995, it wasn’t taken down to bare metal. Stohlman owns an Oldsmobile dealership in Alexandria, VA and at one time owned four 1966 W-30 cars.
     Today the car has just 31,000 original miles and it hasn’t received any other major refurbishment. Wray’s statement about this car’s condition just goes to show how meticulous he is about his cars, but the W-31 taught him one thing. If a car’s too nice, you don’t want to drive it and driving these cars, and driving them hard, is what it’s all about.  Wray says the only way  he can see undertaking another frame-off, concours restoration is if he somehow damages the engine. Which, it seems, is a possibility. "I’m having more fun driving this car than the three cars I owned before it," he says. “I never did drive the W-31, which was a shame.  "I’m not showing (the W-30) any mercy."
     When it comes to the W-30, Dr. Oldsmobile didn’t want it any other way.
               Rapping with
        Dr. Oldsmobile Jr.
     Kurt Anderson of Kimball, Minn, is what Galen Govier is to the Mopar muscle faithful - a guru and font of all Oldsmobile knowledge.
     If Anderson says it’s so, it most probably is. In a brief, but information laden conversation, Anderson filled me in on some W-30 history. He first became aware of the 1966 W-30 option while working at Lupient Oldsmobile as a high school student from 1972-74. While reading a 1973 parts book, he came across the acronym OAI when describing parts available for 1966 442s. OAI stands for Outside Air Induction and to the young Anderson, it was like uncovering buried treasure.
     "I figured it’s in the parts book, so they must have made these cars."  So Anderson and a friend began researching the cars and more than 30 years later he probably knows everything there is to know about W-30s. It’s Anderson who’s determined that only 54 factory built W-30s left the Lansing plant in 1966, though he says as many as 150 to 200
W-30 air cleaners were manufactured in two separate batches.    
     In fact, he says if you can find the correct W-30 air cleaner, you can build the car. "If the air cleaner survives, the car survives," he says. The parts package was listed as 203195 and it was available as a dealer install, but since almost nobody but hardcore drag racers knew about it, few people bought it.
     If you did order the parts, they were marked as "salvage" when removed from the assembly lines. If you knew the right person, you could get the package shipped in the trunk of the car.
     "They were quite a departure from standard production models," says Anderson of the ’66 W-30s. For one thing, Anderson says the W-30 400s used A-pistons in D-size bores. The factory cars had engines painstakingly assembled and blueprinted at the factory and many of the F-85 coupes came without radios or heaters. The TT rearend wasn’t much different than a stock 442 unit, save for using Pontiac axles that received special heat treatment.
     Oldsmobiles’ "Back-door Racing Program" did have some success, though the NHRA U.S. Nationals C/Stock title won by a ’66 W-30 was by default. The team of Woody Woodland and Roy Anderson actually lost the final to the Bill Knafel-owned Tin Indian GTO. "Woodland missed a shift," says Anderson. "But the Tin Indian had illegal staggered shocks and it was disqualified."  (The Tin Indian crew, owned by prominent Pontiac dealer Bill Knafel, included two transporters, three airplanes, a travel RV and a complete machine shop and 14 employees.  Little wonder the Tin Indian GTO won 27 trophies in 1966.)
     Anderson currently owns a 1966 project W-30, a 1967 W-30 and factory 1968 W-30 with 50,000 original miles.  He bought his first ’66 W-30, #16, in 1975 for $1,500.  "A good friend’s wife worked at K-Mart and knew a guy who had the car for sale."  Turns out the car had been raced hard and had a cracked block and a pair of experimental heads had replaced the stock units.  "I sold a 23195 OIA package to pay for that car," Anderson says.
     In 1986, he sold the car because "I never thought I could do it justice" and started collecting pieces to make a W-30 in the future.  A life-long Oldsmobile fan, Anderson says the 1966 W-30 doesn’t get the respect it deserves.  "The Olds is definitely overlooked - especially the ’66-67 cars," he says.  "In many ways they’re like the COPO Camaros and Super Stock Dodges."
     Consider that in 1967, there were 54 COPO Camaros built with 12 surviving and these days a good one can fetch six-figure numbers.That’s probably one category Wray is glad his W-30 hasn’t matched the 427 Camaro.  I’m sure he’s itching to find out how his W-30 measures up in other numbers games.