You know about the Police Brutality 1963 Thunderbird blowing its transmission at the Detroit Irony race, but you may not know the glorious ending to that story. And you've heard of Cadillac's V8-6-4 engine? How about a 4-2-1 Fiero?
One of the things we love best about LeMons racing is the lengths some teams go to in order to keep their heaps on the track. For every team that packs up and flees after frying a wheel bearing or nuking a fuel pump, you'll see several that drive 150 miles to buy a transmission donor car or orphaned-engine head gasket. Last weekend, we saw two teams locked in an epic, weekend-long battle for the coveted Heroic Fix trophy: the Police Brutality T-Bird and the Double Jeopardy Pontiac Fiero. This was the first Iron Duke-powered Fiero we'd seen in a LeMons race (after a half-dozen or so V6 cars, nearly all of which blowed up right quick-like) and we had high hopes for it. Sadly, it spun a couple of rod bearings Sunday morning, and nobody could round up a rod-and-crank donor engine in rural Michigan on such short notice. Race over for Double Jeopardy?
Hell no! Just because your car started out with four pistons doesn't mean it needs all four! The guys on Double Jeopardy wasted no time removing the pistons, rods, and pushrods from the bad cylinders, converting their engine to a 1.25 liter two-banger.
They mounted the amputated pistons on the hood, fired it up, and hit the track. It sounded terrible, because the two bad cylinders were adjacent in the firing order and therefore the crank was making a full unpowered revolution every other rotation.
But who cared, because it worked! The Double Jeopardy Fiero went around and around on two cylinders… until a few hours later, when another rod bearing failed. What to do? Why, remove the bad piston and run the car as a 625cc one-banger! As you might expect, power was down and the idle wasn't so smooth, but the car returned to the race track. Sure, it finally blew up in spectacular fashion an hour or so later, but this performance was enough to induce the Chief Perp to give Double Jeopardy the Heroic Fix trophy.
Note: a Double Jeopardy team member has added the amazing details of the team's 4-2-1 Iron Duke hack in the comments, and it's a must-read:
Every time you remove a piston, you need some way of blocking the flow of oil to that journal on the crank. Strips from a pop can and a hose clamp around the journal works fine.
When the engine is distributorless, you can't just leave the spark plugs unattached, lest you burn up the coil packs, so we had the plugs still in the head firing into empty cylinders. The second time we oiled the track, we figured it out. We were igniting crackcase gasses, and blowing out the oil pan gasket. Welding some spare plugs into the trunk we could keep the proper resistive load to the coil without having an ignition source in the crankcase.
When we first fired it up on 2 cylinders, the throttle body was still trying to feed enough fuel for 4 cylinders, and we were running RICH. Cracking open the pressure regulator, and cutting a coil out of the spring seemed to drop the fuel pressure sufficiently, and the black smoke settled down, at the expense of proper fuel atomization.
That decision was not an easy one by any means; while all the Fiero piston-removal hijinks went on, the Police Brutality Thunderbird was getting its 3-speed Cruise-O-Matic automatic transmission converted to a direct-drive, one-speed LeMons-O-Matic™ unit. The T-Bird started out pretty well, but when a car sits for 20 years and then wakes up from its hibernation on a race track… well, you know how this goes. The transmission started slipping after a few hours, finally failing completely.
The team had brought along a spare transmission, but it was a C6. You Ford experts know all about the nightmarish lack of interchangeability between different 60s components, right? Nobody on the team could figure out what combination of flexplate, driveshaft yoke, and/or starter would be needed to mate a mid-70s C6 onto an early-60s 390, despite a frenzy of research on their smartphones.
They were screwed, right? Wrong! Why not just drop the Cruise-O-Matic, open it up, and weld the innards so that the transmission would become a direct-drive shaft between engine and driveshaft? Makes sense to us!
Automatic transmissions have always been mysterious black boxes of the "here there be monsters type" to me— I've swapped plenty of them, but fear opening them up— so I can't get into any great detail about what exactly these madmen did. I can say that all of them will spend the rest of their lives reeking of burned transmission fluid after wrestling with hot transmission parts for about 16 straight hours.
Leftover parts? Who needs 'em?
Everyone at the track was quite skeptical, since the car would have to be push-assisted to start in third gear, but just watch the above video! The T-Bird went back to racking up gorgeous, stately laps… right up until the catastrophic engine failure and resulting fire.
Still, Police Brutality took home the highly prized Epic Repair Failure trophy for their efforts. Good work!
Thanks to Ron Vickers for photographic help.