Some 24 Hours of LeMons teams simply give up when faced with mechanical woes; we've seen teams load the car on the trailer after a fuel pump failure. Not so with Police Brutality!
After driving all night from Maryland, dragging a decrepit rustbucket that still hadn't moved under its own power for 30 years, the PB guys fixed the brakes, got the engine firing, and performed all the other hundreds of jobs needed to get the car onto the track. By late morning, the Thunderbird was out on the track and looking glorious! It dropped its exhaust system and suffered from a few similar headaches, but mostly it kept racking up lap after lap.
Then, blammo! Dead transmission. The team scraped up an allegedly good C6 to replace the KO'd FMX, but that plunged them into the sulfurous depths of Ford Parts Interchange Hell. Yokes, flexplates, starters, driveshafts— it's a whirling freakin' nightmare to figure out how to get that C6 to go between the 390 and the driveshaft. Many phone calls to junkyards and local Craigslist sellers, without much in the way of results. There's talk of simply replacing the transmission with a welded-on short shaft and going with direct drive, which might work just fine with a grunty torquer of an FE motor. We're confident that Police Brutality will never, ever give up; check in tomorrow to see where the strange plot twists of this tale lead us.
Disclosure: Murilee Martin gets crazy baksheesh from LeMons HQ for his LeMons judging duties.