And the Real Winner Is…
When a first-time 24 Hours of LeMons team finds some ancient hooptie that’s been rusting in a field for a decade and makes a “race car” out of it, most of the time that team spends the entire weekend thrashing on fuel-system components, shriveled transmission seals, and rodent-gnawed wiring. This did not happen with Team NASA’s Space-Shuttle-themed 1978 Ford LTD wagon.
The old Ford was quite slow, what with its original shocks and Malaise-grade 400M engine, but its drivers kept out of the way of the faster cars and never once visited the Penalty Box. Other than an hour-long pit stop to deal with a vapor-lock/dead-starter problem, the wagon never broke down; the team rebuilt the entire fuel system with fresh parts and thus avoided the bad-gas adventures of the Tunachuckers’ ’75 Ford LTD Landau that we saw last month. In the end, the NASA LTD finished in 34th place (out of 56 entries), a miraculous performance from a dead-stock Malaise wagon. Congratulations, Team NASA!
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I believe it was a 1969 model, maybe 1968, Country Squire wagon with a mighty 390 the old man sold to the neighbor. It burned to the ground while traveling the I-580 freeway outside Livermore, CA. Neighbor stomped over and demanded, vociferously, that the old man return the money paid. Old man just looked at him. Ex-cop, ex-Marine, left Nebraska to avoid prosecution for pummeling a man until extensive medical care required (the guy touched his wife inappropriately, old man paid him off later to drop charges so he could get a government job), and was a fireman at the time. The HULK versus the corporate cubical dweller. A few minutes of old man staring and the cubical dweller swearing (and threatening)and the neighbor turned and stomped off. The old man turned to me and, with a laugh, declared that the neighbor seemed to be a bit upset and that, often, it is best to allow them to rant and rave and to just listen with no reply. Seemed to work; neighbor never talked to us again. That was a nice Ford, though. Before it burned to the ground.
Brilliant!