| Barracuda
Formula S 1966 -2- What went wrong? What's green and smells bad? |
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| So, why did I keep it for just eight months?
Only long enough to do that trip to San Blas and back;
to install those super-cool hood pins-cum-locks; browbeat the Goodyear guy into
replacing two tires that had cosmetic splits in the sidewalls; wrap the rear leaf
springs in preservative; use it as a utility vehicle for the early 1967 Playas
de Tijuana road races (it's parked just out of the frame in the Sports
Car Graphic photo on the TJ beach racing page)?
Well . . . Back to the gasoline. Me and the Bob Bauer Plymouth catch-up-with-the-factory-mistakes crew developed a mutual distaste for the process: I come in with a list of niggles, they do what they think is just barely enough and I tell them that's what they did. Eventually we wore each other out and got most of it done. I don't actually believe they did less than their best at resolving the one crowning problem, the one I think was the camel-breaker, but was never cured: gasoline fumes came into the car. Bad enough in the USA, but a bond-breaker in Mexico, where the pump fuel of the era, beyond being lower octane than claimed, stunk. Putrid, obsolete-refinery gag-me-with-a-whiff stinky. Green, stinky interior. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. PS: Mom's Satellite had an intransigent exhaust-in-the-interior problem. Is it a Plymouth thing? Not with the Valiant. Hm. PPS: It wasn't that I fell in love with the MG B GT. Nuh uh. Hmmmm. PPPS: After eight months in the garage, the Barracuda left it clean; it took the MG B GT about fifteen seconds to make its mark with a spot of oil. Brit cars. PPPPS: If you have a 1966 Barracuda Formula S that might once have been yellow, might once have lived in Southern California, and you have the tools and gumption to take off the right front fender, you have a treat in store. Once upon a time when I was working under the hood I dropped a Zippo™ lighter and it went out of sight between the fender and some subframe or other. I never got it out. It was a wonderful, near-new found-object Zippo™ lighter with a bull logo and motto from an artificial insemination service. Man your wrenches. PPPPPS: It might have been the left front fender. |
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