I am not a smart man.
We must get that out of the way here because it will make understanding the rest of this story so much easier. This is going to be a long build story about me, Eric Rood—a complete idiot whose mushy brain is filled almost entirely with Bad Ideas—and my struggles with building a $200 1979 Dodge Magnum XE to race in the 24 Hours of LeMons. Naturally, I’m already two months behind on telling the story of this Personal Luxury Coupe.
This Last of the B-Bodies.
This Malaise Era Mopar Orphan (Mop-phan).
This rusting 3,900-pound albatross.
Before we get too deep, I suppose a modicum of explanation is due in case you’re not familiar with the 24 Hours of LeMons, despite my vastly overwrought writings on that subject for Hooniverse. Here’s the basic premise: Buy and build a car with no more than $500 of running gear and suspension (not including safety gear), then race it for between 14 and 24 hours over a weekend. The winner ostensibly clocks the most laps in that time, but real winners bring some kind of hopelessly terrible car—like a 1979 Magnum—in the hopes of taking home the vaunted Index of Effluency, a brilliant and fitting malaproprism that is the top honor for doing the best with the worst car.
Why would I build a car to this end? The world’s top mental health professionals are still trying to explain LeMons’ afflictions—which have now reached Roadkill’s perpetrators, for better or worse—so it will likely remain a mystery, but tag along over the next However-Long-It-Takes for a full dose of “Look at this idiot” and perhaps a slightly smaller spoonful of “What did we learn?” In calling this car-napping called “Project Regretmobile,” I’m only half-referring to my own regret and also half-referencing how you, the prospective LeMons builder, can learn from my horrible, horrible life choices.
A plan
This build really began about two years ago when it was someone else’s Very Bad Idea. I befriended vintage racer Greg Heuer—who races a well-worn-but-well-sorted Mercury Bobcat—in 2010 at my first LeMons race. After the track had gone cold for the day, we traded beer and he fed my team some incredible chili. We stayed in touch and in 2013, he let me know that a teammate of his had pried loose a clapped-out Dodge Magnum from one of the small-but-frighteningly-dedicated Magnum collectors in the country.
The Magnum was to be destined for LeMons, ostensibly, but the story mostly stopped there. Greg’s teammate got busy with a drag build for Hot Rod’s Drag Week and the Magnum sat under a tree in a lot near Kansas City, collecting leaves (and worse) under its sprawling hood. A couple months ago, Greg let me know it was for sale and a mere $200 would claim it.
I’d been without a LeMons car since selling mine in 2014 (and it had sat for a year before that), so I said I’d see if I could talk some other idiot gearhead friends into it. I was surprised to find some interest and so sent $200 via PayPal. I had a racecar that I hadn’t actually ever seen, aside from a small picture or two a couple years ago. What, as they say in LeMons, could possibly go wrong?
This brings us to our first “What did we learn?” point. Curiously enough, the lesson isn’t “Don’t buy a car you’ve never seen” (though that’s generally sound advice, too).
No, the lesson here is rather “Never, ever buy a car without telling your spouse, significant other, spiritual guide, and/or extremely lifelike full-size poster of Han Solo with whom you converse in private but pretend not to notice when other people are around.” This is self-evident to most of the world, but I wouldn’t write it if, as mentioned in the opening line of this story, I wasn’t an idiot. My wife is a very patient person, but explaining that I’d have been stupid not to buy a barely running heap of low-performance luxury coupe to make into an extremely incapable racecar sounds, well, dumb. Especially after you’ve already done sent the money.
That old phrase “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission” will sound like the world’s worst Joel Osteen line when you’re sharing the tattered and pungent (lack of) backseat of your newly minted turd with its ant colony because you’re not welcome inside the house, let alone the bed. If you’re lucky like me, your wife will come around and eventually stop deservedly flipping you the middle finger every time you talk, so long as you cede your garage parking spot for it so the neighbors don’t know completely the depths of your tastelessness.
After a bit of time and much hard work to restore that I am merely stupid and not also dangerously insane, my wife has sagely accepted the fact that it’s probably better for me to have a heap with which to tinker than it is to have more time for writing mindless garbage like you’re reading now.
Sorry about that.
Retrieval
By this point, you’re probably wondering how the Magnum got from Kansas City to my garage in suburban Chicago. My friend Kevin (See top photos) is a car guy’s car guy but like me, he’s never owned a pre-1980 American whip. Curiosity got the better of his judgment and he offered to help me along with the project and to help me retrieve the car.
The Magnum had traveled from Kansas City to St. Louis on a trip of Greg’s and another LeMons racer, Brett Sloman, was going to meet us halfway so long as I delivered him a Toyota Supra axle for his Chevy Ecotec-powered 1978 Toyota Celica LeMons car. Still with me?
Aside from some trailer-rental snafus—Fun fact and (minor) Lesson #2: U-Haul has car haulers in two widths and not every location has the bigger ones that will fit a Malaise Era jalopy. You must pick up the phone and call because the online reservation system doesn’t understand this—we made it to our rendezvous point, which happened to be my friend Pat’s house in [REDACTED], Illinois.
Brett pulled up a couple minutes after us and upon opening his enclosed rear trailer’s door, I was greeted with a dreary representation of what was once a top-of-the-line personal luxury coupe from the grandest day of the personal luxury coupe.
The options list must have been impressive for its day: 155-horsepower 360 cubic inch V8 with Lean Burn computer ignition control, T-Bar roof (with intact T-Bar glass!), two-tone finish, Landau top (long ago rotted), motorized flip-up headlight covers (long ago broken), 8-track stereo, leather seats, and the thickest green shag carpet I’ve ever seen.
After marveling for a bit and holding our noses—which doesn’t keep out hantavirus, by the way—we rolled it out onto the street and we noticed that Brett’s trailer contained a nice Magnum-sized rectangle of rust flakes. Racecar weight savings!
We soon figured out that the starter wasn’t going to work on its own, but Brett made the solenoid engage and dumping a healthy dose of starting fluid brought the 360 to life. As long as I matted gas pedal, the Lean Burn system was just barely able to keep the engine running…until the ether ran out and the 360 wheezed to a halt just as I was preparing to drive it onto the trailer with my butt firmly planted on the leaned-back seat, its power motors clearly immobile.
A bent rental-truck tailgate and 20 minutes with ratchet straps later, the Magnum perched atop the orange rental trailer, dwarfing it with the Magnum’s prolific 18-foot bumper-to-bumper length. With little fanfare and three hours’ tow, the Magnum’s trip to its new home was complete. Two more friends showed up to help corral the tired beast into the stall of my spartan mid-century garage where my Ford Focus usually resides. As the Magnum didn’t run and consequently had no power steering, this was something of a chore, but much yanking of the steering wheel and pushing and pulling got it where it needed to go.
Soon. Later.
What will become of Project Regretmobile? Even I can’t say yet, but hopefully it turns a few race laps in as much anger as an Mop-phan can muster. Check back next episode when we take stock of what this 1979 Dodge Magnum actually is, aside from an inevitable string of four-letter words.
[All photos copyright 2015 Hoonverse/Eric Rood]
Leave a Reply