[north]

The year, circa 1984. The place, a wide straight smooth boulavard around midnight.

I am cruising with my buddy in my then GTO, a 69 black droptop with parchement interior and top. It was a kinda rusty car but somehow looked good. Fat rubber on a set of cragers but otherwise stock looking. For GO it had a 400 with a 650 holley DP, headers, T400 and 3.36 Safe T Track.

As I coast up to a stop sign a black mopar packing a Hemi swings up beside me in the opposing lane, he does a 5mph stop and nails it. I do the same and he has a car length jump on me. My tires hook up nice and I am keeping up to him, at first. Then slowly he pulls me, so that by the next stop sign (1/3 mile or so) he has me by several car lengths as he blows through the intersection well into the century club. I turn to my friend who is giving me the look and say to him, "hey, it WAS a Hemi, what's your problem?" He just smiles.

There is a problem: See, the sinister black Mopar was not a Charger, not a Challenger, not a Roadrunner, No, it was a 1984 or so Aries K car!! For those of you behind in your 80's car history studies K cars came with a 2.2 but a Mitsubishi made 2.6 was an option and it was a Hemi (a 100 or so HP Hemi but a Hemi) even had the factory Hemi emblems.

In fairness those 2.6 engines in a tin can like a K car were probably a pretty quick car by the pathetic mid 80's standards but still I had a 69 GTO for chr*** sake. An explanation is clearly needed, especially since it ran nice and felt fine in normal driving.

I found out a few things as time went on, first my engine was a hybrid of sorts: 76 400 block with the factory dish pistons that delivered 7.6/1 stock, next the car had a set of lo-po heads from a 75 455. The net effect was about 6.0/1 compression (it did NOT ping!). Next was that nice looking Holley double pumper; looked good but since it was a square bore carb it probably would have worked better if it was not bolted onto a stock 76 spreadbore intake. Net effect of that was that the throttle plates on the primaries hit the intake at about half throttle.

Final kick was that the guy who had put all this together was a mechanic called Goofy, well named he was. (when we first started that motor in his shop it knocked like crazy, teardown revealed that he forgot to tighten two rod bearing bolts)

Overall result was probably 100 odd horses but up to partial throttle it was a nice cruiser (in a mid 70's smogger 400 kind of way). And hey, it was a Hemi that smoked me!