Antique & Classic Cars Blog

That last post got me thinking of high school. Remember all the things you believed back then?

In those days, my ride du jour was a 1974 Plymouth Satellite 4-door with 318 V8, license plate 369 44L. Good for 110 on the highway, or, uh, so I reckon, and held five skiers with full equipment. But for this car I had no speed trick–only a Pioneer AM/FM casette stereo with Jensen speakers and well-played tapes of Jethro Tull, AC/CD and The Who.

My good friend Ferg had a ‘74 Nova, yellow, plate PO8 261. And that car did have a speed trick, or so we thought. We’d heard that flipping the lid on the air cleaner–making it concave instead of convex–allowed more air and created more power.

At the scientific level, with dynomometer, gas spectrometer, team of MIT guys and some Snap-On Tools for disassembly verification, maybe a tiny bit. Overall, this probably didn’t give us any more oomph.

But we loved the idea that it did. We used to treat that trick like one of the prime switches in the Batmobile. We’d be out driving somewhere, it’d get late, the then-rural roads of Chester County would be quiet and we’d decide the need to get home by 12:00 required the speed trick. So out we’d hop, pop the hood, spin off the big air cleaner wing nut, and the deed was done….

Heh. Wonder where that Nova is now…. Probably melted back into a Suburban’s fenders, some weight plates, an iron and a waffle maker.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Car stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.