The Beast is Back...Again

Lately I’ve been driving the Formula again, now that I’ve been able to replace the rear tires.  And I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the power and torque which have returned after a long absence.  How appropriate that a Firebird, its image and logo that of the mythical phoenix, should rise again from its ashes (thankfully not literally, but I have had nightmares about the car going up in flames).

 In March 2009 I got the car back from the body shop in Stafford, where it had been since January 2008 being returned from the dead – USAA had considered the car totalled.  Having failed emissions in 2007 and told that it needed new injectors – only getting new tags due to a waiver – I took it to a speed shop in April 2009 shortly after getting the car back from the body shop.  The speed shop pronounced my injectors healthy, but said the engine was “gone” and the car would never pass emissions with it under the hood.  In July 2009 two Chevrolet dealers told me the same thing.

 Fortunately, for a car like this, the options for engine replacement were substantial.   A simple remanufactured  replacement engine would cost about $2000, the next step up being a ZZ4 crate engine from GM Performance Parts ($4,000), or a Dart 400 short block ($3,000) + AFR aluminum cylinder heads ($1,500) (=$4,500), even some LS variants ($5000+ for the engine itself, not counting myriad mods required to make an LS engine work in a third-gen Firebird), with $2000 installation, assuming no unforeseen problems – which always seem to erupt anyway.  This was serious cash I don’t have.  So the car sat idle for the remainder of 2009 and most of 2010.   The few times I did drive it, it drove poorly, had a rough idle when cold, almost as if it was going to stall.  The power was way down, and the fuel economy was horrendous – something like 6 mpg, with black smoke belching from the tailpipes.  Moreover, it had a voltage drain on the battery, meaning I’d have to hook it up to a battery charger overnight if I wanted to drive the car the next day.  It was a sick, old car, a car you’d sell for whatever anyone would pay for it, if you didn’t care so much about it.  I was certainly discouraged, but I didn’t give up.

 In late 2010, I brought it to a shop at Fairfax Circle, Bubba’s, with the idea of producing a laundry list of “tasks” for various prices which needed to be done, topped off with the engine replacement.  Bubba, however, was not convinced it needed a new engine, and suspected that the real problem was simply an underperforming fuel system.  Long story short, Bubba fixed the car, and it passed emissions – without a new engine.  It wasn’t cheap, but it was well under the cost of a new engine.  And the voltage drain seems to have disappeared.  The fuel economy has improved dramatically, though not back up to its original peak.   It still needs a few things fixed (headlights stuck on high beams, A/C kaput) but the bottom line is that the car is now FUN TO DRIVE, which it wasn’t before.  Hallelujah!

 I still drive the Neon, especially since gas prices have shot up dramatically, and premium (93 octane) has bumped over $4 a gallon around here.  The Neon will continue to beat the Formula on gas.  The Formula’s bucket seat is deep and low, making it difficult to get in and out of the car; once you’re IN, you’re IN.  The Neon is very much a generic CAR.  Imagine a futuristic utopian society where everything is generic with no name brands: soap, water, coffee, beer, soda, houses, cars, etc.  The Neon could be that cheap plastic thing you drive around because the State has decreed that there will be only one type of anything.  But I can plug my iPod into the stereo!  So it’s not completely un-fun.

Hello Neon, Bye Bye Formula

…well, at least for the next 2 months or so.

Part I. The Crash. On December 4, 2007, on a cold (but not snowy) evening, I left work and drove down the road to go home. Turning a curve, the car spun out, and crashed backwards through the woods (I was acquitted of “failure to maintain control” due to my own pro se representation). The driver’s side window was completely destroyed, the driver’s side door banged up enough to prevent it opening (see pic above), and various other body panels also suffered their fair share of damage. The passenger side tie rod end was busted, meaning the car is neither steerable nor drivable, though it fires right up on all 8 poorly injected cylinders.
The insurance company, sending out a special adjuster who divides a car’s fair market value by half and issues a check for that, and yanking rental car coverage before it had even issued that pathetically inadequate check, was happy to rip me off and reward me for 15 years of loyalty. So I had to go down to Woodbridge, to a large used car auction dealership, and snatch the first cheapo econobox that wasn’t a total piece of shit.

Part II. The 1995 Plymouth Neon. Actually, the car is pretty nice. Smurf blue, fairly clean grey interior, automatic transmission, with working air conditioning and 4 wheel antilock brakes. It had no stereo, so I had to get a nice one from Crutchfield, a Pioneer CD player with one of those incredibly cool but equally distracting blue screen displays. I installed it myself, aside from some help from Myer-Emco because the factory harness refused to supply a constant 12 volt power supply. I also got floor mats with the embroidered “Plymouth” logo, as the car didn’t even have any mats. But the car passed inspection with just a new fog light and cleaning up the headlights, and passed emissions with flying colors.

Part III. Formula vs. Neon. Hmm. 5.7L OHV V8 vs. 2.0L SOHC I4. 300 horsepower and 350 lb-ft of torque vs. 134 HP and about 120 lb-ft of torque. Black on black vs. blue on grey. RWD vs. FWD. WS6 performance suspension on 245/50ZR16 tires, vs. go-cart suspension on 185/65R14 tires. Although the Neon is lighter, it doesn’t handle nearly as well as the Formula, and it has a cheap, small, fragile tin can feel to it which doesn’t inspire any sense of safety or security – despite the anti-lock brakes, which work as though the brakes are failing, not working properly thanks to higher technology than the older brakes on the Formula. In all these categories the Formula is definitely superior.

But in two categories, which you can probably guess, the Neon triumphs: INSURANCE went down by almost 50%, from $140/month to $80 a month (for a code 10 Neon vs. a code 20 Firebird Formula) and FUEL ECONOMY jumped dramatically, from 13 mpg in the Formula to 24 mpg in the Neon. Instead of filling up every 3 days with 93 octane gas, it’s every week with 87 octane. The econobox does have its advantages.

I did do some research, and discovered that performance parts are available for this Neon. Header (as in ONE), cat-back exhaust, SOHC camshafts from Crane and Zex, and a few other parts. But it’s not nearly as much as for the Formula and even with all those parts thrown in together, the HP would still be only something like 180, well short of the 240 HP the Formula had in stock condition, never mind the modified condition it’s in now. Perform the same modifications on a V8 and you’d be seeing twice the overall output, in a car that’s only 50% heavier. There’s a reason hot rodders have preferred V8 muscle cars for so long. These stupid rice racers and import/compact tuner crowds act as though they invented a hobby which didn’t exist in any real sense before 1998 or so (for their crappy excuse for performance cars) – whereas Edelbrock was modifying the Camaro as soon as it came out in 1967 and Hot Rod has been published since 1948. Bootleggers had been souping up their Model Ts and Deuces (first mass-produced V8, Ford in 1932…first small-block Chevy V8, 1955) long before Toyota, Honda and Nissan were out of their automotive diapers. Hoorah for “Fast & Furious 2” for showing us some REAL cars: the Yenko Camaro (’69 w/a 427) and a ’70 Hemi Challenger.

Fortunately, the Formula isn’t dead, it’s merely resting in a lot down in Stafford. Someday, it might rise from the ashes like its namesake. We’ll have to see. But at least in the meantime I have the Smurf-blue Neon to drive.

The Beast is Back in Black

On Wednesday, May 23, I finally got my car back from the body shop.  I had dropped it off on February 5, and had to drive two different cars until now.  It was originally supposed to simply have the front bumper cover and left fender replaced, and it turned into a complete repainting.

 The car had last been painted from September 1997 to January 1998, which was a color change from the original factory teal (aka “Dark Aqua Metallic”) to black.  Even that involved bringing the car back to paint the engine compartment, buff it several times, and finally have the decals put back on in June.   Until then it had the Knight Rider jet black finish to it.  And since it will be some time before I put the decals back on again this time, it will be KITT again for awhile.  Here are some thoughts about the whole deal.

 Work.  This car is my daily driver.  I drive it in good weather, rain, snow, etc.  I park it in garages, on the street, in mall parking lots, etc., everywhere I go.  I take pains to park away from the idiots and morons, but I can’t control when some dumbass will pick – of all the spaces in an otherwise empty parking lot – to park his behemoth of an Explorer next to my car.  So since 1998 it had accumulated a wide variety of dents, dings, scratches, and even some rust.  The paint on the hood and roof began to oxidize (probably just the clearcoat) and became a cloudy grey instead of jet black.  Suffice to say, it had seen better days and was in desperate need of attention.  Thanks to the body shop, all those dents, dings, scratches and rust are gone, and once again it’s straight.  Even more to the point, because black is the one color which is least forgiving of even the least imperfection. 

 Cheap, good, and fast – pick any two.  Well, the paint job is great, the price was right, so the missing element was time.  This is why it took so long.   It was frustrating and annoying, wearing my patience to the bone, but the wait is over.

 Rarity.  Between 1987 and 1992, they only made less than 55,000 Formulas.  There are only 6,500 ‘91-92 Formulas, and of these, only 1,000 are 1992 models.  Of these, even less have the far more desirable 5.7L V8 (aka “Formula 350”); the rest have the anemic 5.0L V8.  The days are long gone that I regularly saw third generation Formulas on the street, and months go by before I see another 91-92 Formula.  These cars are getting rarer and rarer every day.

 Other cars.  The inequality of this is that few owners of economy cars have ever driven, much less owned and driven on a daily basis, any sort of performance car.  In Brazil and Europe, performance cars are extremely rare, limited to the Porsches and Ferraris, with no Firebirds, Camaros or Mustangs available for the common man (or woman) with a limited budget to enjoy.  Scoff, if you wish, that Camaros and such are “poor man’s sports cars” (which is true) but there was an excellent reason why the 1965 Mustang sold so well: until it came around there was NOTHING which came close to filling this valuable niche in the market, a performance car that the average person could afford.  Truth be told, the Firebird is not put together like a Swiss watch, with the top quality ingredients, fit and finish of a BMW or Mercedes.  Some of the models are extremely cheap in appearance.  And unlike Hondas and Toyotas, these are not reliable cars.  Even when pampered, lavished, and kept up on routine maintenance, they will still break down and give all sorts of problems.  Part of the reason the cars are getting rarer and rarer is that there is little reason to salvage or maintain the lower (non-Z/28 or Formula/Trans Am) models, and not enough motivation to do so even for the performance models.  Even my car, with the top V8 available, in the last year for its generation (1992) only has a blue book value of $4-5,000. 

 Having said that, how does the car compare against a 2006 Nissan Versa (rental car) and 1998 Dodge Neon (customer car) which I drove while I was waiting for my own car to be finished?

1.  Fuel economy.  Hands down, both economy cars won this big time – hardly surprising.  They could pass a gas station without stopping and I could get down to Stafford and back without filling up all the time.  With gas getting expensive again, this was a big plus.

2.  Performance.  The flip-side of this! The Versa could get out of its own way from a stop, but quickly ran out of breath.  It’s a hot rod so long as you never leave a parking lot.  As soon as you get on a major road, let alone the highway, you’re quickly reminded that it’s a 4 cylinder under the hood.  In the Neon I frequently had to put the gas pedal to the floor just to get up to 60.  Whereas in the Formula, with its 300 horsepower V8, (even with 210,000 miles) I can get the car moving quickly to 60 with only part throttle.  It gets up to 80 without breaking a sweat.  And with its wide tires (245/50ZR16 size on 16x8” wheels), low stance, and performance suspension, the car handles terrific.  The Versa and Neon both wallowed on curves and their narrow, skinny wheels & tires did a poor job of biting the road. 

            People have asked me, “don’t you get frustrated in this muscle car when you’re stuck in traffic?”  Yes, I do.  But I get frustrated stuck in traffic in ANY car – even a Versa or Neon that can’t even cut loose when the traffic does lets up.  Traffic jams are frustrating no matter what car you drive.

            It’s clear to me that the people who cynically whine that “you can’t use all that power” have never owned such cars and are just full of sour grapes.  I haven’t been to the dragstrip since 1998 and yet I’ve still been able to enjoy the power, performance and handling of my car on the roads, highways, etc. without street racing, without a stack of tickets for speeding or reckless driving (you can get both in an economy car if you’re simply unlucky or a bad driver) or prohibitively expensive gas or insurance.  Some cops have it out for such cars – I know from personal experience – but others are, to the contrary, performance enthusiasts and far from being hostile to Firebird and Camaro drivers, respect and admire such cars.

3.  Features.  The Versa, despite being the cheapest rental car, had a killer stereo.  Lots of rich bass and midrange, perfect!  And it had power everything.  None of this yank-yank-yank on the windows.  The Neon had a big hole where the stereo used to be, until Tim put a factory CD player in there – which worked 60% of the time.  The presets didn’t work on the radio, meaning I had to manually twirl the dial to change stations.  Hey, it’s a ’98 and I was paying zero per day for it, so I won’t complain.  The Formula is somewhere in between: manual everything but a respectable stereo with 6-disc changer in the trunk.

            Incidentally, I can convert the Formula to power windows, door locks, etc. if I scavenge a parts car for the required parts.  Maybe in the near future I’ll do so.  For the time being I’m focused on getting the rear spoiler and getting the car to pass inspection.

 It’s a great car, and now it looks as great as it runs.  It’s definitely a keeper.