1976 Ford Torino
The Chaotic Good Bard in a Leisure Suit
Everybody remembers their first car! It’s the first time you got to experience your first taste of freedom, and responsibility. And in 1988, the first thing you did was put glass packs on it and chunk the cats!
And it sounded glorious!
Well, as glorious as a 1976 Ford 351 Windsor with a tiny 350 CFM 2bbl carb can sound. After all, this CARB-addled boat anchor had horsepower rated at 144@3200 rpm. The torque was 266@2000 rpms. Not great for a 5.8L monster. But dualed-out with glass-packs, it sounded divine! Removing the cat and freeing up the exhaust did add a bit of power, and actually made the fuel economy better (great for a high school senior).
Other mods were performed by the shop class at my school included replacing the single-speaker AM-only radio with a Krako AM-FM Cassette with Auto-Reverse, four speakers consuming the stock positions in the doors and rear deck lid and finally installed seat covers that actually stayed in place.
Of course, all that sound and fury require appropriately matched tires, but this was 1989 and I had to find tires I could afford, so they were WHITE-WALLS, but oversized for the width of the stock rims, of course!
In the brief year I owned it, it saw many trips across the great state of Tennessee with Appetite for Destruction screaming out of the 6x9 decklid speakers. I learned how to transfer just enough side-to-side momentum to allow the extra-wide tires to break loose on dry asphalt, which added to the local mystique of this lounge lizard. It literally couldn’t win a race with a dump truck, but sounded great in defeat, so cruising on Saturday Night outside Dover city limits (you didn’t dare cruise in city limits) was a blast as everyone challenged the old girl just to hear those glorious glass packs crackle!
The next summer I was heading to college a couple hundred miles away. The Torino got about 8 miles per gallon under the command of a 17-year-old with neither money nor cents, so we traded her in for the next car on the list…