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Pick your favorite iconic car from any decade....

#2,521
AC Shelby Cobra 289

I saw this car in Gallery Aaldering, Brummen, The Netherlands for € 839.000!! :yawn: (almost 1 million $).

DSC07465.jpg
 
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#2,525
hbarcat said:
That sux!

My brother had a 79 Mustang Indy pace car replica. I borrowed it to take a girl on a first date. A falling tree crushed the car a few months after that. The girl eventually became my wife.

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He took it well considering, but then there's a hundred year old tree on your car, not a lot you can do about that. I felt a pang of strange guilt to be honest, a 'pride comes before the fall' sort of thing, instigated by me admiring it. It was a nice one though fair play.
 
#2,526
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#2,527
hbarcat said:
That sux!

My brother had a 79 Mustang Indy pace car replica. I borrowed it to take a girl on a first date. A falling tree crushed the car a few months after that. The girl eventually became my wife.

.


View attachment 3968066
Click to expand...
I actually had two of those '79 Pace Cars. At the same time. And I was working for GM at the time. I was looking for a 5.0L V8 model but couldn't find one, so I bought a 2.3L turbo. Had it for a few months and a 5.0L appeared out of nowhere, so I bought it, too. The 4-cylinder turbo had the full decal set applied, the 5.0 had the door decals still in the box.

One day I'm driving the 2.3T around downtown Flint, Michigan, sunroof open, windows down and people are blowing their horns and waving at me. Narcissist that I am I wave back and think "yeah, I know...cool car...thanks". Pull up to a stoplight about a block from my apartment and smoke starts rolling up my windshield. Luckily, I was across the street from a fire station, so I pulled into the drug store parking lot and holler over to them. Then I did one of the stupidest things I've ever done in my life. I opened the hood. WHOOOOSH!!!! Slammed it and let the firemen take over.

Insurance replaced the engine and completely repainted the car, including installing the decal kit. Wound up giving that car to my brother and hung on to the 5.0 until I got my first Fiero.
 
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#2,529
malthumb said:
I actually had two of those '79 Pace Cars. At the same time. And I was working for GM at the time. I was looking for a 5.0L V8 model but couldn't find one, so I bought a 2.3L turbo. Had it for a few months and a 5.0L appeared out of nowhere, so I bought it, too. The 4-cylinder turbo had the full decal set applied, the 5.0 had the door decals still in the box.

One day I'm driving the 2.3T around downtown Flint, Michigan, sunroof open, windows down and people are blowing their horns and waving at me. Narcissist that I am I wave back and think "yeah, I know...cool car...thanks". Pull up to a stoplight about a block from my apartment and smoke starts rolling up my windshield. Luckily, I was across the street from a fire station, so I pulled into the drug store parking lot and holler over to them. Then I did one of the stupidest things I've ever done in my life. I opened the hood. WHOOOOSH!!!! Slammed it and let the firemen take over.

Insurance replaced the engine and completely repainted the car, including installing the decal kit. Wound up giving that car to my brother and hung on to the 5.0 until I got my first Fiero.
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I thought only Volkswagens did that :roflmao:
 
#2,531
malthumb said:
I actually had two of those '79 Pace Cars. At the same time.
. . .
One day I'm driving the 2.3T around downtown Flint, Michigan, sunroof open, windows down and people are blowing their horns and waving at me. Narcissist that I am I wave back and think "yeah, I know...cool car...thanks". Pull up to a stoplight about a block from my apartment and smoke starts rolling up my windshield. Luckily, I was across the street from a fire station, so I pulled into the drug store parking lot and holler over to them. Then I did one of the stupidest things I've ever done in my life. I opened the hood. WHOOOOSH!!!! Slammed it and let the firemen take over.
Click to expand...

fretter said:
I thought only Volkswagens did that :roflmao:
Click to expand...

The Ford 2.3 turbo was very susceptible to the oil feed lines to the turbo springing a leak and spraying oil all over the red hot exhaust manifold, which would immediately start an engine fire.

My friend's Merkur XR4ti burned down to the ground that way.
 
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#2,532
fretter said:
I thought only Volkswagens did that :roflmao:
Click to expand...
I'm really surprised that this hasn't happened more with '79 - '83 Mustang turbos. The root cause of the fire was a gasoline leak that dripped onto the turbocharger. The turbo is the hottest part of the engine. Why was the gas line routed above the hottest part of the engine?

**EDIT** @hbarcat's explanation makes a lot more sense. Maybe that's what actually happened. The insurance adjuster wrote it up as a gasoline leak onto the turbo. At the time I was a transmission manufacturing engineer and knew jack-all about engines. Over the years I added engine manufacturing, remanufacturing, and service engineering to my bag-o-tricks. Both Pace Cars were long gone by then.
 
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