The Fin Car
By noderel:
It should come as no surprise to anyone that I would own a fin car. A Mopar fin car, of course. I like them now, and I liked them back when they were new. Big. Lots of balls. Great ride. Marginal handling. Horrible brakes, Terrible gas mileage. Bad bad bad! And totally unappreciated by the unwashed masses.
I was working for a Chrysler agent in Idaho when the hemi engine debuted, and I was gobsmacked when Mopar introduced the big V8 in the smallest body style, think it was called the Saratoga or some such. It was way fast, but wouldn’t corner and wouldn’t stop. Perfect, and it blew the doors off Chevy’s and Fords. Fast forward a few years and I was working for Hot Rod Magazine when Chrysler dropped the huge rear fender fins they had chronicled as being aerodynamically stabilizing. When was that, about 1962? At the press conference the PR toady told us that the company had figured out how to get the same fin car performance with a much smaller reconfigured fin. Translation: More power, same lousy brakes.
Thus it was that when I was doing the Great American Race from down in Dallas and I saw an ad for a 1060 Chrysler hardtop up in Washington state, I burned up the phone to get the machine. Turned out it had the hot 413 engine with pushbutton auto and a caved-in quarter panel. Right there where a big fin lived. The car was way up there, and I was way down there. Solution was to have the owner drive the car over to a body shop owner friend in eastern Idaho. So it was that Carl Brunson in Driggs, Idaho eventually got the car to: l-fix the fender whack and 2-paint the beast a Ferrari red.
Which was why I got the phone call, “You sure you want this thing all bright red.” I assured Carl that he should take off a ton of chrome trim and paint it all. “It sure is big”, he said. He called in a couple of days to pronounce the deed done. “It looks dynamite, and it helped to get rid of that extra chrome glitter. You can come get it anytime!” Which I did. And promptly blew the doors off other mopar owners at a show in the Texas area.
Upshot of it all is that the 413 engine was worn out, but it still ran like stink and the price of gas wasn’t too bad and I loved the donkey. A year later and I had moved to eastern Idaho where Brunson had his shop. The fin car was my daily driver and I discovered immediately that going over the teton mountains pass to Jackson, Wyoming was an adventure in pucker-city trying to reduce the speed to something under l00. Lousy brakes.
Then, after building the Junkyard Dawg roadster and securing a late model Chevy suburban, I put Fin Car on car jacks for a total resurection. Which is where it has languished ever since.
I learned immediately that all the burgeoning restoration industry which had been a’borning in years recent did not include Mopars made before l964. My much loved 1948 Chrysler airport sedan didn’t need stuff, so it was a surprise to find that I couldn’t get anything for Fin Car. It was square one in the rebuild, so the behemoth languished in the barn. I replaced the entire rearend with a later model housing and 2.76 or so gears. I found that I could maybe replace the front suspension from an early 70s era Plymouth, which gave me disc brakes, and Fatman down south made me a set of 2-inch dropped spindles.
I found a Mopar boneyard up in Three Forks, Montana that was supplying older hemi’s to Garlits and his ilk, who had a late model 440 that was subject of a mislaid rebuild, while Gary Dagle was in Helena at the time doing transmission rebuilds. All of this trickled down to me and I dutifully found time to muddle through a kind of project.
Which is where the thing stalled in the late Nineties. I was busy with other things, as every rodder is wont to discover. Thus Fin Car has sat neglected in my storage hall since. And which is why I have decided that my second most favorite hot rod of all time is out the door. Yep! Going to a new home. The paint clear coat is disappearing, but I think a new coat of clear will save that great Brunson red. The dash has failed, but I did find another pad at the same boneyard in Montana. Upholstery is barely usable, one quarter window power unit has died, but the new tires are still good as mounted on police wheels. In short, all the fixins are there. You can haul it away for 5500. If you jump into the project you can easily have it on the road in a year, maybe less. Anyway, I love WPC Fin Car. Call me a 808-634-1192 so that saga can continue. I wouldn’t tarry, however. Good fins are hard to come by it seems.