Ed. note: this is your language warning. I’m going to have fun with this series. 

In 2009, Brian Lohnes dubbed me “The Patron Saint of Automotive Lost Causes” after he started following the fun I was having with “Project SuperBeater”, a 1981 Dodge Mirada CMX that I had picked up for a few hundred bucks. The Mirada didn’t really have any kind of build plan going for it…really, I was trying to dredge myself out of a funk brought on by many factors and figured that having a car I could do whatever to and not feel the least bit bad about would help. It did, oddly enough…sure, the car was rusting faster that even I could have predicted, the driver’s side seat self-destructed on me while driving through Tacoma, there were stories about 5 a.m. fireballs, there were videos of burnouts on military roads, and there was the battle against non-functioning gauge lights that gave me fits for the entire duration I owned that car…which, now that I think about it, was probably due to a gauge cluster voltage regulator that shit the bucket. But I learned how to do interior work, I drove the balls off of the thing whenever I felt like it, and spent more in fuel driving around western Washington in the middle of the night trying to sort my life out than I want to remember. It actually kind of broke my heart to see the car being hauled off to a junkyard in Prescott Valley, Arizona after we figured out that the car was physically breaking in half just in front of the rear spring perches from years of water intrusion.

Sometime just after summer gave way to fall last year, I decided that I wanted to run the King of the Heap event at NCM Motorsports Park again. I wanted to have another land-yacht entry, and I wanted to bring along friends. Chris Conn, my buddy who’s been tagging along ever since the Cadillac Limo, was in for sure. We needed two other guys to fill in where we had lost team members to distance, and on a stroke of genius, I decided that I’d invite a couple of well-known YouTubers to join us. But what would we do for a car? The Rough Start Fox was nowhere close to driving (and experience from the Dirty Cougar project taught us that I need all the headroom I can get when I’m wearing a helmet in a Fox-chassis car), but then I remembered a car that had been parked for years. It’d be perfect.

The Fury

Right about the time I was falling out of love with the Imperial, I had learned of a 1976 Plymouth Fury Sport parked behind a shop in Bowling Green. At one point, I had even gone and looked at the car, wondering if a 1975 Road Runner clone could be a possibility. Unfortunately, what was present was a brick-colored two-door that had more rot in the lower quarters than I was prepared to deal with, an interior that needed sprucing, a removed half-vinyl roof and bare A-pillar join seams that had the body filler cracking out. I wasn’t thrilled with the asking price, either, so I moved on. On a whim, I decided to see if the Plymouth was still there, and amazingly, in the time space of about two years, it was…still rusty as ever. I couldn’t help but think of the opening scenes of Christine, when Arnie goes fucking bonkers for that dilapidated disaster waiting to happen, especially once I noticed that the Fury was light in the nose. After talking with the shop, I got the story…the 318/904 combination had been pulled to go into some kind of more desirable Mopar, but at the last second some buyer scooped up the car and the Fury’s powertrain was left to sit on the shop floor. For a three-digit price tag, I could take everything. Okay, sounds like a plan to me. Chris agreed to go 50/50 on the price tag, and we had ourselves a car.

Bringing It Home

The day we had scheduled to have a truck and trailer ready to pick the Plymouth up was a miserable, rain-soaked slog. The day had already been threatening, but the moment I rolled up to the shop to push the Plymouth out into the open, the skies opened up. I couldn’t tell if Mother Nature was trying to cleanse me of some kind of sin or what, but as Chris and our friend Todd showed up to help, it became a royal washout. “The shit we do for cool-ass cars,” Chris noted. I had to disagree with that logic…I like the late-B Mopars, but “cool” wasn’t quite on my mind. With the tailpipe dragging the ground, we narrowly missed hitting the Ford next door as we got the car moved out of it’s long-term storage. Laying down to attach the cable onto the car trailer in enough rainwater to drown a toddler, I was starting to lose that loving feeling already. Fun correlation to the Mirada…both times, I was suffering in heavy rain to bring home a Mopar worth it’s weight in scrap value. It’s like history repeating itself! Once loaded, I bolted towards BangShift Mid-West and to the bit of land I’ve come to use as an unloading point…mostly because a truck and trailer can fit there, but also because the gravel would keep the Plymouth from sinking up to the doorhandles.

As Chris and Todd pulled into the unloading zone, my wife was rolling up to see the shitshow in person. She’s lived through every cheap pile I’ve owned since 2009, Mirada included (she hated it) and was really not impressed with this non-running sled. We figured it was best to leave the car until the ground dried out a couple of days later. Originally, I was going to use her truck to tow it the mile down the road to BangShift Mid-West, but my neighbor decided to give me a hand instead as he was heading home. After hooking up the tow strap to his truck, we started an achingly long cruise at fifteen miles an hour down the road. After turning onto the asphalt, what had been the remnants of the exhaust from the axle forward had caught the road surface, bucked the ass-end of the car up for a second and proceeded to wrap the muffler around the rear axle. That whole drive, the sound of dragging pipe announced my presence. Neighbors looked at the car with disgust. Kids pointed, as if I wasn’t aware. You could see the scratch line all the way down the road for a month. You could see the trench it carved out in my lawn for a month as we dragged the Fury onto the concrete “kill pad” we use for outdoor work.

First Cleaning

I spent an entire day (and three entire cans of degreaser) pressure-washing the engine bay of the Fury to something that resembled “clean” since the powertrain wouldn’t be picked up for another week. Then, for reasons I still don’t understand, I gave the sled a bath. I guess I felt sorry for it, after seeing it sit behind a building neglected for years. It came out surprisingly well, I must say…you can’t ignore the rust, the roof looks like hell, but I’m pretty sure that someone who knows what they are doing with a clay bar, some buffing compound and wax could make the Fury look killer. My theory is that this car was loved until sometime in the mid-1990s or early 2000s, and afterwards went down the spiral before winding up parked on the concrete where the Rollover Explorer and the donor SN-95 Mustang were stripped, with no engine, no transmission, and it’s exhaust system wadded up around it’s axle worse than Ben Stiller’s “frank or the beans?” scene in There’s Something About Mary. If you haven’t seen Love the Beast, the film that goes over Eric Bana’s love for his 1974 Ford Falcon and it’s history with him, you need to see the section where Jeremy Clarkson breaks down the way a human can create a kind of relationship with a car. I felt like I was making friends with an old veteran. His kids don’t come around because they’re off eating leaves and condemning whatever is trendy this week, his wife has passed on, and it seems like nobody has talked to him in years. When I put the jump box onto the battery terminals and saw the headlights wake up, I knew that this car had to have another shot.

Stay tuned…this was just the first week of owning this Fury!