May the Force agree with you
Great read in t he current issue regarding running in?
Just an old war stor y from my limited experience on t he subject driv ing cars t hat were not mine in a sense but did go prett y good at t he time.
See, in t he late 70s to t he early 80s I was a Highway Patrol unit in NSW. My experience in the 80s was in the countr y, and manual V8s at t he time were just a ll go. I reca ll about 1982, at a countr y station, t he then-current Falcon XD was due for replacement and the new car was an XE 351 fourspeed. My of f-sider picked it up from the depot in Sydney and when arriv ing home stated: They said not to rev it too hard for t wo to f ive t housand kays or t he f irst ser v ice. Yeah, me says.
An old boat-race mate says to me: Drive it like you just pinched it. Me did. About 10,000km down the track that 351 XE would redline in ever y gear, and wit h a sun v isor, Police sign and blue bubble on the roof. Went like a shower of t he proverbia l. Redline it in f irst, snatch second and brea k traction. Top speed on the check-speedo was 221k/h. I must admit t hough, t he air-condish belt was of f `cause it went better wit hout it. Didn’t have to pay for f uel and rubber as well.
Had a great time driv ing it until 35,000k m when Sydney ca lls and says: Time to replace t hat car. I ended up with one of the last 2 XE 351 Falcons out of the Ford plant in Sydney – an auto, with an economy gauge in the dash! Got it home and I thought what a piece of shit t his t hing is. Scored a Porsche on the radar one day at 188k/h and me thinks, good one. Turned around to stop him and a ll I remember is a black dot getting smaller and smaller and the speedo on the XE says FL AT STICK at 184k/h. That’s just t he dif ference bet ween cars of t hat era. Obviously one built middle of the week and one built on a Friday or Monday.
Great reading Dave and keep up the good stuff, and a bit more on t he old goers. We a ll have thoughts on how to run an engine in and what’s the best method, but in the end whatever works for you is good.
Denis Morton, email
JEEZ, IT’S not often I agree with a member of the Highway Patrol. But hell Denis, why couldn’t all Highway Patrol officers be like you and understand the significance of a dude, his car and an open stretch of road? I reckon you’re the sort of bloke the Force needs both then and now as a means of injecting some reality back into the game. You don’t, for instance, strike me as the sort of fella who’d write me up for doing five over the limit on a sunny day in a proper piece of machinery
with good tyres and plenty of brakes. `Cos we both know that’s no naughtier than scratching yer bum in church. And yet, here we are in a society where I can get busted by Robo-Cop for allowing my speed to creep up less than a speedoneedle’s width. How the hell did we allow ourselves to arrive at this point?
Anyway sounds like you made the most of the taxpayer’s dime back in the day. And 221 flat-oot with all that crap on the roof suggests the XE you were pedalling back then was a particularly fit one. But here’s where my own intel comes in.
See, my old man was a small-town NSW copper for three decades, including when I was growing up, so I have a bit of an insight into this stuff. And I can clearly recall going to Sydney with the old man to swap one police car for the next at the Police Garages in (I think) Redfern or somewhere near the academy at the time. This particular time we were swapping a HX Kingswood 202 for a brand-spankers HZ with a 253.
Now, I don’t know what those geniuses at the Police Garage had done to this 253, but it was the fastest damn 4.2-litre Holden I ever sat in. It made an evil kind of hissing noise at full pelt and the auto had obviously been tricked up a bit, too. We eventually swapped it for an XC Falcon 4.1 which was not half the car that HZ had been and was about 30km/h down on top-whack.
I’ve since heard yarns about the police mechanics pulling all sorts of strokes like turning the air-cleaner hat upside-down to get around the early pollution gear. I can also remember a VK Commodore Highway car in Albury back in the day that idled like it had a 30/70 bumpstick in it. Who knows? But given the huge differences in performance I saw, maybe they had their favourites or only had a fiddle when they had time.
My favourite cop-cars? Easy: The VK Chargers that were being used as Highway Patrol cars out of Cooma in the mid-to-late 70s. I was regularly ferried around in those and I can clearly recall the coffin-shaped centre consoles, the gear-driven check-speedo and, of course, the way those Hemi sixes used to throw you back in the chair. The Highway boys back then were in it for the fun and the cars and if they managed to book somebody doing something stupid, well that was part of the game. Unlike today, of course, where even the uniform boys and girls reckon the Highway Patrol heroes are on the nose.