Morley says...
I SPENT PLENTY of time on farms as a kid, Luke, so I’ve got a pretty good mental picture of what sort of mis-treatment your old Mitsi gets on a pretty much daily basis. Paddock-bashers are about the most fun you can have with a couple of mates, a wet paddock and any old sort of shit-heap you’ve managed to save from the scrappy. By an odd coincidence, my first dedicated paddock bomb was also a Mitsubishi; a 1968 Colt 1000, to be exact.
The great thing about paddock bashers is that they don’t need a lot of power (thankfully in the case of my little Colt) so I wouldn’t bother going for anything expensive like a turbocharger or even a bigger engine. If the two-litre is still bagging them up, stick with it. That said, I believe the 2.6-litre Astron is a pretty simple swap in to the L200. So if one of those big-block four-bangers happened to fall into your lap, well… Mainly, though, the trick is to make sure you absolutely optimise what you’ve already got. Plugs, points, leads and make sure the timing is spot on. This stuff doesn’t cost much at all, but can really make a difference to how a car drives.
The one thing I would do is bolt the doors back on. Even with good seat belts, you wouldn’t want an arm or leg flying out as she rolls, would you? And mum will be happier, `cos the doors will keep SOME of the mud out of the cabin, meaning less frequent clothes washing. Then, I’d grab Dad’s stick-welder and find some old water pipe and weld me up a roll-bar of some kind. A hoop just behind the cabin’s rear window with some diagonal stays down into the tray should do the trick. Safety is my middle name, after all. While the welder is out, yank the diff centre and weld that up; world’s cheapest spool diff.
Meantime, the best way to improve your car’s power to weight ratio is not to add more power, but to subtract more weight. So fling the bonnet and the tailgate, but make sure you run an air-cleaner to keep the bigger clods of dirt out of the carby. Remove the headlights and tail-lights, too, as well as the grille. Straight on to eBay with those and that should buy a tankful of juice or two. Those LandCruiser rims on the back must have messed up your gearing something awful, but hey, that’s what a gearbox is for, right?
From what I can remember, the Astron was a better mousetrap than a lot of what the competition were doing back in the day. When Datsuns were deafening their drivers, Toyota owners were dying of boredom and Mazda four-cylinder owners were pouring Ajax down the carby to try to stop the engine burning oil, those Astron-powered Sigmas seemed to be a cut above. The biggest recurring mechanical problem was a stretched timing chain, although I recall the 2.6 was worse than the two-litre for this. Make sure you don’t overheat it, though (cracked cylinder heads, blown head gaskets) and it’d be worth running coolant in it rather than tap-water to keep corrosion at bay. If you want to get really creative, why not embark on a program of mass centralisation. The radiator and battery could both be moved into the tray, just behind the cabin, taking weight off the front end and making her turn better. The longer radiator hoses will also increase the capacity of your cooling system. Along the way you’ll also learn about making brackets and mounting points and even a bit of electrical wiring.
Beyond that, keep giving it the berries. And to all those who reckon I’m doing the wrong thing encouraging a young fella to go out and play in the mud, put this magazine down and choose something else from the pile of books in the doctor’s waiting room. Every young driver will experience oversteer, understeer and what happens when they overstep the mark at some point in their driving career. If they can first learn about it at relatively low speed in a nice safe paddock, then they might just survive to be able to put that knowledge to use on the road when it happens unexpectedly. And if you can’t see how sliding around some farm tracks in an old car is incredibly good fun, then I believe the doctor will see you now.