Jay Leno, Derek Bell, Stephen Bayley and Robert Coucher muse on motoring matters
The Collector
If there’s been any advantage at all during the Covid pandemic, it’s that this quarantine business has forced me to finish projects I’d been putting off. Remember the crankshaft pulley on my 8-litre Bentley, which I discussed a couple of months ago? I’d believed that to be an engine-out job, which meant the car had sat almost two years before I gathered the courage to tackle it.
Let me take you back in time to my 1962 Maserati 3500 GTi. This car came with Lucas fuel injection that people found troublesome and replaced with a Weber carburettor. I didn’t want to go that route because a) it wasn’t original, and b) it said ‘fuel injection’ on the side of the car. I’d have to explain it every time I opened the bonnet.
After much trial and error we finally got it working properly, which led to a tremendous feeling of self-satisfaction. The heartbreak came after less than
500 miles, when the ZF five-speed transmission started hopping out of second gear, refused to go into reverse and made every journey a nightmare. After pulling the transmission, taking it apart, checking everything and putting it back together, the same thing kept happening. Fed up, I parked it at the back of the garage for almost four years.
In the intervening period I found a car that I’d been looking for since I was a teenager. That was the Pontiac Firebird Sprint that you may remember me getting excited about back in Octane 195. To recap, this model is special because rather than the usual V8 it had a highperformance six-cylinder engine. John DeLorean, president of Pontiac Motor Division, was a huge fan of the Jaguar E-type and wanted to build a two-seater American sports car. It was called the Banshee. General Motors had other ideas, however, seeing no reason to build another competitor to its very successful Corvette. GM wisely told him to make something to compete with the Camaro and the Mustang, so he created the Firebird.
With the E-type still in the back of his mind he created one of America’s first overhead-cam six-cylinder engines. It was based on a Chevy six and featured – for the first time ever – a rubber belt rather than chains or gears to drive the camshaft. It also featured a Quadrajet fourbarrel carburettor, headers, a hood-mounted tachometer, heavy-duty suspension and a four-speed transmission. Unfortunately, when fitted with all the options, the six cost more than the V8. In America the V8 was king, especially in the horsepower-hungry 1960s. Most American buyers would take straightline speed over handling, any day. Consequently not many Sprints were sold and the engine lasted only a couple of years.
When I finally found mine it was exactly what I was looking for: a Caribbean Blue convertible with a fourspeed transmission, and all the performance options. It had about 90,000 miles on it and was pretty worn out. Well, a lot has happened since I last mentioned it. The first thing we did was pull the engine. These tended to have weak rocker arms so oil pressure was kept low to reduce stress and wear on the rockers. We fabricated our own rocker arms because nothing was commercially available. We made them out of tool steel, then had them hardened and coated with something called DLC, which stands for ‘diamond-like carbon’. Hard running on the dyno showed no wear marks of any kind. We raised the compression ratio slightly and added a harder cam.
I called my friend John Hotchkis at Hotchkis Sport Suspension to get the hot tips on how to make it handle and boy, does it ever! As I do with nearly all my cars, I added disc brakes on all four corners, plus a new close-ratio steering box, all from Hotchkis. Another revelation was a new five-speed gearbox from Tremec called the TKX. It allows a higher rear-end ratio to keep the lively acceleration but also reasonable revs at highway cruising speed.
Is this a restomod? I suppose it is. Although it looks totally stock. But if it’s OK to restomod a Pontiac, what about the Maserati? I bought that when it was just an old sports car. Making changes or improvements at the time seemed like common sense, unlike today, when if you’re caught running anything less than Italian air in the tyres it’s heresy. Yet for the price of repairing the ZF gearbox – and there’s no guarantee it’ll work properly even then – I can install a brand new, far stronger Tremec TKX.
The shift on my Sprint is so great that I want one in my Maserati. What do you guys think? Am I ruining a classic to make it a better car? Unlike the fuel injection, you can’t see it when you open the hood. No-one but me will know it’s there. It’s like Edgar Allan Poe’s tell-tale heart: will I be driven mad by thinking Concorso Italiano judges will find out my secret? Let me know what you think. I have the time to spare.
‘TODAY, IF YOU’RE CAUGHT RUNNING ANYTHING LESS THAN ITALIAN AIR IN THE TYRES, IT’S HERESY’