1997 Ford Thunderbird

4.6 SOHC

Automatic

1FALP62W2VH163342

Clear

What we have here is the one and only "Mighty LeQueen" So I decided to build myself a racecar for the 24hrs of LeMons race series. I build custom cars everyday for a living, so the building was easy, the hard part was picking out a car. I didn't know exactly who would be on my team driving the car, so I had to go with an automatic in case we got stuck with someone who didn't know how to race a $500 car with a millions miles on it and a sketchy clutch. With that in mind, I knew it would have to be easy to work on, reliable and common enough to get parts at every po-dunk lil town next to these racetracks, so we decided on any Ford or Chevy V8 powered automatic car. Oh, I forgot to tell you we knew we would have drivers ranging from "short average man" to Martin, my 6'8" gorilla of a friend, so we had to go with at least a midsize car. After months of searching, and watching Martin try to climb into a Fiero, we came upon this beauty. At the time she was a faded gold, 170K mile Thunderbird with fast and furious racing seat covers. After a little bit of work, she became "Mighty LeQueen", who we like to imagine is Lightning McQueen's super sketchy brother. work performed:6 Point roll cage built to Lemons Spec with additional cross bracing made with 1.75 .120 wall with extra roof bar for Shrek (Martin) sized drivers Mechanical oil pressure gauge, engine temp gauge, transmission temperature gauge were added Kirkey Aluminum seat was installed on tracks to accommodate normal humans and monsters (Thanks Martin) 10lb Fire extinguisher with metal mount 3" 5 point racing harness' were installed Oil change with Mobil One and Prolong treatment Transmission flush and trans temperature mount were added Rear diff fluid changed, Mobil One gear oil added 4 new hardened Rotors, with front and rear Bosch Ceramic pads installed All new front control arms, uppers and lowers with all new ball joints compression tested (all within 5% of eachother) and new NGK platinum plugs installed Wheels swapped to Lincoln Mk8 16" sweet ass chrome rims 8$ Rustoleum paint job (I at least tried a little, I used a proper spray gun, not just cans) Sick ass Graphics! Hand cut Flames on sick ass gold Glitter Vinyl! I flipped the spoiler around and mounted it like those go-fast cars because my son said i needed Lightning Mcqueen's spoiler The exhaust is all new, 4 cats were removed and i ran individual banks through resonators, then a Y, then a cherrybomb glasspack, she actually sounds pretty good. It has the required Battery cut-off with the Alt cut off as well All the required components to pass Lemon's tech like the roll bar padding, firewall plugs, etc I swapped the fuel tank to the Lincoln Mk8 fuel tank. The Lincolns have a better pickup for sloshing fuel and a more reliable fuel pump, so I put a new Bosch unit in there, and new fuel filter. So we take her to INDE motorsports ranch thinking we are just going to be the fastest car on the track, big ole Murican V8 with 4 wheel disc brakes and 4 wheel SLA independent suspension, how could anything be better than our 295lbs of tq? Well it turns out, practically everyone. I had no idea how much sketchy-ness goes on at these events. We were rolling on 5 year old, dry rotted all season tires, aired up to 36PSI to keep them from wearing out too fast. Other guys were pulling up in Semis with trailers behind them that had car lifts in the trailer with complete other cars to steal parts from and 4 sets of tires. We did not win overall, or our class, or even one of the prizes, although mostly the prizes are for people who break stuff and we didn't break anything. This lil trooper put up with so much abuse. We raced that 2.75 mile track with 19 turns and 200 ft of elevation change, and we made it around that sucker 200 laps, without a breakdown. We did lose 3 hours to penalties (Thanks Jason and Trey (but not Martin, he got his sh*t together)) While we were penalized we saw the cooling fan computer was acting up and keeping the fan in low, so we hooked up a switch for the fan that bypasses the computer and keeps the fan on Hi to keep her cool. We got 12th out of 20 in our class and 31st overall, we beat 5 BMW's, 2 Porsches, and 2 Mercedes but that's because most of them didn't finish the race and one of the Porsches had a Volvo diesel NA motor in it that was slow as balls. The point is she finished the race and that's a huge deal. Now, YOU can buy her and live out your dream of racing in LeMons! Lets face it, you don't want to shell out all this money to find a car for 500 bucks, and drop 1200 in a roll cage and 800 in safety equipment just to have something stupid break on the car before the second driver even gets a chance to drive. There were 47 cars that entered our race and the last place team didn't even get there, the second to last made 5 laps before sheering a pinion on a homebuilt conversion, the team ahead of them made it 33 laps, and so on. You want a car that can deal with this punishment and allow you to finish so that you don't have to go home to your wife and tell her you didn't get a chance to drive because Jerry blew up your car 30 minutes into the race by exploding the clutch out of the bell housing. Seriously, Jerry, you can't drop the clutch like that at 4k rpm in an 86 corolla with 300k miles! Buy my car! I'm all done pretending to be a racecar driver and now its your turn. Go get em, Jeff Gordon! (Or whoever is fast these days) -She ran all day at 180-190 degrees on the engine, and the trans stayed around 210, oil pressure at hot idle is 25PSI and up at around 75 while at higher RPM -There is a small amount of play in the rear diff and when racing you can hear a slight clunk when it goes from accelerate to decelerate and visa versa. We knew this when we bought it and that was the only problem then and as far as I know, the only problem now, we checked the fluid when we changed it and measured the lash and its still within factory spec (on the high side of allowable play) with zero metals in the fluid so we changed the fluid and left it. It is 3.27 gear ratio with no limited slip.-The tires are toast, they made it through the race, but they wouldn't have gone much more. I have a spare set of tires and wheels included, its the stock T bird ones with 5 year old tires that are about 1/3 worn down-Includes the factory driver seat in case you wanna lame out and not feel awesome-the speedometer doesn't work (these late nineties ford gauges will poop out if you breathe on them wrong during disassembly. The engine temp gauge on the factory cluster is disabled because I installed the better one in the same fitting.-The tach and fuel gauge work-she averaged 15.7 MPG during the race while we flooring it like a bunch of lunatics, it was unreal, we beat every team in fuel economy i think except the Volvo Diesel Porsche-we hit 93MPG on the straight away every time (it has a phone mount and we used a gps speedometer app and track timing app) and she actually drives really well on the street. On the track she was front heavy and needed the rear springs cut one more coil and better shocks in the rear with better tires all the way around. The factory 15" t bird wheels might actually be better to race because they are an inch shorter so they would aide in acceleration. Bring 2 sets of the best tires they allow! You will have more fun.-fun fact, we coulda came in 5th if we didn't lose time on the penalties-still has the front glass, it removes with two 11mm nuts on each side. I wanted it to have windows because it rained the day before the race. The power window regulators still work!-no AC, we cut that nonsense out, and its air sucking condenser from the front was removed-There is a really high end oil based landscape painting on the hood. We received the Bob Ross penalty for going off track (Thanks Jason) and had to paint the local landscape to be allowed back in the race. The hood alone could be worth millions one day-If you read the LeMons website, it sure looks like they take that 500$ limit super seriously, and I had all my paperwork in order to show what I paid for the car, how much all the parts cost, and what I sold to scavenge money, they took one look at her and said "I'll put you in class B" and walked away. Maybe they hassled the Mercs and Beemers that are obviously cheating, but not us. I will include all the paperwork in case you want to race in the LeMons series. FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS AND BUY MY CAR!