Joined: Wed Aug 11 2010, 10:15AM
Location: E WA
Posts: 1230
Krautmaster wrote ... Oh Yeah, the '69 Fury CHP Police Pursuit with the ''special" 440 - they would do 149 mph right from the factory before we even tinkered with them....
I had a friend in High School in the late 70s whose father was a Superintendent in the RCMP in BC Canada. The dad could get his pick of cop cars when they were done with them. I think that it was a 1974 Fury he bought that my friend said he had upto 145 mph on the certified speedo. dad helped with the tickets too.
Krautmaster wrote ... Oh Yeah, the '69 Fury/Polara CHP Police Pursuits with the ''special" 440 - they would do 149 mph right from the factory before we even tinkered with them.
The patrol men used to tell us the story about when officer Storment caught a hemi powered Super Bee that blew past him going about 150 mph while he was eating his lunch on the side of the road. Storment was clocked by airplane at just a shade over 165 mph during the 30 mile chase--that was one bad ass car.
We never knew just how much power that thing was putting out because our dyno was done by 550 hp and that one went right off the end of the dial. (Most of the CHP "special" engines we had were over 500 hp out of the crate.) Correct..... and here's an awesome specimen that has been restored. http://www.hemmings.com/mus/stories/2007/05/01/hmn_feature15.html You's have to read this story.They even took one out to one of the SoCal drag strips and ripped off a 14.3 @ 99 mph. Now you gotta put that in perspective. A bare bones RR w/ 440 4 bbl or 6bbl was in that territory and the Polara weighed a whole lot more than a RR. The 149.55 mph was reached at the Chrysler test track in Chelsea,MI. This was on radar. These were the only cars to get special treatment in the way they were built. I have seen a 69' Polara Fire chiefs car also on E-bay a few years ago w/375hp/440 although i don't know if the fire marshals or the FBI cars got the same balancing and blueprinting that the CHP cars got. Kraut will know that also as he built those engines.
Joined: Thu Mar 01 2007, 09:30PM
Location: Houston
Posts: 1735
Well...cop cars are surrounded in a lot of BS all their own.
Yes, the Mopars were well know to be the fastest. But let's be honest....blueprinting is only going to do so much for you. And cops...well, they are driving cars they don't own and don't care about.
We all know the normal 5 qt oil system is not going to hold up for a 30 mile, 6,000RPM run. And I'll bet if you ran the numbers you'd find a tremendous amount of HP is needed to push a 4800lbs vehicle with no aero work at 165MPH.
gregcon wrote ... Well...cop cars are surrounded in a lot of BS all their own.
Yes, the Mopars were well know to be the fastest. But let's be honest....blueprinting is only going to do so much for you. And cops...well, they are driving cars they don't own and don't care about.
We all know the normal 5 qt oil system is not going to hold up for a 30 mile, 6,000RPM run. And I'll bet if you ran the numbers you'd find a tremendous amount of HP is needed to push a 4800lbs vehicle with no aero work at 165MPH.
No big block cop car I ever worked on ran on 5 quarts of oil - usually ran 6 1/2 with the worked over oiling system. Also, these engines had a much hotter cam than the "magnum" grind to go along with the balancing and blue printing, fully grooved bearings, etc. All in all they were a really well made engine capable of making tremendous power. The biggest limiting factor was the exhaust manifolds, but that was overcome on a couple of of the cars with a set of B body headers and a BFH.
Back before the oil embargo of '73 drove the price of gas through the roof and parked most of the cars, we had a big budget. With only 15 cars to maintain in our shop (we only had 70 patrol officers in the whole state) we were allowed to "experiment" with many of the cars. Lots of other state agencies did the same thing-especially in the deep South. We heard they had some flat out Nascar type of stuff in their cars down in Georgia. There was a lot more custom work done to these cars than people know - things like the "handling bar" bolted to the trunk floor near the back seat, which was basically a long pipe we filled 1/2 way up with mercury to keep the car flat in corners (try getting that past the EPA today). All of our hot pursuits were plain jane stripped down cars without A/C, and anything extra we could think off was stripped out too - removing the window regulators and holding the back windows up with pieces of pine. Many times the "specials" were used at road blocks in case anyone tried to run them, or turned around to run away -but not many stood a chance.....
Theoretically, the car could have gone that fast - with the 2.94 gears our high speed pursuits used, 165 mph came in at a bit over 5800 rpm, which was well within the sustainable rpm range of the special engines (6500 rpm was the limit before the wrist pins tried to pull themselves out of the pistons). Horsepower would need to be around 600, again very possible. All that being said, all of us mechanics though it was just a good story... a 150 mph chase was much more realistic. But if anybody could have done it, Officer Storment was the guy... he was a little fellow with a big attitude, and he always got the fastest cars because he was the best driver hands down - fearless by all accounts. He would bring his car into the shop and say "Rig, this thing will only do 145 - fix it!"
All of the fun stopped abruptly in '74 when our budget was slashed so much we didn't have any extra money to do more than routine maintenance. The last really fast car we had, a '72 Polara, was sold off at auction in early '75, and all the new cars we got were left the way they came from the factory: slow - most were 400's with a few 360's thrown in the mix. The officers were limited to only 2,000 miles a month, so most of the time the cars sat at the side of the road doing nothing. Then the ridiculous 55 mph speed limit came out, and there would be no more "hot'' cop cars again until the 90's.
Fire chiefs got regular old 440 HP's, and if I remember correctly, most FBI guys used Ford Galaxy 500's - they didn't chase speeders anyway, they just set up spike strips further down the road and cleaned up the mess after the wreck!
<span class='smallblacktext'>[ Edited Fri Dec 10 2010, 02:49AM ]</span>
Joined: Thu May 01 2008, 11:15AM
Location: Chicago,IL
Posts: 2868
So Kraut, to attain the HP you guys got on your dyno, the heads on these engines must have come from Ma with a good deal of port work already? Interested in hearing more about the 'special' touches. I'd think the stock intake maybe needed to come breathed on as well?
Joined: Thu Mar 01 2007, 09:30PM
Location: Houston
Posts: 1735
Well, I was referring to stock cop cars.
But still, 600HP out of a 70's vintage 440 means lots of lumpy parts. I have a hard time imagining a cop car idling 18 hours with the AC on in Drive with a .600 lift cam.
The skepticism is fair enough from those that haven't experienced it first hand.
Let me try again to dispel it!
My 66 Monaco 440 4 speed car has one of those "cop car 440 motors" in it, specifically a Canadian RCMP 440. The original owner worked for the dealership that sold him the car in 1966. He special ordered the car with a hemi, (the dealership should not have taken the order), but it was delivered with the RCMP issue 440 instead (apparently the factory reps thought it was going to be a police-chief's car or something like that, but were not prepared to put the hemi in it because the 440 would be more reliable and faster. They figured they were actually doing the guy a favour. Remember, this was when things that supposedly weren't available could be "made available" to the right people).
The original owner was ticked off when the car came in, and wasn't going to take it. He was told by his boss that "this motor is what we put in cars to catch a@@holes like you with hemis. Take it for a drive, and if you don't like it, we've got a line up of people who will take it off our hands". He took it out for a test drive, came back, change his pants (his words! ) and took the car home.
It idles fairly smoothly, and would easily handle AC and extended idling if so equipped (with the proper cooling system). It has what looks like stock manifolds both intake and exhaust, (at least they look stock from the outside), and is indistinguishable from a standard issue 440 to the layman.
However..... it has more power than I know what to do with. A number of years ago I had it up to 120 mph and it was still accellerating HARD, but I didn't have the stones to keep it going.
It is quite literally the fastest car I've ever driven bar none, and from the original owners personal assertion, it scared the pants off him the first time he drove it.
USS 300 here on the board has personal experience trying to catch me on the on-ramps while on our way to Moparfest last year. He was behind me in his 440 TNT equipped 68 300, and said he was into his gas pedal full, in passing gear, and I was accellerating away from him like he was going backwards. His friend Leo was with me for a couple of those blasts.
I've had people try to reach for the $20 taped to the glass. No one has been able to grab it while the car is accellerating.
I can matt the pedal in first gear at 20 miles per hour and it will break loose without even breaking a sweat. Here's the evidence:
What can I say? This is with stock ignition, (points), original carb, and no work done to the motor except the heads were given a valve job by the previous owner to me. I would conservatively estimate 425 + horsepower, with no other proof than seat of the pants experience.
I keep repeating this story the board here when this topic comes up because I own the living proof that these motors existed, and the cars are scary fast.
<span class='smallblacktext'>[ Edited Sat Dec 11 2010, 03:47AM ]</span>
gregcon wrote ... Well, I was referring to stock cop cars.
But still, 600HP out of a 70's vintage 440 means lots of lumpy parts. I have a hard time imagining a cop car idling 18 hours with the AC on in Drive with a .600 lift cam.
No A/C on these cars, no idling by roadside because on a hot day they would overheat after an hour of doing that. Cam's were from Crane, IIRC 300/310 @.550"- idled like crap, barely enough vacuum to run power brakes. The engines were ordered from the industrial division and the invoices that came with them said ''Max Wedge Phase III" -I think they were about $3k each too (crazy money back in 1970). They were .030 over bored and the heads had big ports with deep cuts down into the bowls to open them up. The ports were nearly perfectly matched, but we finished blending everything ourselves.
Remember that Mopar had their own factory Nascar teams and hired drivers for them, not very many independent owners back then (except for Petty-he did his own stuff and won a lot too). Some of the parts on these engines may have come from that program-especially the heads.
JazzandMopar guy---your engine has way more than 425 horsepower--a 440 six pack had more than that (the factory rated them very low, same way they did the street hemi which put out closer to 550 hp than the claimed 425) <span class='smallblacktext'>[ Edited Sat Dec 11 2010, 12:56PM ]</span>