IMPPY HACK

Story and Photos by Cliff Gromer
6/8/05

t was an incredible idea, really. But, in all honesty, it wasn't my idea, see. Truth is, I ripped it off from Hot Rod magazine--their February, '87 issue, to be exact. Their story, titled “Caddy Hack,” by Pat Ganahl, was brilliant in its conception—-and execution. It graphically demonstrated that reducing a car's weight was the same as increasing its horsepower, in that the bottom line was the same: the car would be quicker and faster.

Hot Rod's physics class experiment approach to the subject was to take a stone stock, near 7000-pound 1970 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, lop off some excess baggage (roof, doors, fenders etc.) to the tune of 4000 pounds and, without so much as changing a spark­plug, realize a 4-second reduction in quarter-mile E.T. with a corresponding 20-mph increase in trap speed. Free horsepower indeed!

Actually, the whole idea was so cool, and the prospect of aggravated car abuse so appealing to the sick side of my nature, that I couldn't resist doing it myself. But, being a Mopar freak, I wanted to go with the Pentastar brand. As it turned out, I learned a lot more than a Hot Rod physics lesson.

In stock trim, the car tipped the E-town scales at 4700 lbs. Hubcaps alone were good for 60 pounds. Stock Imp triggered the lights at 17.2 seconds at 81 mph in the quarter mile.

First off, I needed a car -- a Mopar with body-on-frame construction. I came up with a totally complete, near-pristine original 40,000-mile 1964 Imperial 4-door sedan, that the owner let me have because I promised to give it “a good home.” I flatbedded the beast to our local track (Englishtown, Raceway Park), spread out the article in Hot Rod for reference, and went to work.

The Imperial, laying dormant for years, had a bad trans leak to the tune of a quart every two minutes. But, my partner in crime, Mopar Action’s tech headitor, Rick “E-Booger” Ehrenberg, cured the leak in short order with the used car dealer and tranny shop's best friend: brakefluid! One 12-ounce can of the stuff poured down the trans filler tube, and within two minutes, the leak was history.We were ready to get serious.

Hot Rod had painted their Caddy with clever graphics. So E-Booger painted the Imp with clever graphics. Hot Rod came up with a full crew to hack their Caddy to pieces with a carbide saw that sliced easily through the thin GM tin. Zip, zip, zip -- and the Caddy was down to its bare chassis, to provide a 13.55 ET/ 100.83 mph ride through the traps. We came with the Booger, Tony "Strong Man" Crecco and a car-friendly arsenal that included an electric carbide saw and a fully charged oxyacetylene torch setup. But while HR's Caddy melted away like baloney in a deli slicer, dismembering the Imp was like trying to carve up bricks with a butter knife.

The first thing we did was throw the Imp on the scales to record a starting weight of 4700 pounds. Then we established our baseline quarter mile time of 17.21 sec. @ 81.05 mph. Then we revved up our saw and lit the torch. Surprise, surprise! Even the know-it-all tech headitor was shocked. Maybe the fact that these cars are banned from demolition derbies should have told us something. This Imperial was as close to a 2-ton truck as you could get and still be a passenger car. Everything on the car was double-triple oversize. Frame rails were 1/4-inch thick steel. The roof and all the other body panels were double-thick, double wall steel. We didn't need a carbide saw, we needed nitroglycerine.

The roof finally yielded after removal of the rear glass, torching, sawing and swinging the top up and down about 100 times to fatigue the header metal.

Torching the roof set the interior afire, and we were ill-prepared to handle the situation without water or a fire extinguisher. "Close the windows," said the wise tech editor, with the torch still burning in his hand, "so the fire won't get any oxygen."

The fire did burn itself out -- all except for an eternal flame deep within the foam rubber bowels of the driver's seat. No amount of dousing with a water hose could extinguish it, and E-Booger had to make runs sitting on the Imp's spare tire cover to keep from toasting his tush.