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A fingernail and a heat gun would have been all you needed to convert this goofy little car into the ultimate street fighter in 1972. Heck, if Randall AMC were willing to install headers and a hi-rise, I can almost guarantee they’d be willing to leave out the decal package.
Anything and everything was a jerry can, and most doubled as a fire hazard. There were old bleach bottles, water jugs, lawn and leaf bags, and my personal favourite, the bed of a pickup with a blue tarp liner like an explosive rolling party pool.
Eventually, the taps got turned on, and the world had gasoline again, but the pictures and videos showcasing the panicked hoarding remain. This isn’t the first time the world was going to run out of gas, though, not even close. Back in the seventies, the world was also going to run out of gas. It was mostly due to an OPEC embargo that cut off supply, but that did lead to shortages in North America for a period of time. It was around that very same time that horsepower took it on the chin. Big engines no longer made big power. Some V8’s being reduced to numbers that a six-cylinder put out only a few years earlier. Insurance companies didn’t like the big horsepower, and some bigwigs at the car companies were on side with them. Add to that the fact that catalytic converters were coming into play, and emissions control was the law, and it was all over. It’s a funny thing, though, as many of the low-performance engines of the seventies actually used more fuel than their earlier, stronger counterparts. Was it really about the oil shortage if more fuel was being burned? Was it really about the environment if more fuel was being burned? Of course not, it was always about legislation and liability, and the fear that “they’re just afraid some of us might be having too good a time,” to quote Randall “Pink” Floyd from Dazed and Confused. In 1972, a year before the big fuel shortage, AMC tried to have one last good time and threw a party that only twenty-one people showed up. Don’t worry about tapping that second keg. The Gremlin 401-XR isn’t attracting a crowd.
I’d honestly never heard of it before I stumbled onto an old black-and-white promo shot. I knew the Gremlin was available with 304 V8 power in 1972, and I knew the 304 and 401 were the same physical dimensions, but I never knew that there was a dealership that actually did the swap and sold the cars new, especially so late in the performance game. Basically, what Randall AMC in Mesa, Arizona, gave you was a Gremlin X with a couple of new badges and an extra one-hundred-and-five horsepower. They say you can feel an increase of ten horsepower, so the 401-XR was like a Gremlin X that was shot out of a cannon. Priced under three-grand US and weighing under three-thousand pounds, it ran the quarter-mile in under fourteen seconds, so around one-hundred miles-per-hour. That’s quick, but if you opted for the four-speed manual transmission, Twin Grip differential, hi-rise intake, headers, and better cam, a full second could be pulled off that time real easy. Only twenty-one were ever sold, but honestly, a tribute car could be built even better with modern performance technology, you know, if a fast Gremlin is up your alley.
Have a question or comment for Kelly? Post it at lmtimes.ca/kirk
