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crxforum · 09-01-2004, 07:32 PM

This was posted on another forum on the 30th of July of this year. So when I say tonight etc it happened then. Be prepared to read.

Tonight at about 7pm I get a call from my old boss Todd that a local glass guy, Carl, is stopping by the bodyshop and that I should come over. Carl works freelance to replace automotive glass in cars since he retired from working at a local glass place. So I get in my CRX and head over.

I get there at about 7:30pm or so and notice something at the shop I have never seen before. Sitting on a trailer beside the shop is a White Shelby Mustang GT500. Yes that is Elenore from Gone in 60 Seconds if you didnt know. I get out greeted by Todd and Carl. The car is Carls and he brought it over for Todd to have a look at because it was idling really rough. He said that at the start of the month he just took it out of 2 years of storage and that he had no idea what it could be because it ran fine before it was place in there. The car was shaking hard. Alot worse then the normal tremble of the powerfull engine.

Todd heads up to the house to answer the telephone and me and carl start to talk about his car. We get onto the topic that there was a show on satellite the other night about Shelby Mustangs and he said he saw it and we talked about the episode for like 10 min. Then we get onto the problem with his car. It was shaking so bad that he brought it over for Todd to check out and in return he would do some work on the windows on the cars that needed new glass that were in the shop or something to that extent.

Todd comes back out after 20 min and tells us that he needs to head into town and pick up a compressor and that he would be back in 40 min if we didn’t mind waiting. So we said that would be fine and Todd headed out. I start the conversation with Carl again about his car and he decided that the only way to explain it was to show me. So we get in the car and back it off the trailer. He puts the gas down and the car just roars to life with power. Never being in one of these cars before there was no experience on my part to tell if the car was sounding or shaking like it should or not. So Carl came to the conclusion, since we had a while of time to kill, that the best way to show me the problem was to take out for a spin. This is where it gets interesting.

We get off of the back roads and head onto the local 2 lane country highway and get her going. We get to about 60MPH and you could tell when he shifted that there was something wrong with the car for sure. Even me with my tourgueless wonder CRX could tell that there was something not quite right. It shook very strangely.

We pull into a gas station and Carl starts to tell me about the car. His brother bought the car brand new in 1967 and had it shipped to him in Alberta. In 1978 his brother was having some really bad financial problems so Carl bought the car off of him to help him out and shipped it to Ontario.

Carl popped the hood and let it run. He told me that it was being really nice for some reason and not acting as bad as it was before. So bad infact that he trailered it over because he didn’t want anything to happen when he was on the road driving. I started back to my door on the passengers side as Carl closed the hood up. Carl turned to me just as I was opening the door and said, “You know the only way you will be able to grasp what Im trying to explain to you about the problem is if you are behind the wheel. How about getting in behind the wheel and feel some real power for once?”

I instantly accepted this once in a lifetime opportunity, who wouldn’t, and ran over to the drivers side and got in the car. I placed my feet on the pedals and could feel the surge of power throughout my whole body. It was amazing. Way more, almost infinitesimally more, than my CRX, and considerably more than my Z28 with the 350.

I put her in reverse and watched as the light from the gas station flowed across the dash and illuminated the Carol Shelby signature. Carl proceeded to reach over the radio and turn it on. Raised the volume to Sweet Home Alabama and we were off.

I placed her in gear and headed back out on the highway. The car was more than I ever expected. So much power at ones fingertips was a rush. It was definitely something special for sure. Carl told me that I needed to speed up to hear what was going on with the engine. We had Sweet Home Alabama blasting so hard that I think that he just wanted to go faster and see if I would be able to handle it. So I sped up to 50MPH. Carl then proceeded to make a motion like and old person with a walked which I took as go faster. I sped up to about 70MPH and he stopped the old man with the walked motion and did down the window and closed his eyes. This is when all hell broke loose………

At about 3500RPM the GT500 became one on its own. Without warning it decided that it didn’t like to be driven and that it would like to drive itself. The RPMs instantly started to climb. They flew past the redline and started to pin out, violently shaking back and forth, because they had non other place to go. Carl instantly opened his eyes and asked me what was going on. Still perplexed myself I didn’t answer. The car started to speed up at a remarkable rate of speed. The speedometer climber higher and higher, 75, 85, 95, 100, 110, 120, 125MPH. I had no control of the car at all.

I get on the clutch but we are not slowing down fast enough. The car is still pinning out at full RPMs and screaming down the 2 lane highway. The after market temp gauge started to climb as we blasted down the road. I noticed infront of us the taillights of a car. The car was shaking so badly and the whole speed of the situation make it impossible to indentify the car infront of us. It was starting to get dark and all you could see was the red in the taillights and everything else was a blurr. I don’t know how to explain it other then in Fast and the Furious (I know fuck that movie) when they hit the NAWZ button and everything goes blurry.

The taillight were fast approaching. The clutch was not slowing us down enough to avod it and we were still going like 118MPH so slamming on the breaks would certainly mean a crash. Carl at this point is screaming at me, “What the hell are you doing?!?!?!” I respond with “NOTHING!!” and proceed to take my feet off the pedals and stomp them on the floor to prove to him that I officially have no control over the speed of the car. This was a stupid thing on my part because during the stomping the car accelerated again to about 130MPH.

With about 1 second to spare I decided that the only thing to do was to take it on the soft gravel shoulder and hope for the best. With pure luck I managed to miss the car by about 2” and swung to the right on the shoulder. I somehow managed to get her straight and blast by and pull back out onto the pavement infront of the car like it never was in the way. Then thinking that this situation couldn’t get any worse some a side road I see something that I loathe more than anything in my entire life. Red and Blue lights proceeded to turn on and pull out behind us on the road as we are on our out of control trip. The lights were gone within seconds but then re appeared within about 10 seconds and were within a few cars in about 30 seconds. So now Im thinking to myself, “Well Im really fucked now. I have a car that is speeding out of control. Im going about 110MPH on the road with a cop trying to pull me over, but I cant because the car wont slow down. Im going to jail WTF am I going to do.”

I then remember that most of these cars you can just turn off at any time and kill the engine by taking out the keys and then cost to a stop. So guess what I proceeded to do so. Well it just got a hell of a lot worse from there on. When I removed the keys out of the ignition the steering wheel locked up and I drop the keys on the floor. I now had no control of where the car was headed. The highway that we were on had soft shoulders and that means that over the years the road starts to bow slanting from center out to the shoulder making the car gradually turn to the left.

Carl looks over at me, looks at the cop behind us, and then back at me and looks ahead dropping his jaw. On the right side of the road there is a little bridge, maybe about 2 cars long. Its some obscure little creek with no name. Anyways there is a metal guard rail on it for protection and now that we have no steering on a car still going over 100MPH out of control slowly turning directly into the path of the rail. About it hit it dead on. I did the only thing that I could do. I grabbed the wheel with both hands and horsed it down as hard as I could to break the column and get it over to the left to avoid catastrophe. Carl sees what I am doing and grabs onto the wheel. With the combined strength of a 21 year old and a 62 year old we managed to snap the column somehow and the car spun out of control to the left.

Spinning out of control not being able to establish a bearing on where we even were facing other then when the cops lights flew past I remembered the time I spun out my CRX avoiding some deer that ran out in front of me a year ago. It was almost the same other than we were going 3X faster and rotating about 5X more then I did in my CRX.

The car flew across the other lane of traffic and bounced off a guard rail on the other side of the highway and came to rest about 250’ from where we started. The scream of tires, siren, Carl, and old school American Rock and Roll were still bouncing around in my head when the officer approached the car. He started to scream to us to get out of the car. I opened my door and did so and so did Carl. I caught a view of the front of the car where it impacted with the guard rail and surprisingly with all the speed and action that was going on it was not that badly damaged for the impact we went through. The cop cuffed me and Carl and asked us what was going on.

Within 5 min there were about 15 cars stopped on the road to check out what was going on with the Shelby in the middle of the highway. We talked to the cops and explained what was going on and he said he believed us because he found it funny that the car stopped screaming down the road and turned off for no apparent reason. We went to the police station and filled out a report and Todd came and picked us up and we told him about the whole story.
We are not going to be in trouble at all. The car is not totaled which is great and it was towed back to my old work and put back on the trailer and Carl took it back to storage so that he would be able to work on it.

Do you want to know what caused this whole ordeal?

Well believe it or not it was an engine mount. Back then when American manufacturers made motor mounts they were pure rubber (or urethane or something that is like a rubber compound) with only little metal tabs on the end. Not like todays where there is a metal rod in there for safety incase a mount does break. Anyways the mount snapped and the motor dropped in the engine bay. This caused the weight of the motor to pull on the throttle cable so that the car was at full throttle with no way for me to stop it at all.

The funny thing is that after the whole thing was over I asked Carl about the steering locking up after I removed the key. He said that he replaced the steering column to a reproduction with new safety features in 1997 because his insurance company advised him to after an attempt to steal the car failed.

So ya that’s what happened. Everyone is fine. The car will be ok. Any another chapter to add to the book Im writing.

CRX Forum

09-01-2004, 07:32 PM	#20 (permalink)
crxforum Crazy	This was posted on another forum on the 30th of July of this year. So when I say tonight etc it happened then. Be prepared to read. Tonight at about 7pm I get a call from my old boss Todd that a local glass guy, Carl, is stopping by the bodyshop and that I should come over. Carl works freelance to replace automotive glass in cars since he retired from working at a local glass place. So I get in my CRX and head over. I get there at about 7:30pm or so and notice something at the shop I have never seen before. Sitting on a trailer beside the shop is a White Shelby Mustang GT500. Yes that is Elenore from Gone in 60 Seconds if you didnt know. I get out greeted by Todd and Carl. The car is Carls and he brought it over for Todd to have a look at because it was idling really rough. He said that at the start of the month he just took it out of 2 years of storage and that he had no idea what it could be because it ran fine before it was place in there. The car was shaking hard. Alot worse then the normal tremble of the powerfull engine. Todd heads up to the house to answer the telephone and me and carl start to talk about his car. We get onto the topic that there was a show on satellite the other night about Shelby Mustangs and he said he saw it and we talked about the episode for like 10 min. Then we get onto the problem with his car. It was shaking so bad that he brought it over for Todd to check out and in return he would do some work on the windows on the cars that needed new glass that were in the shop or something to that extent. Todd comes back out after 20 min and tells us that he needs to head into town and pick up a compressor and that he would be back in 40 min if we didn’t mind waiting. So we said that would be fine and Todd headed out. I start the conversation with Carl again about his car and he decided that the only way to explain it was to show me. So we get in the car and back it off the trailer. He puts the gas down and the car just roars to life with power. Never being in one of these cars before there was no experience on my part to tell if the car was sounding or shaking like it should or not. So Carl came to the conclusion, since we had a while of time to kill, that the best way to show me the problem was to take out for a spin. This is where it gets interesting. We get off of the back roads and head onto the local 2 lane country highway and get her going. We get to about 60MPH and you could tell when he shifted that there was something wrong with the car for sure. Even me with my tourgueless wonder CRX could tell that there was something not quite right. It shook very strangely. We pull into a gas station and Carl starts to tell me about the car. His brother bought the car brand new in 1967 and had it shipped to him in Alberta. In 1978 his brother was having some really bad financial problems so Carl bought the car off of him to help him out and shipped it to Ontario. Carl popped the hood and let it run. He told me that it was being really nice for some reason and not acting as bad as it was before. So bad infact that he trailered it over because he didn’t want anything to happen when he was on the road driving. I started back to my door on the passengers side as Carl closed the hood up. Carl turned to me just as I was opening the door and said, “You know the only way you will be able to grasp what Im trying to explain to you about the problem is if you are behind the wheel. How about getting in behind the wheel and feel some real power for once?” I instantly accepted this once in a lifetime opportunity, who wouldn’t, and ran over to the drivers side and got in the car. I placed my feet on the pedals and could feel the surge of power throughout my whole body. It was amazing. Way more, almost infinitesimally more, than my CRX, and considerably more than my Z28 with the 350. I put her in reverse and watched as the light from the gas station flowed across the dash and illuminated the Carol Shelby signature. Carl proceeded to reach over the radio and turn it on. Raised the volume to Sweet Home Alabama and we were off. I placed her in gear and headed back out on the highway. The car was more than I ever expected. So much power at ones fingertips was a rush. It was definitely something special for sure. Carl told me that I needed to speed up to hear what was going on with the engine. We had Sweet Home Alabama blasting so hard that I think that he just wanted to go faster and see if I would be able to handle it. So I sped up to 50MPH. Carl then proceeded to make a motion like and old person with a walked which I took as go faster. I sped up to about 70MPH and he stopped the old man with the walked motion and did down the window and closed his eyes. This is when all hell broke loose……… At about 3500RPM the GT500 became one on its own. Without warning it decided that it didn’t like to be driven and that it would like to drive itself. The RPMs instantly started to climb. They flew past the redline and started to pin out, violently shaking back and forth, because they had non other place to go. Carl instantly opened his eyes and asked me what was going on. Still perplexed myself I didn’t answer. The car started to speed up at a remarkable rate of speed. The speedometer climber higher and higher, 75, 85, 95, 100, 110, 120, 125MPH. I had no control of the car at all. I get on the clutch but we are not slowing down fast enough. The car is still pinning out at full RPMs and screaming down the 2 lane highway. The after market temp gauge started to climb as we blasted down the road. I noticed infront of us the taillights of a car. The car was shaking so badly and the whole speed of the situation make it impossible to indentify the car infront of us. It was starting to get dark and all you could see was the red in the taillights and everything else was a blurr. I don’t know how to explain it other then in Fast and the Furious (I know fuck that movie) when they hit the NAWZ button and everything goes blurry. The taillight were fast approaching. The clutch was not slowing us down enough to avod it and we were still going like 118MPH so slamming on the breaks would certainly mean a crash. Carl at this point is screaming at me, “What the hell are you doing?!?!?!” I respond with “NOTHING!!” and proceed to take my feet off the pedals and stomp them on the floor to prove to him that I officially have no control over the speed of the car. This was a stupid thing on my part because during the stomping the car accelerated again to about 130MPH. With about 1 second to spare I decided that the only thing to do was to take it on the soft gravel shoulder and hope for the best. With pure luck I managed to miss the car by about 2” and swung to the right on the shoulder. I somehow managed to get her straight and blast by and pull back out onto the pavement infront of the car like it never was in the way. Then thinking that this situation couldn’t get any worse some a side road I see something that I loathe more than anything in my entire life. Red and Blue lights proceeded to turn on and pull out behind us on the road as we are on our out of control trip. The lights were gone within seconds but then re appeared within about 10 seconds and were within a few cars in about 30 seconds. So now Im thinking to myself, “Well Im really fucked now. I have a car that is speeding out of control. Im going about 110MPH on the road with a cop trying to pull me over, but I cant because the car wont slow down. Im going to jail WTF am I going to do.” I then remember that most of these cars you can just turn off at any time and kill the engine by taking out the keys and then cost to a stop. So guess what I proceeded to do so. Well it just got a hell of a lot worse from there on. When I removed the keys out of the ignition the steering wheel locked up and I drop the keys on the floor. I now had no control of where the car was headed. The highway that we were on had soft shoulders and that means that over the years the road starts to bow slanting from center out to the shoulder making the car gradually turn to the left. Carl looks over at me, looks at the cop behind us, and then back at me and looks ahead dropping his jaw. On the right side of the road there is a little bridge, maybe about 2 cars long. Its some obscure little creek with no name. Anyways there is a metal guard rail on it for protection and now that we have no steering on a car still going over 100MPH out of control slowly turning directly into the path of the rail. About it hit it dead on. I did the only thing that I could do. I grabbed the wheel with both hands and horsed it down as hard as I could to break the column and get it over to the left to avoid catastrophe. Carl sees what I am doing and grabs onto the wheel. With the combined strength of a 21 year old and a 62 year old we managed to snap the column somehow and the car spun out of control to the left. Spinning out of control not being able to establish a bearing on where we even were facing other then when the cops lights flew past I remembered the time I spun out my CRX avoiding some deer that ran out in front of me a year ago. It was almost the same other than we were going 3X faster and rotating about 5X more then I did in my CRX. The car flew across the other lane of traffic and bounced off a guard rail on the other side of the highway and came to rest about 250’ from where we started. The scream of tires, siren, Carl, and old school American Rock and Roll were still bouncing around in my head when the officer approached the car. He started to scream to us to get out of the car. I opened my door and did so and so did Carl. I caught a view of the front of the car where it impacted with the guard rail and surprisingly with all the speed and action that was going on it was not that badly damaged for the impact we went through. The cop cuffed me and Carl and asked us what was going on. Within 5 min there were about 15 cars stopped on the road to check out what was going on with the Shelby in the middle of the highway. We talked to the cops and explained what was going on and he said he believed us because he found it funny that the car stopped screaming down the road and turned off for no apparent reason. We went to the police station and filled out a report and Todd came and picked us up and we told him about the whole story. We are not going to be in trouble at all. The car is not totaled which is great and it was towed back to my old work and put back on the trailer and Carl took it back to storage so that he would be able to work on it. Do you want to know what caused this whole ordeal? Well believe it or not it was an engine mount. Back then when American manufacturers made motor mounts they were pure rubber (or urethane or something that is like a rubber compound) with only little metal tabs on the end. Not like todays where there is a metal rod in there for safety incase a mount does break. Anyways the mount snapped and the motor dropped in the engine bay. This caused the weight of the motor to pull on the throttle cable so that the car was at full throttle with no way for me to stop it at all. The funny thing is that after the whole thing was over I asked Carl about the steering locking up after I removed the key. He said that he replaced the steering column to a reproduction with new safety features in 1997 because his insurance company advised him to after an attempt to steal the car failed. So ya that’s what happened. Everyone is fine. The car will be ok. Any another chapter to add to the book Im writing. CRX Forum