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Flying American
We Drive Charlie Kemp's Berserk Mustang
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Charlie Kemp would like to sell you a car like his. Well, not quite just like his, because his is the most bizarre, it-came-from-beneath-the-sea racing car in the whole IMSA GT series. What he would like to sell you is on that looks like his and, knowing that before he was a successful racer he was a successful stockbroker, he should be able to sell a lot of his look-alikes. Charlie Kemp could probably sell suspenders in a nudist colony.
His street car will be built on a new Mustang II, and it will look almost like the racer, handle better than any Mustang II ever did, be the number one tourist attraction in your home town and sell for less than 9000 bucks American. What he will do is buy brand new Mustang IIs, throw away the wheels and tires, all the front end sheet metal and most of the rear, about half of the interior and a good part of the suspension. Then, starting from the inside, he puts on better shocks, front and rear anti-roll bars, stiffer springs, wide wheels and tires, Carrera recliner seats, a leather steering wheel, cocoa mats, trick mirrors, Italian air horns and caps it all off with a replica body of his IMSA racer. For legality the engine (a 302 V-8 mated to a four-speed or automatic), stays stock so if you want the punch to make good on the promise of the shape that is up to you. He will sell it through Ford dealers but if you just can't wait you can contact Traffic Builders, Inc., 2515 Mt. Moriah Road, Memphis, Tennessee 38118, (901) 794-2585.
The car it is based on, the IMSA Mustang II , is in the category of seeing-is-believing. I was built to race in the GT series as an All-American GT, or AAGT, a class for American sporty cars with big V-8s and wild bodywork. The rules were sort of made up for crowd appeal more than anything else, but then the size of the crowd is what pays the freight so the AAGT cars are important parts of the IMSA racing program. The first AAGT cars were modified Chevy Monzas, with roll cage-type frames, racing suspension, 350 cid engines and weird bodywork. But they were at least built out of real cars. Then they started getting to where it was difficult to tell where the stock Monza left off and the race car began, so Charlie Kemp took a long look at the rules and the competition and decided that since the Monzas were really nothing more than just race cars with tops and windows he would build a race car and then put a top and windows on it.
The car that emerged never was a Mustang II. It was a pile of tubing and metal and when they were done they ordered a roof panel, some front and rear body pieces like a grille and taillights, windows and chrome trim to make it look nice, hooked it all together over the race car and went to Daytona. IMSA took one look and said, effectively, "Well Charlie, it sure is nice but what are you gonna do with it, because they stopped the CanAm a long time ago?" Among other things, it had a full belly pan, you couldn't open the doors without taking off the exhausts, there were louvers and scoops all over it, the driving position was closer to the back seat than the front and nobody could find one stock Ford body panel in the whole car. The last was easy; there just weren't any. Finally they sort of invented a class, called it GTX or something, decided the car was the only thing that fit it, and let it race. All for naught as it only made a few laps but at least it was a start for a brand new car that was finished in the Daytona garages. Since then the car has been improving little by little with each race and everywhere it goes it is the number one crowd attraction. It still has problems in handling and braking but for sheer weirdness and excitement nothing can top Charlie Kemp's Mustang II.
One thing it does not lack is horsepower. In its present form with fuel injection it has not been on a dyno, but with just a single four-barrel carburetor it had over 530 horsepower and Kemp says he can get wheelspin out of just about any corner. He may have to go to larger tires in an attempt to get all that urge to the ground.
Another problem is has had is braking. It seems the bias mechanism will not stay put so diving into a corner it may work fine, the fronts may lock or the rears may lock. Take your pick. And it will happen without any prior warning at all, changing from lap to lap and corner to corner. At Ontario this poses a definite problem because the long front straight, where cars like Kemp's should reach 200 mph or more, leads into the narrowest, tightest turn on the whole course, an absurd little decreasing radius left-hander. It is not a place for the driver to have to worry about what the brakes are going to be like this time around. The brakes were going to be fixed for the race but not yet and of course Steve, the mechanic, tells me all of this just as I am crawling in through the side window, along with a stern reminder about the bodywork, something about not wanting to stay up all night fixing fenders.
Down inside of it I am really down inside of it. The seat is practically on the floor (what did you expect, Fuller, it's only a knee-high car) and my legs stick straight out in front. The steering wheel is high and vertical and kind of far away for me, and the shifter is also high (the transmission is level with the right leg), and far away. I'd like to move the seat up but there isn't time for that now, just time to get with it as best as possible and see what happens. And remember the brakes.
It starts right up and I can put it into gear and drive away. The gearbox feels very notchy and stiff, and I learn later, after I've missed a couple of shifts with much aaaarrroooooooobaaa, aaaarrroooooooobaaa, that the gearbox is a Ford Nascar road racing unit and, like Charlie says, "You've got to put it into gear."
Right away I can see a problem. The problem is I can't see. At least not very well. The feeling is that I am surrounded by roll cage and machinery in every direction and I'm sitting so low that I just can't see out of it. I wonder how the car can be driven fast in traffic, when the driver is going as fast as he can and has cars all around him besides. Maybe the secret with the Kemp Mustang II is that you should only have to worry about those in front of you, the ones you are about to pass, because the ones to the sides and rear will soon cease to be a problem. But as it is, with the incredibly dump nature of the Ontario road course which is like a flat road on an open prairie and totally devoid of any markings for reference, it is a chore just to find your way around the place and keep it somewhere near the line.
But man, oh man, does the car have some punch. Once I get it straightened out the throttle goes down and the low white car just gets down to the next corner in a big hurry. It is very fast. I nail it hard once on the front straight and it thunders past the start/finish line, the engine pulling strong, clean and hard and the exhaust noise bouncing back off the wall to follow the car all along the first turn. It must be going well over 150 (it still has the Laguna gearing in it from the week before and so will not touch the 200 it will need on race day), and the gray fence posts lining the track are becoming a solid gray blur. Screaming along, the car has really good directional stability, much better than I had expected, and it doesn't move from its intended path as it is aimed for that invisible point on the prairie of Ontario that is the braking area for Turn One. How they are all going to funnel into that space on the first lap on race day is unknown, because out here all by myself and with a monstrous runoff area it still looks awfully crowded. And still, all the way down the straight, the engine just pulls and pulls and pulls; this is a race car that separates the talkers from the doers.
In fact, in the IMSA GT series the name of the game is becoming horsepower and speed. Charlie Kemp's Mustang II is almost a lesson in itself in what IMSA racing is all about, because nowhere else would something this outlandish be allowed on a track.
After a few - too few - times around, Kemp, looking a little paternalistically concerned, waves me in. I consider taking one more cool off lap but hen he wasn't holding up one finger but his whole hand. (Maybe I should have taken five more laps.) Instead I just stop at the end of the straight and turn it around back to the pit area. Over the din of the idling engine they are trying to direct me where to put the car but I can't hear any of it and can't find reverse so finally, in desperation, Kemp reaches in and shuts it off. The he tells me reverse is locked out. I kind of crawl/clamber/squirm/fall out of it, not nearly as gracefully as in the commercials, and wonder if he's ticked due to the audible missed shifts (I know I didn't break anything but maybe he isn't so sure.) Then he tells me about the gearbox and shows the bruises on his hand from all the shifting at Laguna Seca. So it's okay. It's always nice to bring someone's race car back to them in a pretty close approximation of the condition is was in when you took it out.
Where all this will end no one knows. With IMSA making rather loosely interpreted rules the Kemp car was only a matter of time and now a few competitors are starting to balk, saying there has to be a line somewhere. Charlie Kemp just happened to be a little more creative with the rules book than most so we see no reason to penalize him for that. On the other hand, the logical extension of the Kemp Mustang II is to go buy an old McLaren and put a roof on it. What will probably happen is that the line will be drawn right about where the Kemp Mustang II is now because things could get out of hand.
But so what. IMSA has never disagreed that the show must go on, and most of the IMSA racers have a realistic outlook on the value of the paying spectators arriving in droves on Sunday to pay for all the fun. Nobody, not even Charlie Kemp, ever said his car was pretty, but when it comes to packing in the house for the races that crazy Mustang II is one of the premier crowd draws, and in IMSA that's what counts.
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