The Origins of Project FrankenPinto

This little car that has become such a huge part of our lives, and will continue to do so to help us remember Brian, was originally a joke. Brian’s joke. We both already had begun our subscriptions to Grassroots Motorsports and had learned to share our love of cars. Brian had already pushed me further in playing with cars than I ever had. We began a fateful series of “What If?” conversations regarding their still-young Challenge event. The premise is that they wanted to prove you could have fun with a car without spending a fortune and set a total budget cap of the current year. This was in 2004, so you had $2004 to spend.

Brian came up with the concept of what would be the Most Wrong car to hot rod. We both agreed that the maligned Ford Pinto would be an excellent candidate. Usually that’s as far as one of these sessions would go, but not with Brian. He started looking on Craigslist as I recall and located a promising example in Lancaster. He contacted the owner and we arranged to drive out to take a look. Juli basically said “Bye boys, have fun” figuring we would have a nice drive together, see the rusty wreck and run screaming back home. How wrong she was.

Once we arrived, we saw a pretty rough-looking car already relieved of it’s interior sitting in a gravel lot. I had a junky dune buggy seat set in the normal driver’s seating position. It had a 4-point roll bar set in the car. It had a BMW carburetor set in the proper location on the stock Ford 4-cylinder engine (I no longer recall if it was the 2.0 or 2.3–it didn’t matter, we had plans that did not involve it). It also had a bizarre assortment of flotsam strewn through the interior.

The owner seemed to be one of those crazy desert people you hear about. We both though we was a tweaker and may be saving his life by buying the car from him. He told us he planned to turn it into a drag car. We were unsure how he meant to accomplish this since we was wheelchair-bound already and did the entire exchange from the seat of his van parked next to the car. We never got a got story of how the BMW carb was supposed to work on the Ford engine–nothing really lined up at all. In the end we negotiated a price of a whopping $350 with everything in the car “thrown in” and went to get a U-Haul dolly.

We returned, paid for the car and loaded it up. Then the long drive home. We discussed our plans, and tried to figure out how exactly we were going to accomplish this huge undertaking we had just begun. Neither one of us had ever taken on a car project even remotely this involved. Brian had done straight engine replacement swaps in previous trucks and stereo work–and probably other things I don’t recall or he never told me about. I had done bolt-on upgrades to my Probe GT with his help. We were now talking about a radical engine swap and prepping a car for drag racing and autocrossing. What the hell were we thinking?

Once we got home, I think Juli was in shock. As in “Holy crap! They actually dragged this POS home?! This is going to sit in front of MY house from now on?!” I think the picture we took says it all.

Then a funny thing happened. This stupid little car took on a life of its own and became the reason for Brian and I to spend many, many weekends and often weeknights together. Eventually we did some accounting and after a couple of years of attempts we realized we would never be able to keep within the budget for the original intent of the project. We both said “screw it, keep building!” and changed the project into a general play car. The intent was still to show, and race the car and enjoy sharing the madness with others. But it became an excuse to hang out together seemingly all the time. I am so thankful we found this little car.

As I have stated before, I intend to somehow complete the project as we intended. It has come so very far, and still has a long ways to go. However, Brian and I very nearly accomplished our first goal: make the car basically mechanically sound.