Battle of the California Melee X: 1974 Fiat 124 Abarth vs 1963 NSU Sport Prinz

The California Melee is billed as, "The original low buck classic sports car rally". You gotta figure, that if it's "low buck", I should be involved. When my main point is, "No tow truck involved for us!" you can guess there was some car trouble.

The California Melee X happened September 9, 10, and 11th, 2006.

All the pictures are pop-up, so click on them, and they'll get a bit bigger if you're interested.

The California Melee is roughly around a 1,000 mile road rally. I figured I'd take my NSU Sport Prinz (1963, 2 cylinders, 583 cc) on it, but there was some problems.

NSU used to have World Speed Records for cars and motorcycles. In the 1950s, they sold more motorcycles than everyone else. Yes, more than Harley Davidson, BMW, Norton, Triumph, and even the mighty Nessetti. Now no one now remembers who they are.

The NSU Sport Prinz had a body designed by Bertone, who designed lots of neat coachwork for Alfa, Fiat, Ferrari, Jaguar, Lancia, Lamborghini and Citroen. We won't mention that Bertone also designed the horrible Fiat X1/9 (that sort of Porsche 914 Pontiac Fiero kind of wedge).

I gave up on the NSU Sport Prinz with the smoke and the gearbox problems, and went down to ride with David Fuller in his Fiat Abarth 124 (like this one: Fiat 124 Abarth site).

Americans pick on Fiat, but hey, Fiat's highest paid employee is Michael Schumacher. Doesn't that count for something?

The Abarth was having gearbox problems, causing it to smoke, which is completely different than the NSU smoke and gearbox problems. And this Abarth involved David and I in a lovely conversation with SFPD on a lonely Pacific Coast Highway during a 1am test drive. David put in a straight cut gearbox and straight cut differential right before the Melee and we were testing driving to get the problems out. Two cop cars sped by, and the cop that pulled us over took off, so we got away without a ticket and even slept a few hours before the Melee started.

The start of the Melee X. Lots of neat cars, with lots of great pictures. Check out these links if you're inclined. I'm not good with a camera, so I'll link to people who are.

Craig's pics

Max pics

Steph's pics A lot from the Giulietta

Margaret-Ann's pics

hardtuned.com

Besides my usual favorites of old Brit convertibles, there was also this Alfa Giulietta which was my favorite car.

1964 Falcon Sprint

Lancia

MGB-GT

An MGB GT was almost my first car, as a hand me down from a sister. It got sold so I ended up with another sister's 1974 VW Thing. It was zebra striped and I drove it across the country with Steve Mar and Rory Hearse (which is a story with lots of crazy shenanigans involving stuff like working at whore house, telling a Southern Sheriff that I was scared of him because I'd seen "Deliverance", and "acting" in a low budget horror movie called "Disgusteen" that Ben Weasel of Screeching Weasel made). I promised to never own another air-cooled VW again.

I might change my mind and get one of those weird Type 34 Karmann Ghias sometime. I picked up a new hole for my head (it was cheap!), so that makes it alright to change my mind.

Here's the view from the Abarth as we left. That's Walter's Opel GT in front of us. I drove it about 150 miles from Roseville to San Jose so that Walter could get it running for the trip. The clutch was going out so I did it without shifting as much as I could. It's a neat little car.

Walter was one of my teammates in the 24 Hours of LeMons race that happened the first weekend of October. I'll wait for all the fancy pants magazines to write about that before I get around to it.

The Abarth's straight-cut gearbox crapped out about 35 miles into the Melee, so we limped it back to David's place in SF.

That's one of the things that I love about old cars and motorcycles. They break, but they rarely strand you. We could've done the Melee in the Abarth at about 50 mph but what's the point in that when you're in an honest to god rally car? It's got toggle switches! A start button! A switch to reverse polarity! (That kept Gort and Klingons away from us).

Limping the Abarth

We hopped in my indestructible '86 Toyota truck and drove to Sacramento and picked up my NSU and drove it to Red Bluff for the first hotel night. We weren't the last ones to show, but close. We took a different (much straighter route since the tie-rods are iffy) following Highway 99.

We arrived and the NSU piss marked its territory. German car + Italian body = English habits.

It broke down on the way up. Here's a cruising speed that happened a lot: Zero miles an hour at the side of the road.

On Highway 99, we shot out a plug holder on the freeway. Not the plug itself, but the rubber spark holder wouldn't stay on. We kept it in place with some of the same bailing wire that helped my Ducati make it around Australia, and made it to an auto parts store where we replaced the wires with something Japanese.

"Hey, we smell like we're roasting coffee beans"

"Yeah, that's different than the burning 90 weight gear oil from the Abarth or the usual weird smoke from the NSU".

We burned through a mouse nest in the heater pipe. A mouse shouldn't build a home near the exhaust. Unless the mouse bailed without leaving a note, it lived and died in an NSU Sport Prinz. Not a bad way of dying. Except the "Death By Heat" part.

There's the mouse nest. We blocked the hole with a coffee cup from the Melee coffee sponsor to keep the exhaust fumes out of the car. I can't remember the coffee sponsor name or I'd link to it and shout to high heaven. Okay, it's Farley's Coffee. I just checked in the Hagerty bag of Melee schwag. Hagerty Insurance is also a melee sponsor, but they wouldn't insure my NSU.

My reliable car -- the 86 Toyota truck -- is considered too old to be a daily driver. That's the truck I've driven cross country a couple times, and used it to tow my NSU back from Oregon. Blah. Well, that, plus the confusion that my wife lives in SF, and I'm in Sacramento, and that she has another old car -- a 64 Barracuda. Then my license being suspended from a seizure from a year and a half ago. It was too much for Hagerty. I didn't even tell them that my marriage was so I get medical insurance, and that my wife's boyfriend was at the wedding.

The ol' Ball and Chain.

Although since the Melee, my wife sold her house in San Francisco, sold her Barracuda, and moved to LA to be with her boyfriend. She bought a new VW, so maybe now Hagerty would insure me.

The valve cover gasket gave up the ghost close to Red Bluff and we used a quart of Synth 20-50 in about 20 or 30 miles. In a 2 cylinder car that holds 2 quarts of oil, that's a lot. We didn't know it was the valve cover gasket at the time, just A LOT more smoke after the normal smoke had ended. We were close so we just drove instead of pulling over.

We had quite a crowd when we pulled into the lot attracted by the freaky tiny car and the smoke screen. We were both surprised that no one doused us with a fire extinguisher.

I thought I took a picture of the Mini Bar but I didn't. It's a bar put on top of a Morris Mini. Or Austin Mini. Not a Wolseley Hornet or a Riley Elf or even a BMW Mini.

The next morning we tried to fix the NSU with a thin layer of Permatex to continue on the rally. We let it sit about an hour and drove about 6 blocks, and pulled over to check. It was still leaking badly so we bought bulk cork and made a new gasket cleaning out the Permatex. I know the dangers of Permatex. It doesn't mix well with oil galleys sometimes. It was a nice thin layer of Permatex, so no problem with that fix. Except for that it didn't work.

With the new gasket we went about 2 miles and pulled over to check. It was still smoking and the amount that had leaked out from the first valve gasket "fix" should've burned off.

The cork gasket needed to be compressed more and that's when we added the 2 quarts at once. After that most of the valve cover leak was over with.

We tried to leave Red Bluff at 9:15am. We actually left Red Bluff, plus our new gasket we cut ourselves in a parking lot, plus several more quarts of oil around 1:30pm.

We started heading for Ft Brag for the 2nd hotel night but there was some more problems. The main was with the exhaust so we limped it home to Sacramento and stopped by my brother in laws house. Robert's the guy who lathed 6 new bushing for the gear box the night before the Melee started and got all the gears to work. (For the NSU 2 cylinder folks, he said the square bushing at the end of the pushrod looked good so he didn't replace it. Might be why 3rd and 4th are working great, but 1st and 2nd are sometimes hard to find).

The carb gaskets were rough as we found out when we pulled the carb off to see why it was leaking fuel when starting. The accelerator pump is also leaking. The carb needs to be rebuilt but with no time, we made, and put on, new gaskets.

The exhaust manifold was missing the bolts on the bottom (or they rattled off) and the engine rattle finished off one of the gaskets.

Exhaust gasket material is hard to find. When did that happen? We had to wait until Tognotti's, the Sacramento Speed Shop opened up. We showed up early because auto shops always open early. Except this one. They open at 10am. We sat in their parking lot forever waiting for them to open. Letting fresh coffee stew in our insides. It was a fairly uncomfortable wait, but it made for a rush job grabbing exhaust gasket material. A nearby Target bathroom had to pay the price.

We mostly took backroads through Davis and Woodland to catch up with the Melee on the last day. Monday is the "limp home" day and we hoped to hit Highway 1 for the final drive. We hoped on Highway 121 outisde of Davis, and pulled over at the dam at Lake Berryessa to check the oil. That was it for the NSU. Spark, fuel and air but no go. We replaced the plugs and no go. Tried to push start it. No go. It caught fire after one back-fire. It's always funny when your car catches on fire.

I had a '64 Ranchero that did that once to me in high school. A fuel hose popped off and started a fire under the truck while I sat at a light. People drove by pointing and laughing. This was the mid-1980s and people often pointed to laugh at punk rockers. Or pull over to start a fight.

But this time they weren't pointing at me specifically. It took a while for me to open the door and look under the truck to see what they were pointing at. Oh, just these flames on the road under the engine. I pushed the truck backwards with my foot and everything was fine.

At Lake Berryessa

Finally, after 90 minutes, we decided we'd roll down the hill from the dam to the nearby gas station and hope they'd have Starter Fluid. I popped the clutch at about 20 miles per hour, the NSU started, so we drove back to Sacramento without stopping.

NO TOW TRUCK INVOLVED!!!

This was an amazing 4 days.

Our guess is ring/valve leak + stock low compression (7.6:1) + air leak at accelerator pump lowered the compression to the point where we couldn't get it started. I'm not sure yet. I'm letting it sit for a bit.

The Melee wouldn't be as much fun in an old reliable car. I wouldn't learn anything that way. I think we did great by never having to have it towed. Plus, and this I love, it finally, broke in a way that wasn't something I could figure out and fix. This part is goofy and all, but when I get it started again, I'll have learned something new.

No inconvenience for me at all. I'm not sure about David. He would have won a prize at the end of Melee dinner, but he didn't show and you have to be present to win. He went home to visit his wife. She gets car sick, so she stays out of stuff like this. It's got to suck being married to a gearhead when you get carsick.

David sent me this in an email:

"As Professor Farnsworth would say, "good news, everyone!" I've figured out the cause of the vibration, at least I think I have. I've convinced myself I must be right... The gearbox should be okay; turns out I forgot a small metal spacer that slips on the end of the output shaft. It's sort of like a small thick donut about the diameter of a quarter. It acts as a bushing and goes inside the end of the drive shaft, right where the drive shaft and output shaft are joined at the big black rubber flex joint. The metal part is sometimes called a "centering ring," because that's exactly what it does: it acts as a bushing and centers the drive shaft yoke so that it's exactly inline with the output shaft. Without it, the flex joint, well, flexes too much and throws the whole thing out of line at higher speeds. That's why I could rev it up to redline in 1st and 2nd, pretty high in 3rd, and not very high in 4th. The driveshaft would only be spinning fast enough to distort the flex joint above a certain road speed.

"I was looking through my parts manual at the whole driveshaft and realized, hmm, that part is still sitting on my oily towel with the old transmission parts. Gee, do you suppose Fiat put it on for a reason? As soon as my new plastic shifter bearing arrives, I'll test it out. Hopefully it will all be sorted out in time for the Alameda car show next month. Maybe I can also fit the triangular windows by then, too."

I won my first trophy for even attempting it in an NSU 2 cylinder.

The "2006 California Melee Willy Makit Memorial Trophy".

We spent about $30 on fuel and about $30 on oil. 5 or 6 quarts, and Synthetic is almost $6/quart.

--Dave Smith and David Fuller (and Robert Ives -- NSU mechanic when
forced at gunpoint).

Hey, what is that?

- It's an NSU.

Who makes it?

- NSU.

Okay, who makes it?

- NSU.

becomes after a while:

Hey, what is that?

- An NSU

Who makes it?

- NSU. It's the name Ferrari used for their luxury models.

or:

- This 2-stroke (it's a 4-stroke, but it was smoking a lot, but not out of the pipes) 1963 car gets 132 miles per gallon. Oil companies bought up the company and shut it down. They're very rare, as I'm sure you know.

sometimes even the truth:

--NSU, or Neckarsulmer Strickmaschinenfabrik (I'm sure it was badly pronounced by the way) which is how you probably remember it, went under developing the Wankel rotary and were bought up by Audi VW in the late 1960s.

Posted by DaveSmith at November 1, 2006 02:51 AM