The Porsche 944 is a bit of a dice roll for Lemons racing. On one hand, it’s got a lot of the stuff that makes for a successful endurance car–good handling, strong brakes, enough power to stay out of its own way–but on the other, it’s relatively complex and potentially expensive and/or difficult to fix.
If you burn up the clutch in your Mustang, you can practically collect the change from your ashtray, make a trip to AutoZone, and have the car back on track before the session ends. If you suffer the same fate in your 944, you’re checking your credit limit, airmailing parts from Baden-Württemberg, and spending the weeks waiting for parts by disassembling the entire car just to get to the clutch.
That may be a slight exaggeration. Still, one Lemons team was fearful enough of Porsche-wrenching hell that they swapped a trusty Ford 302 V8 into their homemade wide-body 1987 Porsche 944, thus creating the formidable “Fordsche.”
Unfortunately for Team Fordsche, while Ford small-blocks are cheaper than Porsche engines, they aren’t always more reliable. After a few hours of racing, the team experienced one of the most comprehensive engine meltdowns ever witnessed in the series. It was a bit difficult to determine the exact sequence of the failure, but at some point the end of the crankshaft, still attached to the flywheel, exited the crankcase, taking much of the block and bellhousing with it. (The engine carnage also revealed the fancy rockers that the crew snuck by the Lemons judges, although their impact on the car’s overall performance was, well, unrealized.)
Would Team Fordsche have been better off sticking with factory hardware? Impossible to say. At the very least, it’s hard to imagine the Porsche engine exploding into quite so many pieces.
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