American Modified to Xcess - 1970 AMC AMX

The year is 1984.

You're given a muscle car. It just drops into your hands, and it's yours, free and clear. What do you do with it? Put it in mothballs? Restore it to as-new condition? Fill it with Sunoco Purple and boil the tires 'til they explode?

Ah, but this wasn't any old gift horse. This was passed down by your uncle--an uncle you shared an enthusiasm with, an uncle who nursed and stoked the flames of high performance within you. In the days when these were just neat 15-year-old cars, rather than $50,000 investments, the temptation to modify them was strong. Perhaps doubly so with AMCs, as parts were harder to find in those pre-internet days, so going the aftermarket route was a simpler alternative to finding NOS pieces. Easier just to fudge repairs and make a quarter-mile killer out of it, right?

For shame: Your generous uncle would be so disappointed in you. For this isn't just a hypothetical situation--the gift AMX, and the uncle, were very real. "At the time, many people were modifying the old muscle cars for drag racing," recalls Hal Lynch, now of Ahwatukee, Arizona, the recipient of a 1970 AMX. Now, while AMC had a factory drag-racing unit, it wasn't nearly as successful as the company's road-racing and Trans-Am efforts. Hal's uncle, Don Lynch, the second owner of this particular 1970 AMX, had made his desires known prior to his passing. "His dream was to build a high-performance road car that could compete with European supercars of the day." That day coming in the early-to-mid 1980s, cars like the Lamborghini Countach and the Porsche 928 would fit the bill.

With Don's passing in 1984, the car was willed to Hal, who traveled from his then-home in New Jersey to Hartford, Connecticut, to rescue the AMX. The Bittersweet Orange two-seater, with 92,000 miles on the clock, was built within the last month of production, during the week of May 30, 1970. But, for what Hal had planned--the fulfillment of his late uncle's dream of having a street car competitive with Europe's best--things like original mileage and serial numbers mattered little.

"My uncle wanted it built as a high-speed road car, but I was mystified back then as to how to do it when I got the car. Then I saw some of the vintage Trans-Am cars from the early 1970s and thought to myself, 'Nobody can debate the high-speed roadworthiness of a car built from original Trans-Am and NASCAR road-racing parts!'" So Hal set out to find what he could, and fabricate what he couldn't.

Oh, Hal claims that what you see here wasn't meant to happen, of course. "I was just going to do some minor performance upgrades and things got out of control," he protests, not entirely convincingly. But the thoroughness with which things were executed tells us that Hal had a plan.

It started with an engine--the centerpiece that Hal wanted to build his AMX around. He could have sourced a 401 and gone to town rebuilding it, but that lacked a certain... pedigree. And so the search for some Mark Donohue-era Trans-Am equipment was on.

That search took literally years of phone calls, bad leads, blind alleyways and wrong turns to stumble into an AMC gold mine. "My biggest score was finding a Mark Donohue team car; it was owned by Bob Fryer and was being campaigned at the time by the University of Pittsburgh. The team had bought out many of the parts from the Bobby Allison team, including a complete engine." Among the surprises: a set of four 58mm Weber carbs on an AMC intake. "A team of engineering students then adapted the Webers to the NASCAR engine and planned to run it in the old Donohue team car. Unfortunately, multiple carburetors were outlawed for the class the Javelin raced in, so this fully developed race engine was mothballed."

As he thought it a shame to let such a highly developed piece of business sit in a back room in Pittsburgh, Hal generously offered to take it off the university's hands; along with the engine, innumerable driveline pieces also came with the deal.

You'll notice that, in our photos, the quad Weber setup is gone, replaced by a conventional Holley 750-CFM "double-pumper." "The Webers were a handful to keep adjusted, and in 1999, I removed them; I had the original NASCAR manifold, so I returned the engine to its original Bobby Allison configuration."

Owner Hal Lynch

Today, it's topped with an Air Inlet Systems air cleaner that draws cool, dense air via fat dryer-ducting and openings on either side of the radiator support. "When the Trans-Am Javelins were built and tested, they discovered that the ram air intake on the hood was actually a low pressure point. High-pressure air intake points on the Javelin and AMX are in the grille or at the base of the windshield. I chose the grille." And let us save you a trip to the White Pages to track Hal down: He sold the Weber carbs and intake to a vintage Can-Am racer (and bought a new pickup truck in cash with the proceeds).

For that period feel, Hal even went with dry-sump lubrication. "Dry-sump oiling was made legal for Trans-Am racing in 1971 because everyone was blowing up engines due to loss of oil pressure during hard cornering. The system uses a shallow oil pan with a large reservoir placed elsewhere in the car; an external pump provides pressurized oil to the engine and is not subject to loss of pressure during hard cornering forces. The sump holds 15 quarts in the trunk-mounted tank." Because this is not an engine you want to blow up in a hard corner somewhere.

Dropping the engine in was the easy part. Building the rest of the car to support 600-plus horses on the street was another matter entirely. Particularly for something that had road racing spliced into its genes, suspension was critical: "Replacing the front spindles with Stock Car Products Grand National spindles and custom building a full-floating Ford 9-inch rear, which allowed for adaptation of Wilwood road racing brakes all around, was one thing. The changes altered the suspension geometry, which had to be brought back to spec."

A roll cage--liberated from a dead Fox-body Ford road racer and adapted to the AMX's interior dimensions without hacking up the door panels or instrument panel--stiffened things up considerably and allowed the suspension to do what it needed to without the Kenoshan's unit-body flexing. Hal credits Don Schmitz of Kenosha, Wisconsin, for the installation of the Richmond five-speed, rear pump and cooler, and some of the key suspension components.

There was also the question of rolling stock. "I had seen these Panasports advertised in Autoweek, but wanted to first look at them before deciding. I happened to be on a business trip to L.A. and decided to go visit Panasport to look at them. The one-piece wheels were blanks, and they only had four 15 x 10s and two 15 x 8s left in stock, as they were switching to three-piece wheel technology. I bought them all and had them drilled for the NASCAR standard 5-on-5 bolt pattern that was on my SCP spindles and Ford 9-inch rear." Years later, Hal contacted Pana-sport and sought out a spare 15 x 10, just in case. Nothin' doin'. "They could only make three-piece wheels, and they told me I had four of only 21 ever made in the 15 x 10 size."

And then there was the other issue with the wheels: They were a little too wide. "Once I had the suspension finished, the Panasport wheels stuck out a good six inches beyond the factory body lines. I took the car to a custom coachbuilder who specialized in pre-war Packards and Duesenbergs, and they quoted me a mid-five-figure price to build custom steel flares! A friend of a friend introduced me to Jim Mitchell, who built custom Harleys at his shop, Mitchell's Customs in Chesterfield, New Jersey. I towed the car over to him with the tires all sticking out, showed him and his friends in the shop a picture of a Trans-Am Javelin and told them that's what I want."

It took time, with Jim working on and off between Harley jobs, but two years later--after three six-month sessions with the car--Jim had the fenders done using the same metal-fabricating techniques used on the Donohue Javelins: 16-gauge steel, continuous-seam gas welding, and an awful lot of hammering.

Other, subtler bodywork was performed as well. The bumpers were acid-dipped, removing all of the factory chrome and nickel, and saving a total of 15 pounds at the extreme ends of the car. They were painted the same DuPont Slate Grey Imron as the rest of the car--similar to the Charcoal Grey that AMC used in the '80s. "It's a standard Imron color that you can have mixed today," Hal tells us. It's hard to believe that the paint is coming up on a quarter-century old; there's no sign of touch-up, fading or scratching anywhere.

And there are other quietly custom touches as well. The billet-aluminum windshield clips and back-window straps with counter-sunk hex fasteners. The door trim, all shiny brightwork replaced by the same billet aluminum and countersunk hex fasteners. (Both pick up on the depth of the hoops in those massive Goodyear cheater slicks.) And if you're looking for the AMX logo on the driver's side C-pillar, forget it: It's gone, replaced with a fuel-filler neck to feed the fuel cell that dominates the trunk. The electrical connections between interior and engine compartment use "mil-spec" plugs, sandwiched behind the new dual master-cylinder reservoirs, which provide a quick disconnect for the engine harness, in the event of engine removal. The transmission is a Richmond five-speed, with a 1:1 fifth, and sports its own external cooler.

Everything is track-legal, and Hal could go out and pound pavement at the next open-track event if he so desired. He credits Mike Higgins, owner of Vehicle Performance Center in Phoenix, Arizona, for all of the necessary road-racing track preparation.

Getting all of these components to play nice together required a lot of effort in the form of adaptation and fabrication, and all the trial fitments and experimentation that entails. Curiously, though, Hal claims that one of the simplest aspects of this venture was getting Bobby Allison to authenticate the drivetrain components.

"I was driving around town in 1997, and noticed Bobby Allison was going to be signing die-cast model cars at a hobby shop nearby." Bobby Allison just showing up in your town doesn't happen every day, unless you live around Salisbury, North Carolina. "I hustled the car up on my trailer, and asked him if he would authenticate and sign the car and engine for me." Today, Bobby's signature rests on both the hood striker plate, flanked on either side by Earl's component coolers, and on the four-barrel intake manifold that runs on the car.

"It all came together within a few hours," says Hal of the opportunity to connect Allison with his former engine. Some time later, Allison was good enough to forward an authentication letter which reads, in part, "After inspection... it appears that the markings on the engine and accompanying manifold are consistent with the markings placed on 1975-'76 NASCAR engines built by my race team and Reed Cams." This, and other factors, "leads me to believe that the bottom end of this engine was formerly used in AMC NASCAR Matadors and Hornets run by my race team in the 1975-'76 racing era."

Today, such an undertaking would be simultaneously simpler and more difficult. The ease of finding bits has increased greatly with the advent of the internet, and those years of phone calls could well have boiled down to a couple of months of online noodling. That's the simple part.

Everything else would have gotten more difficult. For one, "Owning, restoring and customizing AMCs is a labor of love, since there are no aftermarket part suppliers for many AMC parts--you need to build your network of other AMC enthusiasts and watch online auctions diligently. I'm collecting spare parts now. A NOS grill cost me $1,700, but was also the only one I have seen for sale in years."

And that's the other thing. NOS pieces, all these years later, are going for insane money. And race-tested pieces? Genuine parts that had seen track time? If they're not living on period-correct vintage race cars, then their prices would be impossible for an average Joe to meet.

The result of Hal's efforts was unleashed in 1991, and has changed nary a bit in the two decades since, with only suspension tweaks. The basics remain as they have, but even two decades on, and many laps passed under those Hoosier cheater slicks, there's still much more to learn, fiddle with and have fun with.

OWNER'S VIEW

I've always been intrigued by the concept of building a street-legal road-race car. When you're hanging around road-racing guys, they'll say race cars are just a bunch of parts flying in close formation and in the same direction.

If I had to restore this car all over again, I still wouldn't change a thing. It was a lot of work and even more money, but the joy of seeing it in the garage every day makes it all worth it. To this day, I cannot think of another car I would rather own.

-- Hal Lynch

PROS

+ Family lineage can never be replaced

+ Neither can that Bobby Allison NASCAR engine

+ You'll never see another like it

CONS

- Good luck getting into it

- Holy cats, is this thing loud

- Limited driven miles

1970 AMC AMX SPECIFICATIONS

ENGINE

Block type -- AMC "second-generation" cast-iron OHV V-8

Cylinder heads -- AMC cast-iron OHV, 71.9cc combustion chambers

Displacement -- 414 cubic inches

Bore x Stroke -- 4.235 x 3.725 inches

Compression ratio -- 12.96:1

Pistons -- BRC forged

Connecting rods -- Carillo forged steel

Horsepower @ RPM -- 600 @ 5,500

Torque @ RPM -- 590-lbs.ft. @ 5,500

Camshaft type -- Reed solid-lifter flat-tappet, model R306-10ULX-6A2

Duration -- 274 degrees intake, 277 degrees exhaust (at 0.050)

Lift -- 0.618 inches intake, 0.560 inches exhaust

Valvetrain -- Ferrea stainless 2.02-inch intake valves and 1.65-inch exhaust valves, Traco 1.6:1 ratio roller rocker arms

Fuel system -- Holley 750-CFM "double-pumper" four-barrel carburetor, Holley electric 110-GPH/14-PSI fuel pump

Lubrication system -- Home-constructed dry-sump system with remote 15-quart reservoir, Melling high-volume oil pump

Ignition system -- MSD billet HEI distributor

Exhaust system -- Hedman headers, twin side-exiting exhaust pipes

Original Engine -- AMC 360-cubic inch V-8

TRANSMISSION

Type -- Richmond five-speed manual, 11-inch McLeod clutch, Hurst floor shifter

Ratios:

1st -- 3.28:1

2nd -- 2.13:1

3rd -- 1.57:1

4th -- 1.24:1

5th -- 1.00:1

Reverse -- 4.79:1

DIFFERENTIAL

Type -- Ford 9-inch full-floating rear, Torsen-Gleason gear-driven limited-slip

Ratio -- 3.25:1

STEERING

Type -- Saginaw recirculating ball, power-assist

Ratio -- Variable (12.0:1 to 16.0:1)

BRAKES

Front -- Wilwood 12-inch rotor with six-piston calipers

Rear -- Wilwood 12-inch rotor with four-piston calipers

SUSPENSION

Front -- QA1 coil-over conversion with 600-pound springs, Stock Car Products Grand National front spindles, gusseted lower control arms, 1.25-inch anti-roll bar

Rear -- Georgia Spring semi-elliptic leaf springs, KYB gas shocks (rear anti-roll bar and Panhard bar not installed at time of shoot)

WHEELS & TIRES

Wheels -- Panasport one-piece aluminum

Front -- 15 x 10 inches

Rear -- 15 x 10 inches

Tires -- Hoosier R3S04

Front -- 275/50-15

Rear -- 275/50-15

PERFORMANCE

Acceleration -- Not tested