The Executive Supercar - 1971 Plymouth Sport Fury GT

In the pony- and mid-sized maelstrom of American car performance that was winding down by the early '70s, the cars that brought the full-size performance game to the table had all but been forgotten. Hardcore Pontiacs had disappeared, Chevy pulled the SS option from the Impala line by the end of the '60s, and even the original postwar full-size performance car, the Chrysler 300, had become a slightly nicer New Yorker. In the sport-luxury balance, when it came to full-size cars, the default always seemed to tilt toward luxury.

Plymouth sought to buck that trend with the Plymouth Sport Fury GT, option package A52, which resided at the top of Plymouth's Fury food chain in 1970 and '71. Marketed as "The Executive Supercar," standard issue beyond the plusher Sport Fury trim in '71 was the 375-hp 440-cube Super Commando V-8 with dual exhaust, GT stripes, heavy-duty suspension, power disc front brakes, and H70-15 Goodyear tires on 6-inch-wide road wheels. A 3.23:1 final drive and heavy-duty battery completed the package. But in an era when muscle cars were falling out of favor in the showrooms, the idea of a hot full-size seemed even more out of touch. Plymouth sold just 375 Sport Fury GTs for 1971 before it pulled the plug and called it done.

Tom Flessner ordered one of the 1970 version new, trading in a 383 four-speed '66 Charger, which he also bought new, for the Fury. "It looked a lot like this one: Glacial Blue, white stripes, no vinyl top, bucket seats, console." For a year and a half, he drove it around Illinois, until one day...

"A guy blew a stop sign and pulled out in front of me... I spun it, hit a pole and ripped the back end off of it. The car got fixed, but it was never right after that. So I traded it in on a '71 'Cuda convertible that was beautiful but just awful. The day I drove it out of the dealership, the carb floats broke and flooded the engine, the brakes would lock, the alternator died, the top wouldn't go down, I went to put the seat back and the seat back broke off and the radiator collapsed. The final straw was when I was washing the car: I polished through the paint and opened up a rust hole about the diameter of a ballpoint pen."

As a mechanical engineer who was attracted to Mopar in the first place by the promise of superior engineering, he was heartbroken. "They were really well-engineered cars--but it was the build quality that let them down. Even then, the joke was that they were good kit cars--you had to reassemble 'em after you bought 'em. That 'Cuda put me off Mopars, and I haven't owned a new one since."

Fast forward to 1990. The old 20-year rule for nostalgia kicks in and Tom starts looking around for another Fury GT, not quite knowing how rare they are. The surprising part: He found one in the Pacific Northwest. "It was about as close to my car as I was going to get--Glacial Blue, no vinyl top and all-original. The interior was blue, instead of the black I had in mine, and while it needed paint and upholstery, it didn't have any rust. They don't salt the roads up there, the weather is mild and cars just last. It needed paint and upholstery, but there was no rust to fix."

One oddball note: The small-block that, in defiance of the option sheets, had somehow found its way under the Fury's hood prior to Tom's ownership. The 340-cube V-8 was putting out 275 gross horses and 340 pound-feet in 1971--a far cry from the 375 horses and 480 pound-feet of the standard-issue 440.

It had always been Tom's idea to have a fun cruiser/bruiser, and so while fixing his Fury up in the '90s, looking to breathe 440 V-8-levels of power into the 340, he did the things that you did to cars in the '90s. Some worked out fine. "I installed a Stainless Steel Brakes four-wheel disc system, with 11-inch rotors all around. The difference was night-and-day compared to what came on it. Originally, it had the heavy-duty police brakes, but they were still terrible. Now it's just awesome. I measured a 116-foot stop from 60 MPH." They remain on the current iteration of the car, as you see it here.

The other items? Not so much. "I had a set of aftermarket billet 16-inch wheels and 255/50-16 tires. The bigger wheels and tires really helped handling, but those wheels went out of style." And then there was the fuel injection. "I switched to digital throttle-body fuel injection. It ran better when it worked, but mostly it didn't work. It would lose calibration, and it had all sorts of issues. At one point, the engine compartment caught on fire. Not a good decision," he says with the benefit of a decade and a half of hindsight. For 11 years, from 2001 to 2013, the Fury sat idle, moving with the Flessner family from Orange County, California, up to the central valley of Hanford, California, and then to Phoenix, where Tom currently resides.

It was around the time of his Phoenix move that he priced a new 5-liter Mustang GT for himself--and discovered that to get one the way he wanted would run him close to $40,000. "Instead of buying a new car," he reasoned, "I used the money to build something that no one else had." The goal, as in the '90s, was to make it new-but-better--a car that would once again live up to the Executive Supercar hype. With improved technology circulating, and plenty of hindsight in his arsenal, Tom was a little wiser about his choices.

The basic bones remained strong. The body was still straight and rot-free, although the paint was shot, the interior was tired and the engine bay was a charred mess. Out came the long-suffering 340 and in went a 408-cubic-inch small-block iron-head LA stroker from Blueprint Engines. The 375 horsepower rating matches a stock 440's power rating exactly, while the 460 pound-feet of torque are just 20 pound-feet shy of the big-block's... and all numbers are way ahead of the 275-horse 340 that was pulled out. "Now, the numbers that are quoted are engine-dyno numbers, but after a tuning session on the dyno, with the Holley 750 and Edelbrock Air Gap intake I had on there, it's still around 350-360 horsepower at the rear wheels, and torque is north of 410 pound-feet all day long.

"And it's faster than my old GT by a long shot. I ran that car at Union Grove in Wisconsin in 1971, on street tires, and with an open 3.23 rear and the 440, it ran a 16.2," recalls Tom. "This is at least a second quicker 0-60 and in the quarter-mile--it'll do 0-60 in 6.4 seconds. My old Fury couldn't touch that."

The suspension was refreshed--new tubular control arms and fat 1.06-inch torsion bars up front, seven-leaf springs in back, new gas Monroe shocks on all corners--and Tom reverted to a factory-type wheel with a semi-custom tire. "The tires are BFGs," he says, "but Diamond Back cut the blue streak into the side of it for me." The result? "It handles great," we're reliably told. Vintage Auto Repair in Phoenix did the bulk of the mechanical work.

The interior was also a place Tom spent some planning time, because, when he's driving it, he wants to be comfortable. "Every inch is done in high-end materials: German loop-pile hand-stitched carpets, everything done in leather instead of vinyl, French seams on everything, sound deadener in the doors, under the headliner and under the carpet. I brought a '71 brochure to my upholsterer, B-W Upholstery in Phoenix, and Brian resculpted the buckets to offer more support, but made sure that they looked close to the original. The springs were new, he sculpted new foam for better support, and the result is just gorgeous. I made sketches of some door panels I wanted him to do, and they look like something that came out of 1971--except using higher-end materials. Even the steering wheel, the leather-wrapped Tuff Wheel, feels great--and it matched the era of the car." Other modifications included changing the black-and-silver dash areas to a more technical gray, and replacing the faux-wood strip across the passenger's side of the dash and console with pieces of machined aluminum that slotted right into place. The console-mounted tach is a sporting touch.

The bodywork was stripped to bare metal and resprayed the correct Glacial Blue by Greg's American Classics of Phoenix. Greg Saari was responsible for everything externally, from stripping and sanding to getting the rear bumper rechromed to aligning the tricky-to-install Stencils & Stripes Unlimited-sourced strobe stripes.

The greatest challenge? Getting everything done to the meticulous satisfaction of one's mechanical engineer's mind while not being there to physically oversee most of the work. "I live in Phoenix, but I work as a materials engineer at Tesla in Palo Alto, California, and I only come home on the weekends. During the week, I'd try to get updates on what was going on with my car, and I'd end up irritating the crap out of whoever was working on it. I think that's part of why it was a year-and-a-half project." Then there's the other part of the equation. "Tracking parts was tough. It's not a Road Runner, and if I wanted an A/C condenser, I couldn't just order it out of a catalog. I'd spend evenings online trying to find parts, buy them and have them drop-shipped to Phoenix. After a year, I was really torn--I was getting burned out on it, and I was wondering whether I should have just bought the Mustang. But now that I have it back, and I'm driving it, I've fallen back in love again."

That said, Tom is still tweaking. "There's plenty of sound deadener in it, but it's too noisy, and it drones at speed. It has headers, and I'm going to change the mufflers on it--that should quiet it down. It shouldn't drop performance, but a car like this should be quieter. I do want to get a Sure-Grip rear so I can get power down to both tires--I have it, I just need to install it--and I want to switch to a Firm-Feel steering box as well. Plus, I'm looking to upgrade the wheels and tires: I want to do black 15 x 7 or 15 x 8 steelies and go to a 50-series tire. The width is the same as what's on there now, just a black wheel with chrome lug nuts, like the Six-Barrel and Six-Pack Plymouths and Dodges of 1969."

Getting that all dialed in may be tough. After 11 years of the car sitting idle and another 18 months of intensive reconstruction, Tom says, "Now I'm making up for lost time."

Owner's View

The first owner ordered it in Longview, Washington; the paperwork said "A Lease" on it. The dealership where this car sold new was closing in 1990, around the time I bought it, but I managed to find someone there who remembered it when it was new. The owner special-ordered it: The GT only came as a sport hardtop, and this one has the standard Fury roofline. He also ordered the GT suspension, road wheels and striping, plus heavy-duty cooling and power seat. That's the story I got, anyway. Oh, and the owner's name? Al Alease. This was Al Alease's car, not a leased car.--Tom Flessner

1971 Plymouth Sport Fury GT

SPECIFICATIONS

Engine

Block type: Chrysler LA-series 360 cast-iron V-8

Cylinder heads: Chrysler 5.9 Magnum cast-iron OHV

Displacement: 408 cubic inches

Bore x stroke: 4.030 inches x 4.00 inches

Compression ratio: 9.8:1

Pistons: Hypereutectic

Connecting rods: I-beam

Horsepower @ RPM: 375 @ 2,800

Torque @ PM: 460-lb.ft. @ 2,400

Camshaft type: Hydraulic flat-tappet

Duration: 238/238 degrees, intake/exhaust (at .050)

Lift: 0.474/.474-inch intake/exhaust

Valvetrain: Swirl-polished 1.92/1.625-inch valves, intake/exhaust, hardened pushrods

Fuel system: Edelbrock Air Gap aluminum intake manifold, Holley 750-cfm "double-pumper" carburetor, factory-style fuel pump

Lubrication system: High-volume gear-type pump, high-volume oil pump

Ignition system: Mopar Performance Electronic

Exhaust system: Sanderson headers, dual 2.5-inch exhaust with crossover, dual mufflers

Original engine: Chrysler Corporation LA-series 340 cast-iron V-8

Transmission

Type: Chrysler TorqueFlite three-speed automatic

Ratios: 1st: 2.45:1

2nd: 1.45:1

3rd: 1.00:1

Reverse: 2.20:1

Differential

Type: Mopar 8-3/4-inch

Ratio: 3.23:1

Steering

Type: Factory-type power-assisted recirculating ball

Ratio: 15.7:1

Turns, lock-to-lock: 3.5

Brakes

Type: Hydraulic four-wheel disc, with power assist

Front: Stainless Steel Brakes four-piston calipers, 11-inch rotors, braided stainless hoses, stainless steel hard lines

Rear: Stainless Steel Brakes four-piston calipers, 11-inch rotors, braided stainless hoses

Suspension

Front: Heavy-duty 1.06-inch torsion bars, tubular upper control arms, polyurethane bushings, Monroe gas shock absorbers

Rear: Mopar heavy-duty seven-leaf springs, Monroe gas shock absorbers

Wheels & Tires

Wheels: Mopar styled stamped steel

Front: 15 x 6 inches

Rear: 15 x 6 inches

Tires: BFGoodrich Radial T/A with custom Blue Streak stripe by Diamond Back

Front: 225/70-15

Rear: 225/70-15

Performance

Acceleration: 0-60 in 6.4 seconds