AMC rebel part

About AMC Gremlin

AMC cars swung the bat hard in every at-bat of a new model year - and missed big. The designers were just too conservative. That bilge might work in politics but not with the auto buying public. The American looked so restrained, the rear fins courteously curved and the overall package so boxy that only someone with blue hair and a few years away from a death bed would even contemplate something so stifling. The 1960 American looked like a music box.

After the issuance of five years worth of American Motors Rambler Americans (roughly 1960), the factory got the label of an "old person's car" (at least in my neighborhood). AMC was the Lawrence Welk of automotive factories.

If you were graduating from high school at that time and you had parents who could afford a new car for you, asking for a Rambler American would be social suicide. You'd have been taken out behind the gym and brutally stomped for such inept decision-making. It would be like contacting a drug dealer and asking for aspirin.

And if the Americans were off base, the fabled Rambler Marlins of 1966 were thrown out trying to steal the on-deck circle. Hard as it is to imagine, the Marlin was too radical, but not in "Wow-what-a-breakthrough" sense; more like an "Oh-No-Where's-My-Gun?" kinda fix. The AMC Marlin kinda looked like a marlin. A gigantic black fast back that extended from the front window and slowly descended, with no interruption, to the rear bumper. If the thing had been driven into a lake up to its door handles, a drunken fisherman would've been justified in saying he'd seen a monster.

One bold racer did achieve modest fame with a Rambler Marlin. Preston Honea ran one as a Funny Car in 1966, and that was one of the few times that the term "funny car" applied to the competition, literally.

For drag racing fans, Ramblers did excel for brief moments. Hayden Proffitt ran a Rambler Rebel SST Funny Car in 1967, Dick Bourgeois and Marv Eldridge drove Javelins a few years later, and Pro Stock racers Wally Booth and the team of Rich Maskin and Dave Kanners did extremely well with AMC Hornets. Booth won the '74 Gatornationals and the '76 U.S. Nationals and World Finals with one. Even NHRA Super Comp super star Edmond Richardson started out winning Super Street races with the impossibly lame looking AMC Gremlin.

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