In September 1967, American Motors Corporation (AMC) had no performance parts, no performance engineering group, no racing group, no engine-development program, and absolutely no plan for what it was about to embark on. With only months left before the introduction of the company’s AMX and Javelin ponycars, AMC decided the best way to market them was to enter into Trans-Am road racing and NASCAR and Pro Stock drag racing.
Let’s just say it was highly optimistic AMC believed it could dive into any form of racing, as it was the manufacturer of sensible, compact cars and a few other things like Marlins. Look it up if you don’t know about Marlins. They were the little Wisconsin car company that could, as long as it didn’t involve speed, racing, performance, or impressing your friends at the local Psycho Taco.
Chrysler, Ford, and GM were all heavily involved in different facets of racing for years to help market their cars. Their participation in Trans-Am—a production-based, road-racing series based on intermediates powered by small-blocks less than 305 ci—was a given, as it had quickly ramped up in popularity. But AMC appeared to be delusional; the company had nothing to prepare it for a head-on assault in any racing against its domestic rivals.
Jim Jeffords was contracted by AMC to prepare two Javelins for the 1968 Trans-Am series. Jeffords came up through primarily racing Corvettes—having started Nickey Chevrolet’s racing efforts—then after retiring from driving in 1960, transitioned to become Elkart Lake, Wisconsin’s Road America director. Jeffords wanted Ronnie Kaplan to do the heavy lifting. As CEO of Ronnie Kaplan Engineering (RKE) in Elk Grove, Illinois, Kaplan both drove and then developed race cars ranging from NASCAR to the Mexican Road Races and Sebring Corvette SCCA winners in 1961 and 1963. Accessing AMC’s lack of everything, he wisely said no.
He was then pursued by AMC for weeks in countless meetings and phone calls before receiving free reign to, among other things, use aftermarket parts; the only AMC performance parts that existed, which AMC would assign production part numbers to; and offer an assist from AMC engineering when needed. This was important because Trans-Am was based on production cars and parts, which meant there couldn’t be aftermarket performance components, to a certain extent. Anything developed for the racing enterprise would need factory part numbers, with all the complication and red tape this added, as this was a giant company making lots of parts. Kaplan signed a one-year contract and soon got the good news that AMC had already hired drivers Peter Revson and George Follmer, two talented, versatile racing champions.
RKE’s first step after delivery of three Javelins was stiffening the unibody by welding all of the sheetmetal panels, as they came from the factory spot-welded. Then Kaplan added stiffeners and the SCCA-approved rollcage that even tied into the top, as operating doors was a Trans-Am requirement. Stock suspensions were allowed only minimal changes, resulting in the “dealer-installed” Javelin Handling Package of heavier springs, a sway bar, a track bar, and heavy-duty shocks that were traded for Koni adjustable coilovers for racing.
With a 305ci engine-displacement cap, Kaplan was stuck with AMC’s Gen II 290ci small-block as the only eligible engine. Rules wrangling soon allowed over-boring cylinders, achieving close to maximum allowable displacement. With no time to develop an engine program, RKE contracted Traco Engineering in Culver City, California, to build two 304.6ci, single-four-barrel engines. Dyno’d at 380 hp, they were down 100 hp from the competition. Transmissions were standard Borg-Warner wide-ratio T10 four-speeds. Close-ratio gears were preferred, so transmission cases were machined to accept T10-M close-ratio gears.
Testing commenced at Riverside Raceway in February 1968 to prepare for the Sebring 12-Hour Race in March. AMC couldn’t make the first race in the series, the 24 Hours of Daytona. At Sebring, the two Javelins qualified at 3.07.2 and 3.04.4, quicker than the previous year’s top qualifying time of 3.10. Follmer fell out after 6 hours with a broken valve, but Revson placed 12th. A new rule allowed dual carbs right before the race, which handicapped the AMC single-carb effort since they couldn’t fashion an intake manifold in that short amount of time, but by the following race in May at New Mannford, Oklahoma, a 2×4-barrel cross-ram intake had been developed at Edelbrock.
Here Follmer’s bold red, white, and blue Javelin came in second and Revson’s placement was reduced to fourth after a protest. Still, the Javelin Racing Team was in the hunt with just a few months worth of development time—an amazing feat.
At Mid-Ohio, the Javelins placed one/two on the pole, with testdriver John Martin filling in for Follmer, who was testing Can-Am cars. Revson came in third, with Martin exiting early with a blown engine. By the finish of the July 21 Les Trois Heures Du Circuit in Quebec, Canada, AMC was ahead of Ford in the manufacturers’ points race: 40 points to 37 points.
Strange “dealer-installed” parts were being assigned AMC part numbers as racing continued. One was a front-suspension crossmember that allowed for bolting on a Ford Mustang suspension, which featured the antidive characteristics that Javelin suspensions lacked. Also, a front spindle became available that accepted Lincoln disc brakes, which Ford was using in Trans-Am for their superior cooling properties.
In analyzing the 290ci engines, Kaplan wanted a bit more stroke, but the blocks didn’t allow for any more throw. Working with the AMC foundry, retired 290-engine designer Dave Potter came up with a plan. First, 11/16 inch was added to the decks, requiring spacers for the intake manifolds. Then the foundry devised a way to cast the bottom end of the 390ci block, which used four-bolt mains, to the top of the 290, which only had room for two-bolt mains. The two combined changes allowed the use of longer, standard Chevy connecting rods.
By the last race of the season in October in Kent, Washington, the Javelin team was the only factory-sponsored team to finish all 12 of the SCCA races, never winning a race, but placing second six times and third and fourth twice each.
However, Mark Donohue and the Chevy Camaro were dominant, winning 10 of the 12 races, leaving AMC’s tremendous efforts in the shadows. Manufacturer points were 90 points (Chevy), 59 points (Ford), and 51 points (AMC). When you factor in that AMC was only organizing its Trans-Am plans one year earlier and had kept the purse strings drawn tight, this was a major accomplishment that gave AMC management a reason to continue funding the fairy-tale outcome. Things would be much different for the new season.
For 1969 the Javelin bodies were shipped to RKE with reinforcements and other extraneous bits already omitted at the factory. The bodies were sent to Chem-Tech in California for acid dipping, even though this was not allowed by the SCCA. It seems they didn’t enforce this rule much.
But things were about to get difficult. Tensions between Jeffords and Kaplan were heating up, and both Revson and Follmer were gone—Revson being fired by Jeffords before the end of the 1968 season and Follmer having been wooed away by Ford. Kaplan went to AMC management and gave them a Jeffords-or-me ultimatum. Jeffords was soon out.
Then a driver shuffle disrupted the season, with testdriver John Martin taking one of the seats, then Lothar Motschenbacher and Trans-Am veterans Bob Tullius and Ron Grable in the second car for part of the season. In later races, Jerry Grant replaced Martin, but none of these changes could stop the dark cloud following the Javelin Racing Team.
One of the bright spots in the early stages of the 1969 racing program was a new block that promised to help road-racing applications. It started with changing the engine cores to now reduce deck height. Then forged cranks, rods, and pistons were sent raw to Kaplan, where they machined them to their own specs. This new engine’s specs were sent to AMC for homologation, per SCCA rules. Also a new Edelbrock cross-ram manifold accepting two Holley Dominator carbs topped off the effort. Then it was off to the Michigan International Speedway season opener.
Arriving a day late with three entries, things already started badly and got worse. During the race, Martin’s car blew an engine and Grable’s dropped a driveshaft. Tullius finished the race in back of the pack. Then the SCCA discovered the new engine had not been homologated—it was a lapse at the AMC mothership. Team Javelin would have to revert to the previous year’s engines for the rest of the season, with the SCCA keeping a close eye on them for any further cheating.
Even with the SCCA dogging them, Team Javelin tried using fiberglass quarters in an illegal attempt to lighten the car. When the SCCA guys strolled into the pits with a magnet, steel quarters were quickly fastened to the chassis.
The best the team could muster for the entire 1969 season was a Fourth Place finish at the opener at Michigan, another Fourth Place at Quebec, and a Fifth Place at Mid-Ohio. Donohue again won the season for Chevy with six victories, with the manufacturers’ points standings being 78 points (Chevy), 64 points (Ford), 32 points (Pontiac), and 14 points (AMC). At that final race at Riverside, Kaplan was let go. AMC grimly assessed their future racing ambitions.
Penske and Donohue Take Over
Chevrolet and Roger Penske Racing with driver Mark Donohue had won back-to-back Trans-Am championships, so you would think things between them would be lollipops and rainbows, but such was not the case. In Donohue’s book “The Unfair Advantage,” it was revealed that Chevrolet Racing’s Vince Piggins and Penske didn’t get along and also that Chevy was being stingy with development money and invoking a mess of red tape for much of what Penske needed. In addition, Ford’s racing manager, Homer Perry, had insulted Penske during a protest meeting, saying if it weren’t for Chevy building the cars, Penske would be a loser. Penske was greatly offended because he and Donohue felt their own hard work, testing, developing, and spending lots of Penske’s own money, created a championship racing team for himself and Chevrolet. He didn’t realize some perceived him as a rich kid using Chevy’s resources to make himself look good.
It was obvious that AMC would drop Kaplan, and it appears Penske initiated talks with AMC before the end of the season. He owned quite a few Chevy dealerships, so it was a bit dicey to be considering jumping manufacturers, but that’s what happened. With AMC offering Penske $2-million for the season, a deal was struck and the Trans-Am championship team two years running was now racing Nashes!
Penske was so determined to win that there was no Second Place finish bonus in the contract with AMC. When the news was announced at a press conference, Penske predicted the Javelin team would win at least 7 of the 12 races—a risky thing to be offering up having not so much as touched a Javelin race car. Penske was establishing how deep his determination was to win, even bringing back Peter Revson to race the second Javelin behind Donohue.
Selling off virtually all of the AMC equipment, cars, and backup parts as unusable, Penske wanted to start fresh. He kept one car for testing to determine a baseline. They found that, among other unspecified problems, there was virtually no suspension travel; the cars raced practically 100 percent on the bumpstops. Don Cox came with Penske from Chevy and immediately started on a new suspension. Retired AMC engineer Don Porter was retained, this time by Penske to help in developing special AMC engine components. Traco was contracted to build all of the engines for the 1970 season. Donohue said, “We saw the Javelin project as the ultimate challenge.”
Cox designed the entire rear end, which included the housing, axles, full-floating hubs, spool, linkage to locate the rear, and the brakes. But he added a twist: he “gronked” the rear end. Gronking is adding camber in the rear wheels by bending the housing; in this case, by adding 1 degree of camber, with the wheel bearings pressed into the housing crooked. Unfortunately, in testing the bent rear tore up axle splines, so back to the drawing board Cox went, adding Olds Toronado front-wheel-drive U-joints. In testing at Sebring, they determined with either the gronked or conventional rear it made no difference in lap times, so the gronking experiment was abandoned.
One happy outcome during development was using Girling disc brakes with Lincoln rotors. Cox devised a simple system for removing the rotors as quickly and easily as the brake pads. This played hell with the competition because they would watch the Javelin team change out rotors extremely fast, while it took away costly time in the pits for them to do the same. They never did figure out what Penske had done. Comprehensive aerodynamics testing was conducted, which not only aided the 1970 cars but also the heavily face-lifted 1971 models still being finalized for production.
Many improvements befell the 1970 AMC line, with one being the Gen III improvements of increased deck height for all three engines made. The 290 increased displacement to 304, the 343 increased to 360 using the 304’s stroked crank, and the 390 increased to 401 ci. They also “dog-legged” all heads, which aided in better exhaust flow. The intake bolt pattern was altered, which helps in identifying Gen III intake manifolds today.
What Traco did with this improved line of engines was to destroke a Gen III 360, making comparable power to a then-current 305 Chevy at 430 hp. But engine failures plagued early testing and right into the season’s first race. Testing on the dynos yielded no problems, but without warning, engines would fail on the track. Oil starvation was the culprit, but the team could not pin down the cause. Team Javelin DNF’d the first race at Laguna Seca, then the second race was canceled. For the third race at Lime Rock, both cars DNF’d again, and the jeers from Parnelli Jones and Ford about “winning seven races” became louder.
What was discovered through testing was the combo of hard breaking going into corners starved the oil pump immediately, stacking oil into the valve cover. Extensive testing at Elkhart Lake involved numerous engine builders creating myriad oil pans with trick baffles, swinging oil pumps, and trap doors hinged on bearings. From these tests, external drain backs were found to be a marginal improvement.
Then it was discovered Ford actually used external oil pumps in addition to the stock pump. Since there were no rules forbidding this, Team Javelin started using a dual-pickup pump with the secondary pickup scavenging oil from the uphill side of the pan. In all, the team lost 23 engines. There were no further problems, and at Bryar in New Hampshire, they finished in Second and Third Place.
At Bridgehampton, AMC scheduled a meeting with Penske after the race. Donohue won that race under rainy conditions. At the meeting, AMC management said they were there to cancel the contract with Penske, but since they won the race, they decided to wait and see. What a close call.
Going from hero to zero, one of the Javelins lunched an engine during practice at Donnybrooke, and Donohue blew the other one 20 laps into the race. This time it was found that the strain of the dual-pickup pump was wearing out the drive gears on the cam, affecting the distributor running off of the same gears, which was throwing off timing. As the cars got further into a race, the ignition would start to retard, sometimes leading to backfiring and a definite lack of power. The answer was drilling new oil passages to feed oil to the gears.
In the end, Team Javelin would win three races—not seven. But AMC was in for 1971, so two of the three Javelins were sold to Roy Woods’ team, and Penske started to work on the newly re-skinned 1971 Javelins.
Over the winter, they did development work on the front suspension, brakes, as well as trying to squeeze more power from the engines at Traco. Then Donohue said, “We went back to the shop, started with a new bare chassis tub, and built a new car as perfectly as we knew how.”
One welcome Trans-Am rule change, initiated by Penske, was to allow dry-sump oil systems. Any lingering problems from oil gremlins would forever be a thing of the past for Team Javelin.
Donohue won the first race at Laguna, then lost the next two to Follmer. Donohue went on to win the next six races in a row, clinching the Trans-Am championship. But there was a difference in the 1971 season. The other manufacturers decided the incessant rule changes doubled the price to play each year, and it became too costly for the marketing shine. AMC was in it alone, and their backing and Penske’s knowledge for what it took to win gave Team Javelin a commanding edge, but the dynamics of previous years were gone.
The hollow victory in 1971 was the end of AMC’s Trans-Am assault, but Team Penske and AMC were not done racing. In 1972, AMC contracted Penske to compete in NASCAR, but that’s another story for another time.
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