The Mustang of Vail Pass

[fcjones]

I have been getting my hands black since I was 10. It relaxes me.

In the summer of '99 I was driving my '89 Ford Mustang 5.0 GT from Los Angeles to Chicago to visit my Dad. It had never stranded me before.

I personally had maintained every aspect of the vehicle. I keep my own service logs for every service I perform on it.

I was eastbound going up the Vail Pass in Colorado, almost to Denver, right at the peak and I was really gunning it to keep up with all the rich ski-types in their new SUV's.

If you have driven this route before, you can feel the engine struggling with the high altitude, low oxygen density air.

Suddenly it just lost power, and the engine died but I was able to coast off an off-ramp and had enough momentum to get the car to a dirt pullout area. It was late afternoon.

It would start, but would not keep running. It was not overheating either, the temp guage said normal and the engine looked visibly okay.

I decided to just sit there and let it cool off. After 2 or 3 hours I started it and drove over the peak with the lights of Denver far below.

The engine was making a rather faint grinding or knocking noise. I strained my mind trying to figure out what happened back there, and what to do now.

Lucky for me, it was all down hill to Denver. I checked in to a Motel 6 there.

For the hell of it, I tried to wiggle the fan and it felt kind of sloppy like it was loose.

It occured to me that I had never replaced the fan. This fan is mechanical and has a fluid clutch built in to it.

So in the Motel 6 parking lot I installed a new fan.

Then I drove all the way to Chicago and back to LA with no problem. On the way back to LA, I even went over the Vail Pass again and gunned the hell out of it again, PASSING the rich ski-types, just to regain my faith!

What happened, I think now, is that due to a bad fan bearing, another bearing in the water pump may have started to seize up, causing a drag on the engine and making it stop. Because obviously the new fan fixed it!? To this day I am still not really sure what happened!

Thanks for reading if you got this far!