This AMC Gremlin Can Defeat 454 Corvettes in the Quarter Mile – Jalopnik

The year is 1972. You go to your Chevy dealer and fork over $6,000 for a Corvette with the hottest engine around: the LS5 454 big block. Sure, it only has 270 horsepower, 31 less than a modern Toyota Camry V6. However, with 390 pound-feet of torque and a curb weight of about 3,500 pounds, the Chevy big block rat-engine ‘Vette can still cruise through quarters in the low 14s.

You come to a traffic light next to an AMC Gremlin with a surprisingly choppy idle. When the light turns green, that Gremlin takes off in a cloud of tire smoke and all you can see are the taillights disappearing. That was no ordinary Gremlin. That was an AMC Gremlin 401-XR from Randall AMC, and unless you had the money for a Baldwin Motion Phase III Chevy, that puny economy hatchback was about the fastest car you could buy in ’72. Serendipity, fate and/or great fortune created the unique circumstances that allowed a 401 cubic inch V8 to be placed in the Gremlin’s engine bay.

First, all of AMC’s Gen-II V8s used the same block with different bores and strokes. With a center distance of 4.75 inches, there was reasonable room to grow. So if a car could fit the 290 version of the V8, it could also fit the 401. Second, AMC based the Gremlin on the larger Hornet, which already had an engine bay large enough for the V8. Third, AMC started putting 304 V8s in the Gremlin And they did it!

Now ’72 Corvettes could also be had with the lighter LT-1 solid lifter 350 rated at 255 horsepower, but that only had 280 pound-feet of torque and wasn’t as fast all quarter as the 454 LS5 ‘Vette, let alone a 401-XR. But it could certainly handle it and would easily fly past the Gremlin when the road got twisty. But that wasn’t the point of the 401-XR.

Buyers of a 401-XR could complete a quarter mile in the mid-13 seconds without any changes, handily keeping pace with the best of the pinnacle of American muscle surplus on the straights. Of course, leaving the 401 bone stock was not the gentleman’s way of humiliating the Big Three’s best smog-era machines. Car Craft magazine has made a minor modification to a 401-XR, giving it a set of headers, a hotter camshaft, and resetting the ignition timing. That was good enough for a 12.22 second quarter mile. Please note that this still applies to the stock low octane 8.5:1 compression ratio.

Just as Baldwin Motion guaranteed that your $10,000-plus Phase III Corvette could run an 11.5-second quarter, Randall looked you in the eye and told you that your under-$3,000 Gremlin 401-XR would run a 13.9 off the showroom floor. And the Randalls would probably applaud if you did.

Unfortunately, identifying bona fide Randall AMC Gremlin 401-XRs is no easy task. No two were exactly the same, and today there are enough replicas to muddy the waters even further. Mike Randall and his sons, Skip and Grant, just wanted to make fast AMCs for people who liked fast AMCs. They ordered 30 401 V8s for $389 each and put them in Gremlins because people paid them to do so.

If your Gremlin 401-XR has a 727 Torqueflite automatic (which Randall recommended because it can easily handle 426 Hemi torque levels) and you want to know if it’s legit, ask Mike Randall. He simply knocked on the Gremlin’s firewall to make the transmission fit, and he says he can quickly identify his hasty workmanship.