Kaiser from our crew stopped by the other night to swap ECU’s. He just finished the conversion from automatic to manual on his Neon and was limping the car around with the old computer. In trade he had a brand new Mopar ECU that he didn’t want to use for a daily driver (with the cost of premium fuel these days) and we struck a fair bargain.

Both cars started right up and Kaiser and I were both interested to see what the Mopar computer did ‘out of the box.’ I frantically piled all the tires and items stored in the car off to the side of the parking lot and we took off. Rev-limiter? What rev-limiter? No speed cap either. The car makes power all the way past six grand. After the car was warmed up I wound it all the way out to 7 grand. That’s quite enough for a motor with 80,000+ miles on her.

I came up to traffic and began to slow from sub-light speed. The brakes dragged a little but didn’t bite while the pedal dropped to the floor. “Ahh… We have no brakes…” I announced calmly to Kaiser as I slipped into 3rd and engine braked the car. I safely pulled to the right and yanked the e-brake hard while looking for the anchor to toss out the window. We manged to pull off the highway and get back to the parking lot without incident.

The rear left brake line was dripping fluid when I pulled in. After a quick look, it was worse then I thought. It was coming from the hard line before the connector. The frame had rubbed away the metal and opened the line. My new set of braided replacement ends would do little to fix this, so I decided to replace all the hard lines and run them inside the car. I might as well do the fuel lines too. This afternoon I was up to Baker Precision to pick up fuel and brake line. I’m glad it happened now and not at a rally.