Richard Petty's Abandoned 'Funeral Limo' Cadillac Blows Radiator After Sitting 28 Years

Richard Petty is probably the first name that pops into motorsport fans’ minds when the words ‘NASCAR’ and ‘legend’ cross swords in the same conversation. The King’s long streak of records on the oval speedways spans 34 years, and all of Detroit’s Big Three have built at least one race car for him.

He might be more closely associated with Chrysler’s Barracudas and Superbirds, as well as Dodge, but he also successfully cooperated with General Motors. Petty’s last NASCAR championship was won with Chevy and Olds muscle, and he also had an affinity for GM products outside the race circuit.

But that was some three decades ago, and 1995 is the last year of road service for this interminable carrier of mourners and soon-to-be-husbands (the two categories didn’t cross paths in the car, however). After that, it was parked by the woods on the Petty property. After sitting for so long, it’s not a cataclysmic surprise that it doesn’t run anymore.

Alas, it got revived and brought back to life after several days of wrenching from the popular YouTuber Dylan McCool and Thad Moffitt, Richard Petty’s grandson. One of the reasons for this lengthy resuscitation is the absence of the ignition key; another one is the sheer size and intricate installment of the motor and its ancillaries in the swimming pool-sized engine bay.

The 1974 Cadillac Fleetwood 75 was a low-series limo (1,005 were assembled), and it holds the title as the longest production car in the world, at 252.2 inches (6.4 meters), with a wheelbase of 151.5 inches (3.85 meters). With a crater at the front end and another in the rear (the deck is just as massive as the front clip), working on this abandoned Cadillac proves quite challenging.

The good news is that once the steering wheel is dismounted off the column and the ignition switch is removed, the engine can be hot-wired from the outside. With a jug of fuel acting as a temporary, front bumper-mounted tank, the 472-cubic-inch torque tyrannosaur finally fires up. Granted, it needed a new starter and plugs to start cranking, but once it got going, it rolled (for a brief moment, before the radiator gave up and started blowing steam).

For some reason, the YouTuber claims the engine to be a 500-incher (the 8.2-liter), but that gigantic powerplant went into the Eldorado in 1974. Besides, the bigger V8 was just an over-bored version of the standard 472, with an almost perfect square architecture, at 4.3”x4.304” (190.2x109.3 mm).

The 7.7-liter mastodont (or, to be faithful to Cadillac’s spelling of the period, ‘7.7-Litre’) was a shadow of its prime days before the Clean Air Act and the OPEC oil crisis. At an SAE net 205 hp (208 PS) and 380 lb-ft (515 Nm), the ogre V8 came paired with a THM 400 automatic to set the 2.7-ton luxo-barge in motion.

As ‘the only American production-built car specifically designed and built as a limousine,’ the 75 offered not one but two independent air conditioning systems. The Automatic Climate Control units were separated: one for the person behind the wheel (the owner or a chauffeur) and the second for its nine passengers.