RAY: Hi, we're back. You're listening to Car Talk with us, Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, and we're here to talk about cars, car repair, and the answer to last week's Puzzler. This was, I believe, an historic, folkloric, automotive, militaristic ... I mean it had all the elements: intriguing, woeful ...
TOM: I vaguely remember it.
RAY: Scientific, yeah ...
TOM: There was something about the guy praying over the car.
RAY: What a crock
TOM: Well, here it is.
RAY: Yeah, flash back to the summer of '42. The place: North Africa. The British are battling for control there against the Germans and the Italians. In one of the towns that the British controlled is an Italian civilian named Tony Cardiello. Tony owns a trucking company, and the British demand to use his trucks to [move] their supplies. Tony refuses. Always willing to compromise, the British seize the trucks and throw Tony into a detention camp. Flash ahead to the late '70s, and there's Ed Winn, who was the author of this little Puzzler. Three years out of college, doing the only thing a political science grad could do to earn a living.
TOM: Working at McDonald's.
RAY: He's driving a truck. "Nineteen seventy-eight was a cold winter," he says, "and on many days the mercury was at minus 20 in the morning. Under those conditions, diesel engines, even the ones that had block heaters that were plugged in all night, didn't want to start. "Now the very same Tony Cardiello was the morning mechanic for this trucking company. He taught the drivers that when a truck wouldn't start, they shouldn't grind the battery down to nothing. They should try it for a few seconds and then leave enough juice for him to help them try again. And when they went crying to him about a truck that wouldn't start, his first question would be, 'Did you bless the truck?' When they said, 'No, we didn't bless the truck,' he'd walk over to it, face the bulldog ornament on the hood of the truck, and with a certain reverence, he'd make the sign of the cross and say, 'Now you start the truck. And nine out of 10 times, the thing would start right up. "The strange part was that when the drivers tried this themselves, they'd bless the truck, hop in, and turn the key. It never started. Did Tony have some connection to God forged in his experience in the camp, or had he stored up so much of that North African heat that he was radiating it into the engines? He never let on."
TOM: I know the answer.
RAY: He just blessed the truck and walked away, sure of his powers, saying, "Now you go. Good luck."
TOM: I know what it is. Tony was a very heavy drinker. And when he stood in front of that truck and said, "Hey," the fumes from the Jim Beam that he had been drinking all morning went right into ... it was like starting fluid.
RAY: Well, you're close.
TOM: Yeah, I am?
RAY: So the X factor here is time. A diesel engine requires or relies on the heat of compression to combust the fuel. So when it's minus 20, and you get out there and you turn the starter and it goes, you're compressing that ice-cold air, but not getting it hot enough to start the engine because it won't get the air temperature of that compressed air up to the ignition point of the fuel. And when these guys ran off to find Tony, time went by. And the friction that was inherent, and the pistons going up and down in the cylinders, had enough time to expand the pistons and the rings enough so that on the second try the compression would be just enough so the thing would fire up. And that's why nine times ...
TOM: Nine times out of 10.
RAY: Out of 10, the thing would start up, because Tony knew, and Tony never let on. They'd have to torture him to get the secret out of him.
TOM: He's back in the camp now.
RAY: Do we have a winner?
TOM: Yes, the winner is Janice Baxter from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and for having her answer selected at random from the Hefty bag full of correct answers that we got, Janice is going to get a $25 gift certificate to the Shameless Commerce Division, which is at the Car Talk section of cars.com. And with that $25 gift certificate, Janice can get a Car Talk woolen winter muffler, wrapped in -- get this -- a genuine muffler clamp.
[ Car Talk Puzzler ]
