I haven't touched a Champion spark plug since 1990, and here's my "why" story. I was helping my roommate replace the timing chain on his Superbird in 1983, and being pretty young and stupid we decided to also do a tune-up while we were at the auto hobby shop at NAS Jacksonville.
We get the engine all back together, and do the tune-up, and we end up with a crank-no start situation. We thought we hadn't properly aligned the new chain and gears, so we took everything apart again and re-installed everything, and still we couldn't get the engine to start. We were scratching our heads when That Old Guy came over. That Old Guy is at every auto hobby shop at every military base in the World I think. He's some 50-70 year old dude that's worked on cars his whole life and knows about everything.
That Old Guy asked what the problem was and we told him. Then he asked what all we had done and we told him. Then all he asked was "Did you use Champion plugs?", which was the last thing we ever expected to hear him ask as we thought we had geeked up the timing. We said yes we had used Champions and he said to pull them out and never use Champion spark plugs again. We thought he was nuts, but we pulled the plugs and they were fine. We showed them to him, and he picked up each one and gave them a very slight bend and guess what? Four of the eight plugs had tiny hairline breaks in the insulators! They looked fine at first glance, but once you bent that insulator just a smidge, you could see they weren't. He said he saw that a lot with Champion plugs, and every time someone has a problem after a tune up in that shop, they've used Champion plugs. We went out and got a set of AC plugs, put them in, and the Bird fired up on the first crank.
Lesson learned? No. In 1990, I bought a set of Champions because they were on sale and put them in my 1987 Crown Victoria. The car ran like crap after I put the new plugs in, and I remembered what That Old Guy had told us. I pulled each plug out and checked it, and sure enough... two of the eight had cracks in the insulator and were misfiring. I put in a set of AC plugs and all was right with the World.
I haven't touched a Champion plug since, and only use Autolites in my Fords and AC Delcos in the Road Runner.
imp3:i was told many many moons ago by a chrysler medicineman that they looooove champions . i've used them every since .
