Hi everybody,

For those of you familiar with this legendary beast, it shall not be tamed, and since the Walrus is no longer available as a great source of info, I thought I'd turn to this trusted forum for assistance , on to the story and problem.

This Saturday, the Ozark Rollers had a club meet in Tulsa,OK, my Grandmother, mother my son and I, thought it would be a great idea to take the yellow Peril ,escorted by the green "T-Rex" v70, to the meet, since it had been recently resurrected after replacing a head gasket from a return from another meetup. About 35 mins into our hour trip to the big city, the car started sputtering. I could get some power by feathering the gas a bit but I was slowly losing speed dropping from 65 to 50, I flipped the hazards and exited the highway and at that point. We pulled into a auto salvage and the car sputtered to a halt, I was able to restart but it was idling really low maybe 400rpm (the Walrus has this one "tweaked" to idle about 1.6-1.8k, unsure why). as we came to a rest , Mrs.Walrus advised she saw a big puff of black smoke belch out from our tailpipe about the same time. We decided to try to continue on to the meet, I put the car in gear, and got about 200 ft and another big puff of black smoke and a decent backfire so the Yellow Peril decided, that was against the laws of her nature to go on, and we resorted to towing her home. Now here's the twist, On Sunday afternoon , go out to troubleshoot, maybe my fuel lines are having issues, maybe a compression issue, I put the key into the ignition and it started right up, I proceeded to see if i could replicate the sputter but was about to drive about town for about 20 mins to get her warmed up and it never happened, the car also got me to work this morning just fine , however that's only a quick drive about 7 blocks away, any ideas on what kinds of things I should be checking


TL;DR drove about 40 mins, got a black puff of exhaust,then a backfire and more black smoke on restart, towed home, SEEMED to work fine the next day/try

Thanks for any info on the problem