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Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! Yesterday, the Ferrari 328GTS vanquished the Japanese upstart NSX in a PCH Superpower Smackdown, which should make fellow PCH Superpowers Britain and France- unsettled since a Glas beat a Lotus day before yesterday - breathe a sigh of relief. Today we're going to let a couple of Superpowers have at it, in a Sub-$500 Race Car Challenge: Britain versus Italy! With UDMan's '63 Corvair raising the Index Of Effluency stakes for next year's New England 24 Hours Of LeMons , anyone who shows up with the same ol' snoozeworthy RX-7 or Camaro will be the object of well-deserved ridicule by his or her peers. You need to limp roar onto the track in a car manufactured by one of the Big Three PCH Superpowers, and we've managed to find one that already has a roll cage! In fact, this '68 Austin Healey Sprite is a proven racing champion, having...
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While Lincoln-Mercury dealers sold the European-made Ford Capri in North America, the cars themselves had no marque. Just to make things more confusing, Ford branded the later Fox Mustang-clone and Mazda 323-based Capris with Mercury emblems. Anyway, none of that matters for this car, which I spotted in an East Bay wrecking yard last weekend, because it has a date with the cold jaws that will get it ready for another spin of the steel-reincarnation wheel. galleryPost('DOTJ76Crapi', 3, '1976 Capri Down On The Junkyard');
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You know what we haven't had in this series? Donks! Oakland, just across a narrow estuary from Alameda, has a fair number of donkified GM cars , but the trend seems to be dying out. In any case, donkmania never got very big in Alameda, where old-school musclecars and lowriders seem to be the customization themes of choice. Here's a rare Alameda donk, which I shot next to Alameda High over the winter (no, it doesn't rain here in June). The car parked on that block every school day, so is it a teacher's car or a student's? Not sure if a student could afford 24s, but how many teachers would slap sparkly "24" emblems on the pillars? The '69 Continental that parks just down the block could well be a student car, though it's summer vacation now and the Lincoln is still there. As we know, most Jalopniks prefer a dekotora to a donk , but there's no need to get all riled up over a '76 Regal 4-door with 24s if you don't groove on the donk thing; wheels...
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newVideoPlayer("76_Triumph_TR7_476.flv", 506, 423,""); There's really not much we can add to the Legend Of The British Leyland Wedge here. American car buyers looking for a little car that weaves maniacally among mid-60s Galaxies and gets air cresting hills knew exactly where to go: follow the wedge-shaped British Leyland truck to the nearest dealer!
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The blowout Choose Your Eternity polls are fun, but we really enjoy the nail-bitingly close races... which is what we got yesterday, with the Roots-blown Old Beetle just barely beating the Pro Street Peugeot in a 175-165 vote split. Does that mean a German car just upset Project Car Hell GigaTeraPower France, or does the Detroit engine water down the 200-proof Frenchness of the Peugeot? We'll leave that question open for now, because today we're going to see how an Italian basket case fares against a brutalized European Ford! When a car ad leads off with the statement "This is another car that I have exhumed from my graveyard," you know you're in for a real treat. Better install some good air-conditioning in your garage, because it'll get mighty hot in there once you drag this '76 Lancia Scorpion inside! You Yurpeans might know this car as the Montecarlo , but don't let the similarity fool you- the US version had 81 horsepower instead of 120, because Yurp...
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The cars driven by the team members and audience at the 24 Hours of LeMons race tended to be more interesting than what you'd see in your typical East Bay parking lot. I saw an AMC Hornet with a trunk-mounted computer, a small-block XJ6 with a wicked-looking hood scoop, and this very clean Fox wagon... which turned out to be owned by Shawn, a helluva good mechanic who showed up as a last-minute crew addition and proved incredibly useful in the Black Metal V8olvo pit action. That's Shawn fueling our car in the gallery below. I can't recall the last time I saw an Audi Fox in any condition, much less one this nice. galleryPost('DOTSBEShawnFox', 6, '1976 Audi Fox In 24 Hours of LeMons Parking Lot');
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We're being buried under a deluge of car photos from Kitt and EJacobs , our dog-walking, camera-wielding friends in Denver, so we'd better keep 'em coming if we're ever going to get caught up. Today we're going to look at a battered but proud Malaise Matador, courtesy of Kitt. We can't be sure that this car is equipped with today's Engine of the Day, but there's a good chance a torquey AMC 258 motivates this survivor; otherwise it has a 304, 360, or 401. galleryPost('DOTSBEDenverMatador', 9, '1976 AMC Matador Down On The Denver Street');
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Those tiny 14" wheels that Chrysler put on the Volare? Pizza cutters! Shopping-cart wheels! Try adding another ten inches of diameter to a Volare's wheels and you'll finally fill up those unsightly wheelwells, as we can can see in this '76. You need to keep the air shocks fully inflated in order to keep rear wheel scrapage to almost-tolerable levels, and there appears to be about 3/4" of space between the fronts and the wheelwells... but just look at it! Thanks to LTDScott, Porcubimmer Pilot for the tip! [ Craigslist Stockton , go here if ad disappears]
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Yo, we got to dust these boys off! Whenever I hear the Public Enemy song , I always picture a car pretty much exactly like the Malaise Olds 98 that Schweppes has very kindly captured for us on the mean streets of Windsor, Ontario. Make the jump to read what Schweppes has to say about this fine automobile. galleryPost('DOTSBEWindsorOlds98', 4, '1976 Olds 98 Down On The Windsor Street'); I came home from work today, to find this '76 Oldsmobile 98 moored (parked doesn't feel like the right word) in front of my apartment. Unfortunately, neither my camera, or my ability with said camera can capture the epicness of this car. Still, far more interesting than most of the late-model commuter capsules populating Toronto (I'm waiting on a couple older cars to come out of hibernation though). Incidentally, Oldsmobile's tagline for '76 was "Can we build one for you?" I wish they still could.
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We've only seen two trucks from our favorite farm equipment maker so far in this series (the '48 KB-2 and the '80 Scout ), but those aren't the only International Harvesters on the island. Here's a '76 Scout II (equipped with a warlord-style camouflage paint job) that I spotted in the same East End neighborhood as the '84 Plymouth Reliant . Though the overall look of this truck is incongruous in a neighborhood full of crypto-Mission style turn-of-the-century bungalows, but wait until the Final Days are upon us and the atomic fire rains from the skies! Then this Scout will be full of freeze-dried food and ammo, headed at top speed for the compound in the mountains and leaving the rest of us to fight over charred rat carcasses in the rubble. And what better soundtrack for that drive to the compound than a little Bad Religion? Or maybe it's just an especially menacing commuter vehicle with single-digit gas mileage. galleryPost('DOTS76IHCScout', 14, '1976...
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While we don't see many French cars still on the North American streets, they do show up every so often at junkyards; we saw a '69 Renault 16 not long ago, and I stopped by the same junkyard last weekend and found this '76 Peugeot 504. The 504 is the only French car I've ever actually driven and worked on for any amount of time, and I recall thinking it was a very pleasant car to drive, when it ran... which was seldom. Most of my quality time with my Peugeot was spent staring at befuddlement at some broken mechanical device apparently designed in a parallel universe where every facet of automotive engineering diverged from our present course in about 1920. But it had factory 8-track, and you can't ask for more than that! Make the jump for Gallery #2. galleryPost('Junk76PeugeotTop', 6, '1976 Peugeot 504 Down On The Junkyard Part 1'); galleryPost('Junk76PeugeotJump', 14, '1976 Peugeot 504 Down On The Junkyard Part 2');
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Almost two months since the last Cadillac? That just seems wrong , given how many old Cads still roam the island. That's why today's DOTS machine will be a Malaise Eldorado, similar to the '78 Eldo we had a while back, only this one's a convertible instead of a T-top car. Back in '76, there was a lot of hoopla over the Eldorado convertible being the Last American Convertible ever . As it turned out, it was the last convertible for less than a decade, but back in the Malaise Era you had this palpable sense that everything good was being taken away. The 500-cubic-inch engine in this car was rated at 190 horsepower, which is on the depressing side... until you consider its grunt-tastic 360 ft-lbs-o-torque. This example is in such nice shape that I'm sure the owner doesn't care about the leisurely performance and single-digit gas mileage. I found this car in the East End, mere yards from the '56 Willys Station Wagon (which is visible in a couple of the photos...
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With the Malaisetastic '80 Plymouth Fire Arrow that we saw yesterday on my mind, I got to thinking about the meaning of the Malaise Era, specifically about the American-built vehicles sold during that period. Not captive imports like the Fire Arrow or quasi-domestics like the Capri, but real Detroit (or Kenosha) machinery. And, yes, I know that Jimmy Carter never actually uttered the word "Malaise" in his so-called Crisis of Confidence speech in 1979; what started as a joke term for the cars of the 1973-1983 period has now hardwired itself into my brain). Then I realized that I've forgotten the quasi-tradition of having a Friday poll for the readers to vote on their favorite DOTS machine of the week, so I owe you some DOTS poll action. That means it's time to jump like the late-70s inflation rate to pick your favorite of Alameda's Malaisewagons! Looking at these cars, I realize that I've been remiss in not photographing early-80s Detroit iron on Alameda's...
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