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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! Last time we simultaneously crushed and seared our fingers in the red-hot vise of the Hell Garage, the Shelby-ized Dodge Omni beat hell out of the Shelby-ized Dodge Shadow in the poll. Today, with the New England 24 Hours of LeMons race coming up in just a few days, we're thinking about the kind of car it takes to win the most prestigious trophy of the event. No, that's not the one that goes to the so-called "overall winner" (although a team does get some heavy-duty bragging rights by taking that honor ). We're talking about the coveted Index Of Effluency trophy, the one given to the team that achieves beyond all reasonable expectation in a seemingly hopeless "race car." You contend for the IOE by showing up in a looks-fast-on-paper car that everyone knows is going to blow up for sure (e.g., Maserati Biturbo, Merkur XR4Ti,...
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Yesterday, we saw the Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72 Hell Project competition go to the '72 Volvo 1800ES by a Nixon-over-McGovern-style landslide, with 73% of the vote favoring the Volvo over the '72 Cougar. Today we're going to punish reward Graverobber for his run of incredible PCH tirades (such as this one , this one , or- my personal favorite- this one ) by making him work harder for a PCH Tipster T-shirt than anyone else ever has. The deal I made with him: he chooses the cars, he writes the tirade for the cars, I include the tirade in the post... and everyone wins! Well, except for those who grumble about seeing Mercury Cougars in two consecutive Choose Your Eternity challenges, that is, but we'll pay that price. Perhaps the second-gen Mercury Cougar took such a beating from the Volvo in yesterday's matchup because most folks much prefer the styling of the first-gen 1967-70 models. If so, today's cat might have a better chance, because it's...
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In possibly the most humiliating defeat for France since the whole Algerian débâcle, a French car lost a Project Car Hell challenge to American machinery, with the '61 Simca Aronde getting crushed beneath the rusted hulks of a pair of Lincoln Continentals... and that's with the Simca getting some help from one of the finest PCH commenter tirades we've ever seen (notice hereby given: Graverobber has raised the Commenter Tirade Bar to hitherto unprecedented levels). We'll need to give France a chance to regain its former PCH glory very soon, but we're going to get all political-journalist on your ass with today's choices. I'm not one of those guys (and they're all guys) who blindly worship every mark that the dope-palsied hand of Hunter S. Thompson ever set on paper, but when the man was on, he was really on (insert rant here about annoying HST wannabes who focus on the lifestyle instead of the writing). Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72 stands...
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It looks like Italy has been knocked off the PCH Superpower throne by the UK, according to the results of yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll . That means that PCH SuperGigaPower France awaits the chance to take on its historical PCH rival from across the Channel. But first, let's see how Britain fares against a rival that, though falling somewhat short of true PCH Superpower status due to the stubborn reliability of so many of its vehicles, still puts forward some strong Hell Project competition. And, just to make things interesting, let's get our contestants from Canada, where an iron atom never found an oxygen atom it didn't want to establish a caring, lifelong relationship with. We can thank HoserDave for these tips, and of course a Project Car Hell Tipster T-shirt will soon be thrown into a dogsled and mushed all the way up to his igloo. We had a Triumph GT6 just last week, but somehow that wasn't enough British Leyland Hell! Plus it sat for 23 years, which may...
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With the '67 Scout 800 just barely ahead of the '78 Scout II in yesterday's International Harvester Choose Your Eternity poll , I figured today would be a good time to return to Sports Car Hell. Now, it's child's play to find innumerable cool/nightmarish British machines beckoning to you from the smoldering gates to Hell, but after seeing the Honda S800 earlier I knew what I needed to find to pair up with today's Blightymobile. The only thing that would make a Lotus better as a PCH entrant would be if you could somehow add some French engineering to it... wait, hold on a second- the early-70s Europa had a Renault-built 5-speed transmission! Now it's just a matter of finding one cheap enough to make you think dreams of legendary Lotus handling are agonizingly within reach. Perhaps this '72 Lotus Europa (go here if the ad disappears) for an asking price of $6,000 is just the ticket! In one of those Hell Project understatements we love so much, all you get about...
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Well, the Jeep FC-150 obliterated the Spanish 2CV in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll, no doubt because even an Hecho en España label doesn't add enough weight on either side of the Cool/Hell scale when you're looking at a 2CV. However, we shouldn't start to thinking that France isn't a PCH superpower just because the 2CV was too simple to be truly hellish... which is why we're going with an all-French matchup for today's choices. How much fun can you have in a car with less than one liter of engine displacement? Aside from jumping a Chevy Sprint , that is? Just watch the video below to see: That's a Simca 1000 there (and yes, we know the car in the video probably has more than the factory's 944 screamin' CCs of displacement), and you can have one! Just hand over $1,300 to the seller of this 1968 Simca 1000 GLS (go here if the ad disappears), and you'll have taken the first- and no doubt easiest- of many, many, many steps towards your goal...
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So we had another near-tie in yesterday's DKW-versus-Fairlady Choose Your Eternity poll , which may be partially attributable to the hard-to-decipher photos in each vehicle's listing. If you can't see the whole car, you can't tell how hellish and/or cool it really is, right? However, those photos were bad just because the sellers were too lazy to move the crap that's blocking the camera. How about the seller who can't seem to operate the camera at all? What does that tell you about the sort of hell you'd be getting into with the car- not just when trying to fix it up, but when negotiating to buy it in the first place? You can just imagine the sequence of events that will transpire when you try to buy a car from someone who uses photographs like the one in this ad for a 1972 Midget . It appears that the seller used a 1974-vintage tube-based video camera to get the photos, then used a disposable film camera to grab images off a malfunctioning first-gen color TV...
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After presenting our readers with the soul-wrenching choice between two V12 Jaguars in last Friday's PCH (which, by the way, had the '87 beating the '76 by a comfortable margin in your poll vote), you'd think we'd take a break from British steel for a...
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