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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! In our last Hell Project matchup, we learned that two-thirds of Jalopnik readers would choose a Mustang-based Fauxrrari over an Integra-based one as their ride of choice in the Lake Of Fire. The Lake Of Fire, as we know, is rough on body panels… but not nearly as rough as it is on brain-scramblingly complex German electronics. That means we're going to return to Hell Über Alles , with a couple of precision-engineered German machines with bargain-of-a-lifetime price tags. The BMW E23 745i was quite a machine, with the 252 horses churned out by its turbocharged/intercooled 3.2 or 3.4 liter I6 representing a very impressive figure for its era, but they weren't sold in North America. BMW shoppers had to make do with the naturally-aspirated 733i and 735i over here… that is, unless a buyer was willing to brave the wilds of the gray-market import jungle...
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Amazingly, a Chevy (well, Chevy/Buick) managed to beat an obscure, 40-year-old German microcar in a heads-up Project Car Hell competition, with a 57-43 split in yesterday's voting . Today we're going back to the common-theme idea; inspired by all the love for the DOTS Cressida , we decided we ought to do a Project Car Hell matchup featuring a pair of Late Malaise boxy Japanese midsize sedans, complete with luxury features, independent rear suspensions, and big inline-six engines. Japanese stuff isn't normally hellish enough, however, due to their boring reliability and tediously good build quality. In order make things more interesting, these projects are going to require massive horsepower upgrades. Boost, engine swaps, whatever it takes! These days, the demand for the "four-door Supra" is so high that it's tough trying to find one cheap enough to serve as the basis for a project that's going to involve a lot of cutting and pasting. That doesn't mean it...
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After listening to the Jack Astro & the Asscrackistanis hit single , we approach the results of yesterday's Mix-n-Match Engine Swap Hell poll with a new understanding. The Ferarri-powered Porsche 912 didn't win because the swap process itself might be slightly less hellish than, say, the Series 60 Morris. No, it won because the spirit behind the swap is most in line with our purist-offending sensibilities! Yes, that's it! So now that there's a howling, torch-and-pitchfork-wielding mob of worshipers of German and Italian machinery clamoring to nail our hides to the wall, let's keep up the pressure, shall we? Please to give Signor Lieberman credit for dreaming up this matchup of a couple of his all-time favorites; this could have been a QOTD but I cruelly snatched the cars from his grasp and hurled them into the abyss that is Project Car Hell . Feel like bombing around some dirt roads in a screaming, get-sideways, turbocharged, classic all-wheel-drive rallying Audi , in fact the very Audi...
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After seeing how the Deutschland V12s went over in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll , with the 850i just barely beating the pair of 750iLs, we've learned that it's possible to raise the price of admission charged at the Fiery Gates of Vehicu-Hades and still have legions of madmen ambitious project lovers forking over the cash and diving into the flames. So get ready to whip out ever-thicker rolls of Benjamins, folks, because we're on a one-way trip to Dante Land today! The 80s may well have been the decade in which the Ferrari made the most sense . Ferraris of the era didn't have the ungodly awesome racecar cool of the 60s models, and they weren't as loony fast as the current crop, but what goes better with looted S&Ls, Learjets paid for with junk bond profits, and sniffing coke off a $10,000-a-day Brazilian prostitute's rock-hard belly than a Ferrari? Exactly, and it's that sort of immediate-post-Malaise decadence you want when you have the prancing pony on your car's hood ornament...
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