|
Browse by Tags
All Tags » Choose Your Eternity » 24 hours of lemons ( RSS)
-
|
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...
|
-
|
Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! Yesterday, the "get out of jail free" supercharged Beretta edged out the "must stand 100 feet back to take the photo" Mazda Millenia in the Choose Your Eternity poll , in a 54:46 split vote. For today, we're going with a couple of cars suggested by 24 Hours Of LeMons -loving readers who were inspired by the Corvair and Peugeot 505 Turbo racers to look for even better LeMons entries… When you think about a Chrysler-engined British car, the Jensen Interceptor is probably the first thing that comes to mind. While the Interceptor makes a fine Project Car Hell candidate , its perceived value to Jensen masochists aficionados is such that you'll never find one for anywhere close to the 500-buck 24 Hours Of LeMons limit. Hold on, though- what about the Bristol 408 ? Powered by the good ol' reliable Chrysler 313 , the Bristol combined...
|
-
|
Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! After a 24 Hours Of LeMons race, I like to do a PCH pitting the #1 and #2 cars against each other, but this time it's going to be a bit different. You see, the #2 car in Houston was a 2nd-gen Camaro, and they're really easy projects- cheap, simple, and with ridiculously easy parts availability. That means we'll be going for a Japan-versus-Germany 80s Hot Hatch Challenge today, and you Camaro fans can console yourselves with the fact that you can fix most problems on your cars with a pipe wrench and zip-ties. For that matter, the Toyota Corolla FX16 is almost too reliable to show up here, but most of them spend their entire lives with the tach needle bouncing around the 8 grand mark and the body panels scraping telephone poles, with repairs performed by 19-year-old hoons with $9.98 Taiwanese socket sets and 12-packs of Steel Reserve to provide...
|
-
|
Not very shockingly, the Mercedes-Benz 450SEL beat up on the Pontiac Bonneville in our 6.9 Liters Of Misery Choose Your Eternity poll on Friday, no doubt because voters were counting camshafts or dollars in the original purchase price or something. Today we're going to have the traditional post-24 Hours Of LeMons PCH, only instead of letting you choose between the cars that finished #1 and #2 (in this case, a Supra and a Jetta) we're going to choose between two cars we really, really want to see someone bring to a LeMons race. They were expensive when new, featured sophisticated DOHC V8s and rear-wheel-drive, and came equipped with dizzyingly complicated electronics and plush luxury gear… yet it's possible to pick either one up for a LeMons-friendly price today! We've seen the Porsche 928 in the Hel l Garage before ; in fact, we've had more 928s here than any other car! Why is that, you ask? They were insanely expensive, insanely hard to fix, and insanely (for their...
|
-
|
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,...
|
-
|
Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! We had what may be our all-time closest vote yesterday, with the 4x4 Econoline beating the lowrider Econoline 202 votes to 200. Today we're going racing! We've had Arse-Freeze-A-Pa-Looza LeMons PCH and the LeMons San Francisco PCH , and now tradition dictates that we have a LeMons South Edition PCH. Just in time for teams still hoping to make the deadline for the Yeehaw It's Texas LeMons event! With Mazda RX-7s taking the first two places at LeMons South (not to mention three of the top ten at the Arse-Freeze-A-Pa-Looza ), you've got to figure you're looking at one of the all-time great budget race cars. Light, simple, and powered by a wailing rotary that's sure to give your competitors a migraine by the time the race is over... and you can get 'em for peanut shells! Say, this '85 RX-7 with an asking price of only $200. Two...
|
-
|
The 429 Mustang II put up a good fight in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll , but only a French or Italian car really stands a chance against a Triumph GT6 when it comes to true Project Car Hell. Still, every so often you need to let a PCH underdog take on one of the superpowers. We're going to try it again today, with a British machine squaring off against a German-American mashup, only this time the theme is much different. One thing I've noticed with the cheaper PCH cars is the Super LeMons Potential many commenters observe in the entrants, and so today we're going to look at a couple of cars that would immediately bestow Legend In Their Own Time status upon any team entering either one in a 24 Hours of LeMons race. Each is priced below the $500 mark, each could (in theory) be a credible race car, and each would leave onlookers stunned with a potent mixture of awe, fear, and pity. When you're showing up at the track with your $500 race car, four cylinders under...
|
-
|
The last time we felt the flames of Project Car Hell licking at our flesh , the 2002 Maserati Coupe was beating the 1985 Ferrari Mondial by about a 60/40 margin in the polls. What lessons may be learned from this remain uncertain, but what is certain is that I've got 24 Hours of LeMons fever and I've got it bad; I'm scouring Craigslist day after day, looking for the right car to run in the Altamont race in May (even worse, sellers know I'm looking ). That can mean only one thing: a Choose Your Eternity poll covering the cars driven by the top two teams at the Thunderhill LeMons race! We never would have considered the Mazda Protege a likely candidate to win the 24 Hours of LeMons, but Team Red Meat and Poontang showed us that a near-stock '99 can do the trick. The problem is finding a running late-90s example for under $500; Red Meat and Poontang did it by finding one with horrendous body damage, but it's not an easy task. However, it can be done; here's a '97...
|
|
|
|