|
Browse by Tags
All Tags » Choose Your Eternity » Italy ( RSS)
-
|
Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! Britain has defeated Italy in a PCH Superpower Showdown (after two consecutive defeats , with the Triumph Stag going 70-30 against the Alfa Romeo Giulia Super yesterday. Today we're going to let Italy regain its bruised Hell Project pride, with an all-Fiat matchup! The early Fiat 124 coupes sure are wonderful machines, but they're rarer than honest politicians in North America. The few that came over here became red powder and wistful memories a couple decades back… except for this one in Oregon (go here if the ad disappears), which is priced so low we dasn't reveal it here, for fear of being deafened by screams of disbelief. This one needs some work, we'll be the first to admit, although the seller has decided to spare us the troublesome details in his description. "Good condition to restore" is all we get, and that should be enough...
|
-
|
The 6.9 Mercedes-Benz used its JFG status as a knotted club to pound the bratwurst out of the BMW L6 in yesterday's Hell Über Alles PCH poll , winning by one of the most lopsided margins we've ever seen. Today I'm so inspired by the San Francisco daily-driven 1970 Fiat 500 that I've started shopping for potential Fiat projects. Yes, I've suppressed all those childhood memories of my mom's '73 Fiat 128, which was the source of so many "family outing derailed by car trouble" episodes that they all sort of blur together into one mental snapshot of a green boxy car being hooked up to a tow truck. But your 128s, your 124s, even your X-1/9s... they're too easy! What do you get when you take a 45-year-old Ghia-rebodied Fiat 1500 (one of only 600 manufactured) and let it sit in a field for a decade or two? You get this 1963 Ghia 1500GT , that's what! The Ghia 1500GT is Concentrated Essence of Italian Car Hell, and the best part is that it's going...
|
-
|
The '38 Graham-Paige did a number on the '38 Mercedes-Benz in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll , similar to Marshal Zhukov's number on Berlin (and our poll would have been even more one-sided if we'd stacked a Pobeda against the Benz). Today I feel like returning to the perennial struggle between PCH Superpowers Italy and France, because a Project Car Hell without one of the Superpowers is like knuckles without fresh scabs. The last time we saw a Simca 1000 in this series , it got walloped by a matchup even more unfair than yesterday's (and that was without the taint of National Socialism hovering around one of the contestants like a vile stink-cloud). The Citröen SM is the H-bomb of PCH entrants, and two of them... well, the Simca never had a chance. But the Simca 1000 is a powerful contender in its own right, with the combination of a history packed with wild rally hoonage (see the video above) and French design. And we have just the '64 Simca 1000GL for...
|
-
|
With Italy edging out a narrow victory over Britain in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll and advancing to the first-ever Project Car Hell Superpower Showdown with France, I decided we needed to add an extra layer of Hell to each nation's entrant in order to honor this occasion with the solemnity it deserves. Not that we won't repeat the Superpower Showdown schtick over and over, of course, but this one is first! So, what we got here is PCH Superpower cars with Japanese engines. Now, you figure maybe a Japanese engine would make such a car more reliable, but I've been careful to select car/engine combos that involve twin-turbocharged complexity and fragile-chassis-twisting power. France? Italy? You decide! The Renault 4CV was a sort of French interpretation of the Volkswagen Beetle... which meant that it wasn't much like the Beetle at all, other than having an ass-engined configuration and being cheap. Would you like suicide doors on your tiny econo-car, monsieur...
|
-
|
After a pair of close ones, we finally had a decisive victory in our last Choose Your Eternity poll , with the Taurus SHO using its Yamaha power to roar to victory over the SRT- Faux by a 70/30 margin. We're not surprised by that, but we don't have the foggiest idea who should be considered the favorite in today's matchup. Either choice would be serious fun with all the bugs worked out... but such big, crawly bugs! Today we're going old school with the source for a PCH ad; I dropped by Alameda's Lee Auto Supply (the last independent auto-parts store in the area and sponsors of the Park Street Car Show ) and taped to the counter was this flyer for a '77 Lotus Eclat . The Eclat was essentially a fastback Elite, with all the pluses and minuses of the breed. You know it'll stick to the road... if it can reach the road, that is! This one is only $6500, and the seller claims it runs. Formerly owned by a "retired head mechanic for Lotus Racing," this car has...
|
-
|
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...
|
|
|
|