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While I was at Infineon to drive the STaSIS S5 a couple weeks back, I kept seeing this silver blur howling past everything on the track. It looked like an old Quattro… but that fast? Sure enough, it was a Quattro; not only that, it's a genuine 1983 ur-Quattro with carbon-fiber bodywork cast from original molds brought over from Germany, 500 horsepower under the hood, the full STaSIS brake and suspension treatment… and license plates! When I found out that the STaSIS guys not only knew about the car but had helped hop it up for William Perkins, one of their expert race consultants, let's just say I was eager to learn more. The car is maintained at McGee Motorsports Group's shop at the track, and talk about a freakin' candy store - you'll definitely see some more of McGee's stuff here in the near future; in fact, if you're a regular at the Monterey Historics , you've already seen quite a few of their cars. Yes, that's a genuine NASCAR '63 Mercury Monterey...
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newVideoPlayer("/83_Cosmo_BigRun_JDM_494.flv", 506, 423,""); Roll up to the Playboy club in a Mazda Cosmo Big Run Genteel back in '83, and you'd be sure to get some special treatment from the bunnies. newVideoPlayer("/84_Mazda_Cosmo_Genteel_JDM_494.flv", 506, 423,"");
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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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newVideoPlayer("/83_Ford_FSeries_476.flv", 506, 423,""); Ford made the good ol' 240 and 300 inline sixes starting in 1964, and they had the torque and longevity to be great truck engines. By 1983, however, pushrod sixes were going the way of the vinyl LP- quick, get a metric designation on that thing, so buyers will think it's one of those newfangled V6s! We're a little skeptical that a Late Malaise F series pickup ever got 30 MPG highway, but maybe that test was done at a "highway speed" of 42 MPH, using a liquid measurement known as "Ford Truck Gallons," which are equal to 1.5 regular gallons.
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. We haven't seen many Hondas in this series, though I'm still hoping to find a very early Civic or- better still- a 600 on the island. The early-80s Civic wagon is a good example of the Japanese cars that shifted American car buyers' opinion from the "cheap, gets good gas mileage" view of the 70s towards the "these things never break" view widely held today. They were once everywhere, but nostalgia doesn't adhere too strongly to a reliable appliance... and so most were crushed as they hit 300,000 or so miles on the clock. 2,033 pounds. That's right, this car barely weighed one ton, and it would haul four passengers and plenty of cargo. With only 69 horsepower, lots of wind noise, and no cupholders, a car with the same specs as the '83 Civic wagon would be laughed out of the showrooms by car buyers today....
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Today we're looking at a vehicle owned by our first four-time DOTS honoree, WhatWouldJesseDo . Well, I think this is Jesse's truck; my Black Metal V8olvo emailed me about his new truck, and I found this Hilux parked on his block. When you have a '66 Datsun , a '61 Mini , and a '70 Puma GT , you need something to haul parts! Give it a coat of camouflage paint, install a water-cooled Vickers machine gun on a crude mount in the bed, and fill all available space with jungle/desert/mountain/urban fighters and maybe some looted livestock, and you'll see the Hilux in its natural element. It also looks good with a nice shiny paint job, parked in the battle-free East End of Alameda. In fact, this may be the cleanest 25-year-old Toyota truck I've ever seen; most others around here have seen 800,000 miles of hard use hauling plumbing...
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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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Perhaps it was the terrifying rust coupled with warrior heritage, but somehow an American Hell Project managed to beat an obscure Warsaw Pact convertible in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll. Actually, it was a near-tie, but still a triumph for the red-white-and-blue over the, uh, blue-white-and-red. Today we're going to up the price of admission to the Gates Of Project Car Hell, though we've found a couple of high-buck cars available at (what ought to be) reasonable prices. Will you go with Late Malaise British super-luxury or Mangled Super Tokyo Hoonage? It's up to you: buy now, repent at agonizing leisure! You want a genuine right-hand-drive, straight-from-Japan R33 Skyline GT-R, don't you? Of course you do! A 250-horse twin-turbocharged 2.6 six (which is eager to be boosted up to ridiculous power numbers using off-the-shelf components and well-known tuning tricks), all-wheel-drive, and JDM-only prestige that will leave jaws dropping in your wake. You could take...
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Let's say you have a 1983 Pininfarina Spider Azzurra, which is a Fiat 124 built after Fiat handed production over to Pininfarina for a couple years (go here for the story), and you know it's something special . How do you show the world? Why, you convince the world it's actually a Ferrari, by dressing up the Fiat Twin Cam under the hood and then adding a great deal of body modifications. Hey, Fiat, Ferrari, what's the diff? They're both Italian, right? Don't forget the headlight shields and Von Dutch shift knob! Thanks to LTDScott for the tip. galleryPost('1983Pininfarina', 6, '1983 Pininfarina Azzura For Sale');
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Our last Japanese representative on DOTS Truck Monday was the '80 Plymouth Arrow , but the last one actually bearing the name of an overseas manufacturer was the '74 Datsun of a couple months ago. That means we're due for another Japanese Truck Monday, so let's take a look at this fine tape-striped Late Malaise Toyota pickup. Oh, sure, these things are still everywhere (including the motor pools of every strongman, warlord, and wannabe Lord Humungus in the world), but immortality shouldn't disqualify a vehicle from Down On The Street! I found this rack-equipped 4X4 parked on the same block as the '53 Packard Cavalier and just around the corner from the '74 Plymouth Satellite Sundance Edition ; perhaps the presence of those two stellar DOTS heroes blinded me to the presence of this fine work truck for all these months. Check out these fine Late Malaise tape stripes! It's true that the 22R engine in this truck might not have been the mighty bass-boat-haulin'...
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I've been trying to do at least one Japanese DOTS car every week or so, but after two Toyotas in a row (not counting the Plymouth-badged Mitsubishi ), it's time for... a Nissan. We've seen one of the last cars Nissan made right before the Datsun-Nissan branding changeover , so now let's look at one of the first ones sold purely as a Nissan in the United States. The Sentra nameplate replaced the 210 in North America; both were rebadged versions of the Sunny. Except for the SE-R, it's pretty easy to forget the Sentra has ever existed. That's partly because they've long been hidden in the vast shadow cast by the Corolla and Civic... and partly because they're such generic little transportation appliances. This one is a pretty solid daily driver; these things are so nearly invisible that it's easy to forget you're looking at a car that's pushing a quarter-century in age. The '87 Civic 4WD wagon lives on the same block and seems much more of its...
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newVideoPlayer("83_Toyota_Truck_Diesel_476.flv", 475, 376,""); I don't think I've ever seen a Toyota diesel pickup in the United States, although this ad clearly shows that they were available in '83. In a not-so-subtle jab at GM and their disastrous Olds 350 diesel conversion, the announcer makes it clear that the Toyota truck has "a true diesel engine- not a converted gasoline engine." Oh, what a feeling!
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After all these months of DOTS, we've only seen two water-cooled VWs (a Rabbitamino and a Quantum ). The island is buzzing with air-cooled Beetles (so many, in fact, that I could probably show nothing but Type 1s in this series for a solid month), but what happened to all those Rabbits? They used to be everywhere! And let's not even talk about Dashers and Sciroccos. So, I've been keeping a lookout for vintage water-cooled Wolfsburg machinery, and was rewarded with a few more Rabbitaminos and this 4-door '83 Rabbit. VW ditched the Rabbit nameplate for North American Golfs after the 1984 model year, so this is one of the last of the original Rabbits. I did my high-school driver training in a very loose dual-brake-pedal 70s Rabbit... which, come to think of it, was the last time I've driven a Golf of any sort. The LS Rabbit for 1983 came with 74 fuel-injected horses... which wasn't all that bad for a Late Malaise Era subcompact. Of course, 74 horses coupled with an...
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