|
Browse by Tags
All Tags » 1980S » FX16 ( RSS)
-
|
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...
|
-
|
The race is over and they're packing up the Traveling LeMons Circus now. The winner more or less led the race the entire time, flag to flag. To absolutely nobody's surprise, it's the Team SCHWING Toyota Corolla GT-S FX16, which avoided penalties, ran fast laps, and finished several laps in front of the #2 car (the Bikini Racer Camaro). I've got thousands of photos of the action to show y'all, but they'll have to wait until the carnies have packed the Tilt-A-Whirl back into the trailers. Check in during the week for further Yeehaw It's Texas LeMons madness!
|
-
|
There was some grumbling over the choices in our last Choose Your Eternity challenge (which was won by the '77 Levis Edition AMC Hornet AMX by a healthy margin), ostensibly because they were too easy… but we know the real reason: being reminded of the Malaise Era brings up the uncomfortable parallels between the hard economic times then and those now . Of course, there are differences; sure, the current war is more expensive- in dollar terms- than was Vietnam, but inflation isn't the raging beast it was back then (though the bill for our 15-year debt binge looks to be just as painful as 20% inflation was). What we need is a flashback to Morning In America ! The 80s, when the Evil Empire was crumbling and Toyota still built cars that didn't hit you like a triple Valium with cough syrup chaser; yes, it's Corolla Time! As we all know, the problem with Japanese PCH cars is that parts are too easy to find, the build quality is too high, and Japanese engineers- particularly those...
|
-
|
We saw a rear-drive Corolla GT-S a few months ago, but we haven't yet seen one of the front-drivers. Things involving the Corolla name in North America got a little confused in the mid-80s, what with the different platforms available at the same time and then the Corolla-clone Nova (and Toyota-branded Corollas as well) being built in California . The AE86 gets all the attention from the donuts-in-mall-parking-lot kids these days, which may be why even rarer GT-S FX16s like this one survive as reasonably original daily drivers. Decal emblems? Plastic crypto-racy side trim? Paint the color of Cyndi Lauper's lipstick? Welcome to the 80s! I spotted this car on the same East End block as the '82 Mercedes-Benz 380SL and a couple of DOTS cars I haven't posted yet, so we're talking about a DOTS gold mine second only to the block with the Morris Minor convertible , '69 Cutlass convertible , '47 Plymouth , and '54 Ford . I've always thought this vent/window arrangement...
|
|
|
|