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Dec 10, 2008 05:30 PM
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Detroit, 1:35 AM
Wed Feb 10
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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! Yesterday, the Humber Super Snipe got out-prestiged by the Aston Martin DBS, according to the Choose Your Eternity poll, and you'd think we'd follow up Britain-on-Britain and Italy-on-Italy matchups with a matchup honoring the other PCH Superpower, France. Instead, we're going to make PCH Supergalactic Megapower France do battle with lowly PCH underdog America today, and then we'll have a France-on-France matchup.
Can a Ford Falcon ever hope to generate the kind of toxic sulfurous flames needed to make an ordinary garage into a Hell Garage? The early Falcon was simple and reliable, shared a lot of components with other Ford products, and served as the basis for the first-gen Mustang, which- as we all know- benefits from compre-goddamn-hensive aftermarket parts support. Sure it can, provided there's a backyard-built blow-through-carbureted twin-turbo setup slapped on its 289! Yes, you can buy such a car (go here if the ad disappears), though we can't say how much the seller will take for it. It's got a spool-equipped 8" Ford rear end, which should be a real barrel of death laughs on wet pavement, and all the hassle of the turbo plumbing has been done. The engine is fried, most likely with the custom ventilated pistons you often get with the funky fuel delivery of blow-through turbo systems- "DIALED BOOST UP AND NOW MOTOR HAS LOTS OF BLOW BY POSSIBLE BAD RING, BUT ENGINE STILL RUNS!!"- but the junkyard, with its legions of cheap 5.0s, beckons; you could just keep blowing up $200 engines until you got everything set up right. We'd probably ditch the carburetor and go with some form of fuel injection, then add some intercoolers… and then there'd be all the fun of broken- and increasingly costly- drivetrain components if the engine made the 300-600 horses such a setup is good for. Still, how hard could it be? Thanks to LTDScott for the tip!
While that Falcon would be fun if by some miracle you could get it running right, leaf springs and drum brakes don't make for an all-around pleasant driving experience, especially when you're making about five times the power the car's designers had in mind. If you're going to go fast, it's best to do so in a car designed for screaming performance as well as serious comfort, and that means you need to find yourself something French! The Peugeot 405 Mi16 is such a car, but it's so hard to find them over here in North America, and the prices! Fortunately, our own Matt Hardigree is searching for a personal Hell Project right now, and he's been scared to death by decided to share this Texas-sized Mi16 deal with us: Two 1989 Peugeot Mi16s (go here if ad disappears) for just $1,500! One of them doesn't run, because the timing belt went bye-bye and there were some personal-space-violation issues between the pistons and valves, but the engine in the quasi-beat-looking gray one works just fine (by the way, have you ever noticed that American Peugeot owners always have parts cars?). All you need to do is pick the best parts from each and make one good Mi16… well, that's assuming that the gray car- which sat for an alleged seven years before getting back on the road- can contribute anything meaningful beyond a not-yet-destroyed cylinder head. Anyway, you'll make it happen!
Send an email to Murilee Martin, the author of this post, at murilee@jalopnik.com.
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