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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. Yes, I'm back in California this weekend, so it's time for an Alameda flashback! More »
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The Türbö Schnitzel XR4Ti has competed in several LeMons events here in South Carolina, with predictable results each time: KABOOM! Obviously, an XR4Ti must have a turbocharged Ford engine, but there's no law that says it can't be a V8! More »
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William Randolph Hearst created his San Simeon castle by importing the best of Europe's ancient architecture and having Julia Morgan find ways to incorporate it. Today, Nice Price or Crack Pipe has a Ford Sierra that would make Hearst proud. More »
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Historically X marks the spot, however Ford seemed to miss the target with their mid-eighties imports. Today, Nice Price or Crack Pipe wants to know if time has improved the perception of their aim. More »
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Bad timing, bad marketing and bad pricing have all killed a number of great cars. With a little help we've identified these ten great cars that sold like complete crap. More »
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After every 24 Hours Of LeMons race, we put together this list of the top finishers for you. And when we say "top," we mean "every single car that managed to get onto the track." More »
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As always, there was no shortage of BMW E30s at the last LeMons race, but we also saw representatives of British Leyland, German subsidiaries of the Detroit Big Three, and a whole squadron of Saabs. More »
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They're back on the track for Day Two of racin' at the 24 Hours of LeMons South, and lust for the checkered flag has turned all these formerly polite Southern boys into a bunch of PCP-overdosed Junior Johnsons, with dramatic spinouts galore (yes, we'll have some action shots in a little while). A contributing factor to the higher speeds today is the less crowded track. Why less crowded, you ask? Well, when you pay $500 (or "$500") for a race car, you don't always get 100% bulletproof reliability. More »
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Seems the boss-man has been moonlighting again over at Popular Mechanics, this time advising Detroit about which of its dead nameplates should remain six feet under. We won't give away Ray's picks; you'll have to head over to PopMech for those, but we've tossed our own version together after the jump. More »
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The blowout Choose Your Eternity polls are fun, but we really enjoy the nail-bitingly close races... which is what we got yesterday, with the Roots-blown Old Beetle just barely beating the Pro Street Peugeot in a 175-165 vote split. Does that mean a German car just upset Project Car Hell GigaTeraPower France, or does the Detroit engine water down the 200-proof Frenchness of the Peugeot? We'll leave that question open for now, because today we're going to see how an Italian basket case fares against a brutalized European Ford! More »
]]> http://jalopnik.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=395183&view=rss&microfeed=true We knew the double-winged turbocharged Ford Sierra as the Merkur XR4ti on these shores, and the TV ads for the car weren't all that interesting. But this Spanish-language ad really shows how mean the car really was. It growls! Slinky babes can't resist a man in an XR4- this ad is the proof! More »
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Does a 20-year-old car qualify for this series? In the case of the Merkur XR4Ti, I think it does- these things were pretty rare to begin with, and time has not been kind to the few that Ford did manage to sell. Sure, it was actually an Americanized Ford Sierra- common as hell in Europe at the time- but there were Dearborn dreams of the thing seeming exotic enough to swipe sales from the Germans and Japanese on these shores. This example, spotted in Alameda's East End, is in excellent shape- could it be someone has painstakingly restored a Merkur? More »
]]> http://jalopnik.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=318614&view=rss&microfeed=true The XR4Ti roared out of Lincoln-Mercury-Merkur dealerships, ready to do battle with the best European sporty sedans! Unfortunately for FoMoCo, the number of roaring Merkurs on the battlefield was tiny and they were never heard from again. Bonus points for incredible 80s-ness on this ad's soundtrack! – Murilee Martin More »
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Uttering the phrase half price anywhere near the word junkyard sends a couple of the Jalops driving with toolbox toward the self-service junkyard like so many moths to a streetlight on a summer night. One of the larger self-service yards in California had a statewide half price sale a while back and we were there in NoCal and SoCal. Bumbeck headed down out of the hills into hot and dusty Sun Valley while Martin ventured out onto the mean streets of Hayward from Alameda. Out of the thousands of cars being picked apart we've chosen ten that qualify to enter into the pantheon of Jalopnik half-price day junkyard specials. Our selections in blazing full color after the jump. More »
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Back in late 1970, Clarence Milstead purchased a 1971 AMC Gremlin. As time went on, he began tinkering with the six-cylinder Kammback hatch until the fateful day he saw an XR4Ti in a junkyard, yanked its turbocharger and plumbed it in, using a carburetor bonnet scavenged from a Mitsubishi-built Chrylser Hemi 4-cylinder. What fully awesome cars used the Hemi 4? That's right kids, the Conquest and its Starions! As time's gone on Milstead's continued to widdle with the Gremmie, converting the front drums to discs and dropping the final-drive ratio to 3.55. We'd be proud to drive this car. We'd be even prouder to say we built it ourselves. – Davey G. Johnson More »
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Back when Ford was preparing to launch Merkur, they decided it might raise a bit of brand awareness to campaign the XR4Ti in IMSA's GTU class. With a slight dip in displacement over the car's Pinto-based 2.3 mill, the cars, prepared and campaigned by Kent Racing. A bit later, FoMoCo shifted the XR4Ti's mission to Trans-Am and over-two-litre IMSA competition, with the Merks running under Roush's aegis. Peter Cipolla, a man from the Show-Me State we can throw our weight behind, has rescued a couple of these mighty orphan warriors from bygone days, and for that, we owe him a package of schnitzel and an ice-cold MGD. – Davey G. Johnson More »
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While Lutz recently explained to Automotive News why the reborn Goat went so soon to slaughter, we might want to look back at another Bob Lutz project that combined great-for-its day power with a rear-drive IRS package: The Merkur XR4Ti. Pulled from a 1998 interview, Lutz explains what killed Ford's 3-Series rival in the American market after the jump. More »
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What was the coolest of the Fox-body Mustangs? Without a doubt, it's the SVO. Obviously threatened by the birth of the Mitsubishi Starion, Ford decided to take the fabulous Mitsubishi on using its own formula: slightly-over-two-litre turbocharged I4, sport tuned suspension Space Shuttle-look exterior components, etc. Its 2.3 turbo mill also found its way into the Merkur XR4ti — the main difference between that car and its European Sierra twin. Truth be told, though, we'd still rather have the Merkur or the Mitsu. – Davey G. Johnson More »
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Alex Taylor makes a case against Ford bringing over European models that's based largely on suckiness. He cites the Merkur catastrophe as the rationale behind Americans not wanting European Fords. The reason Americans didn't want European Fords is that they knew not what the hell a Merkur was. I, as a child who watched a rather average amount of television in the 1980s, only knew about Merkur when we stopped by a Lincoln/Mercury dealership to get a part for our Colony Park and I saw a Sierra XR4i sitting on the lot and wondered what the hell that was about. More »
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