As soon the staff at LeMons HQ realized that Jim Thwaite (of Misfit Toys Racing fame) had felt it necessary to build his own widebody Yugo and has owned at least one example of every variety of Lancia Beta ever made, there wasn't much doubt about who would be dragging home one of East Germany's most advanced automobiles. Mr. Thwaite's plan is to install a Studebaker OHV six-cylinder engine- mid-mounted, of course- and then take on what he calls the Trifecta Of Crap: The 24 Hours Of LeMons, the BABE Rally, and the Grassroots Motorsports $2009 Challenge.

Where do I start? I guess I should first say, from one evil genius to another this is brilliant. Only an evil genius such as yourself could find a way to get people to beg him to take a Wartburg off his hands. And having a bit of that streak in myself I must say this car belongs in the evil genius family so it can live out its full potential.

Add to this you would be saving me from the absolute mediocrity imposed upon me when my team handed me a Toyota to build for our Lemons chariot. Where is the potential for evil goodness in that? Where is the flair, the panache? Vanilla is not a flavor I tolerate well. As sure as a swift shot from Auric's gun could have easily ended Mr. Bonds life a Toyota will be swift, accurate and reliable. But Mr. Goldfinger appreciated the flourish of genius, no matter how doomed to fail that the laser brought to the situation. Let this Wartburg be my laser as I set out on my hopeless yet entertaining mission to upset the 007's of this world.

Right from the outset let me tell you I will not be so mundane as to put a small block V8 anything into a gift of this uniqueness. I think this situation would call for a bit more flair and well, hopelessness. I have, sitting now in my garage, a 101,000 mile Studebaker straight 6. And not one of them fancy schmancy reliable flathead 6's. No this is one of the maligned OHV 6s which helped to doom Studebaker later in it's life. And why stop there, I'm thinking this requires mid-mounting in the car, just to ensure no one mistakes it for one of those mundane Wartburg's with a Studebaker 6 in the engine bay.

To be honest from the moment I saw this car I had impure thoughts about what could be. Not those wholesome family impure thoughts like I had when I met my wife's little sister. No, I'm talking about full blown, bottle of Bacardi, some used 40 weight, a Wartburg and me wearing nothing but a smile, kind of impure thoughts.

But I digress, I have a well established history of insanity when it comes to oddballs. My first autocross car was a 1973 VW Squareback with an automatic. I built a wide body Yugo...just to prove I could.

I have issues and I'm proud to admit it. I did not come by the name Misfit Toys Racing by accident, it was thrust upon me by other local racers who always remarked at the litany of oddballs I would bring to races.

Unconvinced? Did I mention I have owned one of every body style Lancia Beta ever made? Coupe, Zagato, Scorpion and HPE. I've suffered through Alfas, Fiats, Triumphs, Austin Healeys, MGs and a myriad assortment of other misfits but up until now something has been missing. Today I realize, that something is a Wartburg. Choose me and I will be able to look you in the eye and say "You complete me".

Remarkably my wife did not immediately hit me with a frying pan when I mentioned I wanted this car. She took a moment to set down her phone first, then took a swing. But she is understanding, and more importantly she realizes the more time I spend in the garage the less time I'm annoying her. Therefore I cannot promise the high quality amusement of marital discourse but I can pretty much guarantee my teammates tie me greased and naked to the hood and take parade laps to punish me for thrusting this upon them.

Generally all of the above might seem enough to make me seem like a complete loon. But please don't pass judgment until you hear me out on this final point. 2010 was to be the year of the Trifecta of Crap for my team. 1 car, 1 year, 3 events. BABE Rally, Lemons and GRM challenge. With this in mind the Toyota makes very good sense. I've never much cared for making sense, as you can tell by reading this diatribe. The Wartburg, oh god, the Wartburg is nonsensical as Dr. Seuss on a 3 day meth bender, it deserves this glory, I deserve this torment. I need this car. Now you may deem me a complete loon, but just as you couldn't turn away while that laser inched toward Bond's naughty bits, you know you want to witness the spectacle we will create.

You might also enjoy some of the the essays written by the runners-up.

Now, we thought it was pretty cool that a Lada Signet would be coming to the Lamest Day LeMons, courtesy of Comrade Teargas, and LeMons HQ has decided the only thing that could possibly make the race even better would be the giveaway of a genuine Eastern European sedan! Actually, the blame credit for this terribly stupid brilliant idea goes to the team bringing an Eagle Premier to the race- yes, there's a guy who owns both an Eagle Premier and a Wartburg- for donating this DDR-iffic machine. Here's what LeMons Assistant Perp Nick (and BMW 2002 driver) has to say:

The rules are simple: Just tell us why you should be the winner of a 1958 Wartburg 311 sedan. Post your essays here or email them to Nick Pon; all entries must be received by September 1, 2009. The winner will receive a beat-ass 1958 Wartburg 311 sedan plus a one-year supply of Bactine, both presented at the Lamest Day race at Nelson Ledges, October 3-4, 2009.

What's a Wartburg? Think "East Germany's Buick to Trabant's Chevrolet." And why should you enter to win it? A) If you have to ask, you shouldn't. B) After suitable prep, this car will be automatically accepted in, given free entry to, and awarded ZERO B.S. LAPS at the LeMons race of your choice. So all you whiners—ahem, legitimate enquirers—who've asked about guaranteed entries and how to avoid B.S. penalties, the answer is now clear: Eine kleine scheissboxen.

The winner is responsible for hauling this fine machine away from Nelson. No, it doesn't run, but the current owner assures us this is the way it left the factory. A title? Ha!

There you have it! Write your essays, then be ready to hit Nelson Ledges to pick up your new race car! What could possibly go wrong? When you're done writing your essay, you can head over to Southwest Airlines Spirit Magazine to read all about the Toxic Asset Racing Program's MR2 at the last Texas race. Yes, Southwest passengers who forget to bring reading material will be forced to choose between reading the barf bag instructions or a 24 Hours Of LeMons article!

Yeah, you just never know where this writing thing will take you; one day you put up some photos of a car you owned in 1983, and then some Canadian builds a disturbingly accurate model of that car in what appears to be 1:zillion scale.

Next challenge: I want to see a diorama of the junked Renault 16, with a 1:24 Charles de Gaulle weeping over it!

This makes a nice follow-up to the documentary of the 1965 Targa Florio race. Totally different type of racing, of course, but the same sense of golden-age racing action. Thanks to Hellhammer for the tip!

Even now, 25 years after Hubert The Hatred Bug went to The Crusher, its corrupting influence over me remains strong. Though somehow I've managed to become a solid-citizen homeowner by my 40s, I've never owned a car that cost more than $1600 (if you're going by initial purchase price), and my current daily driver is a beat-to-shit 17-year-old Honda Civic DX… which is actually one of the nicest cars I've ever owned. I can look at a basket-case hot-rodded Sprite with no electrical system whatsoever in my driveway and not even flinch, because I've been here before! The main difficulty I have with telling this story is the near-total lack of photographs of my first couple dozen cars; I finally shook down my relatives for the few you have here, and even resorted to scanning a shot out of my high school yearbook. That means you're going to get way too many words and not enough pictures here, but that's how it must be.


Yes, Alameda High School, 1984. This photograph really illustrates the difference between the kind of social group you associate with when you drive a hideous beater, versus the kind you get when you drive a nice shiny version of the same car. On the left is my Beetle, decorated with Led Zeppelin-esque graffiti and the words "Dave's Still Smokin'" (a reference to some deceased stoner friend-of-a-friend, presumably still firing up doobage in the afterlife). I'm wearing an ironic Ernie-&-Bert Shirt and peering out through the ragtop opening, while my buddies are all seriously geeked-out rejects, flexing muscles, fat rolls, and/or icky cutoffs, and destined to be the unemployable punk drummers and bitter conspiracy theorists of the future. Meanwhile, my preppie classmates pose by (future wealthy realtor) Nancy's showroom-condition '72 Beetle (which she called "Herbie" and labeled as such when signing my yearbook), in their bound-for-success sweaters; even through the crappy halftoned yearbook printing, you can smell the optimism in their attitudes. It's like they know that Reagan and Bush I are going to grease their path to success over the next decade or so, and they're totally geared up for it. And why wasn't I standing on the right with those folks, as should have been my birthright? Well, it all started with a phone call to Sweden…


In the summer of '83, I managed to get shipped across the ocean to spend a month or so with a family in southern Sweden. I was having a great time, as you might imagine a 17-year-old would, and I even got to indulge in some car-geekery by taking a trip up to the Volvo Museum in Göteborg. After a few weeks, a phone call comes from California: it's my mom, with some garbled story about a "$50 Bug with a Porsche engine" that my friend Scott had found, and did I want him to get it for me? Scott (the shirtless guy flexing on the roof of my car in the yearbook photo) lived with his survivalist blacksmith father in a crumbling East Oakland shop, with a Hell's Angels bar on one side and a junkyard on the other. The allegedly Porsche-engined Beetle was some sort of one-day-only sale deal at the junkyard; Scott figured it was perfect for me, and my mom agreed. A little family history here: my mom learned to drive on a '55 Beetle with a Porsche 356 engine, thanks to her ice-racing father, and always felt that setup was a great combination. I already had a total beater '67 GTO and a $50 1969 Toyota Corona at the time, but what the heck? "Sure, buy it and I'll pay you when I get back," I said.


It turned out that the "Porsche engine" was actually a VW Type 3, as used in the Volkswagen Squareback and Fastback; this engine has a crank-driven fan instead of the belt-driven "doghouse" fan setup used on the Beetles and Transporters (even though I didn't get the Porsche engine, I did get a pair of Weber 34s instead of the Bobby Bosch fuel injection originally put on the Type 3, thus making the $50 investment worthwhile right there). How do you make this engine fit in a Beetle? Easy- just hack off most of the rear body behind the back window, to make a sort of a crude parody of a Baja Bug. And that was just the start of the carnage. There wasn't a single bit of wiring left in the car. No instrument panel. No interior. No cover on the huge ragtop sunroof. The brakes didn't work. The pan was mostly rust. Bondo everywhere in adobe-thick layers, including over rust holes. Still, I loved it right away, much more than the Corona and the GTO (which I soon sold for five times what I paid for it). A week or two of trial-and-error electrical work (melting wires are no problem when your car's interior is all sheetmetal), and I had the engine running, much to the dismay of the neighbors (who discovered that a Type 3 with dune-buggy megaphone-style straight pipes sounds like the World's Loudest Chainsaw in action). A few trips to the junkyard and I had brakes (after a fashion) and a driver's seat, and I was ready to start collecting the largest number of fix-it tickets ever issued to any driver in Alameda history.

The first thing I discovered about my new ride was the magic of the Power-To-Weight Ratio. Sure, that engine was probably making something like 60 or 70 horsepower (depending on how much help it was getting from the Webers and straight pipes), which doesn't sound like much until you realize that the 1958 Beetle came from the factory weighing just 1,609 pounds, and mine was completely gutted and missing much of the body. The transaxle was geared for 36 horsepower, and this combination meant that I suddenly had the quickest-accelerating car in town… for about 2 blocks. And it wasn't anything like the smooth torquey rush you got with a big V8; a hard launch with my Beetle was more like being inside a 55-gallon drum strapped to the nose of a Hound Dog missile fired into a burning oil refinery. The word "brutal" was the word most often used by my friends foolish enough to ride in the "passenger seat" (a small plywood stool screwed into the rusty floorboards), and few of them would take more than one ride. The pan would flex and vibrate so badly under acceleration that my eyeballs would jiggle out of focus, and everything got a lot worse better after I installed some VW-to-GM wheel adapter plates that allowed me to install 235/80-15 tires on '56 Olds wheels (complete with Olds hubcaps) in the rear; this "improved" the car's off-the-line grip enough that I could almost get the front wheels to leave the ground (I was able to get enough weight off them that the car would be nearly impossible to control, a real plus for a 17-year-old hoon). It wasn't really possible to drive it on the freeway, since the engine would be screaming near redline above 60 and the ductwork that enabled the Squareback to get cooling air to the fan was nonexistent, meaning the thing would overheat in a matter of minutes. Minor problems, compared to the joy of driving the most notorious car in town!


Then I bought as many junkyard off-road lights as I could find at the local junkyards, rigging them up on the hood and fenders… after that, a PA system from the legendary Quinn's Electronics, which meant I could blast my very favorite song at the time (Frank Zappa's "Stick It Out") for all the world to enjoy… then, of course, a dozen or so random car horns, all this crap controlled from an instrument panel made from street-sign aluminum and studded with dozens of toggle switches and cryptic indicator lights. What I really wanted to do was install a pair of toilets for driver and passenger seats, complete with water tank and pump so that they'd actually flush onto the pavement, but I couldn't figure a way to keep the sloshage from being too maddening, plus there was the shards-o-porcelain crash danger issue. Meanwhile, I was letting anyone who felt like it decorate the car, which went through numerous paint jobs, graffiti-bombings, decal schemes, etc. There was the Led Zep deal you see here, followed by a Dead Kennedys theme, and then it ended up with a Great Gatsby mural on the doors, for reasons that probably made perfect sense at the time. While all this weirdness made me pretty much radioactive in the eyes of all the Cyndi Lauper-esque AHS girls I lusted after at the time, it was still totally worth it. Unfortunately, all the photographs I have come from a single month, prior to the car reaching its true zenith of lameness awesomeness; can you see why I'm such a sucker for the 24 Hours Of Lemons?

Then I realized that, while the car was pretty quick, there was more power to be had in that engine. I made a deal with a Baja Bug-owning classmate for a set of used pistons/cylinders to get displacement up from 1600cc to 1835cc, and sent off for some Brazilian dual-port cylinder heads and the ubiquitous Bosch 009 distributor. While I had the engine apart, I painted all the various pieces of sheetmetal different bright colors and painted the menacing cooling fan (which was most effective at keeping tailgaters at bay) a screaming Day-Glo yellow. I was never able to get the registration straight on the thing (the junkyard guys who sold the car didn't have any paperwork on it and gave it the VIN off another Beetle they were about to crush), which meant that I spent a great deal of time standing in line at the DMV and explaining the situation to disapproving cops. Oh, it was great fun, and I somehow avoided a horrible, fiery death driving the thing.

Then it was time to head off to college, 430 miles to the south, and there was no way Hubert The Hatred Bug was going to survive the I-5 journey. I sold the engine, planning to build up another, even hairier one, and parked the car in the Martin family back yard. Unfortunately, my long-suffering parents grew tired of looking at Hubert out the kitchen window, refused to believe my promises that I'd be back to claim it someday, and finally pushed the engine- and license-plate-less Beetle out into the street to be towed to The Crusher by the APD.

So, that's why the 20R-powered Austin-Healey makes perfect sense as my personal Hell Project; it's the same sort of funky, stripped-down/overpowered rig that I've been yearning for since The Crusher ate my '58!

That's exactly what our Canadian friend Fantasygoat did, and he's photographed some fine daily-driven machinery for us. General Motors products seem to dominate, from the '58 Buick above to a good assortment of early-to-mid-50s Buicks and Oldsmobiles; we also get a pretty clean-looking '57 Ford sedan and some bonus Warsaw Pact rides in the background (and we can assume that some of those American cars are motivated by Soviet truck engines). Hey, is that a '60 Corvair, brought to the island in the final minutes before the embargo? Check out the original photo album here.

Yes, you're looking at a total of 34 minutes of vintage rally action below, in a vintage Shell documentary put up on YouTube courtesy of this kind soul. We don't want to spoil things for anyone, but you'll be awed by the parade of race cars that go past the starting line (about 2:20 into the Part 1), and it just gets better from there. The usual Alfa Romeo and Porsche suspects are there, of course, but fans of British and French machinery won't be disappointed. Thanks to Scroggzilla for hipping us to this super-addictive find!

Hi Murilee,
Driving around in Phuket, Thailand, my second home, I come across all sorts of weird and wonderful cars, maybe you are interested in the enclosed expamples :)
Pristine 1958 GB Ford Consul
Rough 1974 Alfa Romeo GT Junior 1600 (powered by 1800cc Toyota engine)
Hard working 1970's Mazda Station Wagon with Zoom Zoom Sticker, but with great difficulty in zooming to anywhere
1960 Alfa Romeo Giulia Spider and other classics in Underground Garage.
Hope you can use them, regards,
Arco

Now let's hear the song "Ballad Of Thunder Road," which was sung by Mitchum and became a hit single. Here are they lyrics (thanks to SeanKHotay for sending them in):

Let me tell the story, I can tell it all
About the mountain boy who ran illegal alcohol
His daddy made the whiskey, son, he drove the load
When his engine roared, they called the highway Thunder Road.

Sometimes into Ashville, sometimes Memphis town
The revenoors chased him but they couldn't run him down
Each time they thought they had him, his engine would explode
He'd go by like they were standin' still on Thunder Road.

(CHORUS)
And there was thunder, thunder over Thunder Road
Thunder was his engine, and white lightning was his load
There was moonshine, moonshine to quench the Devil's thirst
The law they swore they'd get him, but the Devil got him first.

On the first of April, nineteen fifty-four
A Federal man sent word he'd better make his run no more
He said two hundred agents were coverin' the state
Whichever road he tried to take, they'd get him sure as fate.

Son, his Daddy told him, make this run your last
The tank is filled with hundred-proof, you're all tuned up and gassed
Now, don't take any chances, if you can't get through
I'd rather have you back again than all that mountain dew.

(CHORUS)

Roarin' out of Harlan, revvin' up his mill
He shot the gap at Cumberland, and screamed by Maynordsville
With T-men on his taillights, roadblocks up ahead
The mountain boy took roads that even Angels feared to tred.

Blazing right through Knoxville, out on Kingston Pike,
Then right outside of Bearden, they made the fatal strike.
He left the road at 90; that's all there is to say.
The devil got the moonshine and the mountain boy that day.

Those who wanted to buy a new Mercedes-Benz 190SL roadster back in 1958 had to come up with $5,020, about $1,400 more than a new Corvette and about the same as a '58 Lincoln Capri hardtop. We're talking about quite the high-buck machine (though you had to spend twice as much to get its mighty 300SL sibling), and much in demand today. It's got some German notoriety, too, being known as the Nitribitt-Mercedes after the murdered Frankfurt call girl who drove one. If you've got $27,800 to spend on your next project- or even if you don't- why not blow it all invest it wisely in this '58 Mercedes-Benz 190SL (go here if the ad disappears)? Look at it! Sure looks nice... so nice that you shouldn't fear that "light rust on the floor," because the seller says right in the ad that it's an "easy restoration." Right! It's even got a rebuilt engine "that is bolted in the car," yet for some reason it's not running. Maybe a few turns of some carb screws, perhaps some futzing with the distributor, and it'll roar to life! It looks like most of the trim is still there, and maybe the interior is good enough, which leaves you plenty of time to puzzle out the drivetrain problems.

What are you, some kind of cheapskate? Only 28 grand, and for a German car? Where's the fun there? What you need is a super-rare Jag, say one of only 32 1956 XK140 dropheads with automatics and left-hand drive (go here if the ad disappears). Not only that, the seller wants to make it perfectly clear that this car was once ARBOUR GREEN, and that you'll need to get up off of $49,000 if you want to take it home. Whew, almost 50 grand! That's perfectly understandable when you learn that the seller estimates that "the car is 90 to 95% complete as to parts." Skeptical types might try to rain all over your parade by pointing out that 5% or 10% of an automatic-equipped 52-year-old Jaguar is a helluva lot of parts, but we'd counter by saying that maybe the missing stuff is the easiest 5 or 10 percent! Don't try to lowball this savvy seller, though, because it says right in the ad (twice) that "THE PRICE IS FIRM!!!" Thanks to htrodbldr for the tip!

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We had a 928 here just a couple weeks ago, but the cool/hell equation is just irresistible with Porsche's front-engine V8 machine. It's fast, good-looking, sold for vast sums when new, and has a scary-sleazeball Tony Montana aura you just can't deny... and you can find them dirt cheap nowadays. Well, dirt cheap provided you're willing to fix everything a few things. How about a genuine Porsche 928 for just 600 bucks? Come check out this '82 in Connecticut, which is priced down in 24 Hours of LeMons territory. Come on, you know you can sell off more than a hundred bucks worth of stuff from this car, and you've got 3 months to go before the New England race! Or perhaps you want to make it a daily driver and sell cocaine commute to work with it. Either way, you'll need to do something about the transmission, because the seller describes it as "dodgy." We're assuming that means "inert hunk of leaky metal," but maybe it still sort of works! The color is "obviously black," which should count for something, and the engine starts. It also "smokes and is missing," which hand-wringers might interpret as cause for concern... but not you! You'll have that thing purring in no time- it's probably just the spark plugs, right?

Yeah, can't argue with the coolness of the 928, but how about if you're looking for something with a little more presence? You want a big classic Detroit luxomobile, but you'd rather take the bus than drive yet another Cadillac? We hear you brother (or sister), and we've got the solution: This 1958 Lincoln Continental, which could darken your garage for a mere grand. Now, you could probably sell off $500 worth of parts from this vessel and qualify for LeMons on the money front, but (fortunately for the other racers) this thing tips the scales well beyond the 4,000 pound shipping-weight limit called for in the rules. That's OK, because a car like this should be glamorous, with a gleaming paint job (or ominous black primer, which is also glamorous in our book) and spiffy snakeskin interior. Before you can get to the body, paint, and interior work (of which there'll be plenty), however, you'll need to deal with the running gear. The engine and transmission are out of the car, and that's usually not an indicator that they'll be in perfect working order. You get "all parts plus lots of extra parts and lots of extra chrome," which is a good thing as it's no picnic finding body and trim parts for late-50s Lincolns. At least the engine is the good ol' MEL 430, which is just common enough to make you think you should have no problem finding parts for it. Thanks to Brian B for the tip; Brian has sent in three separate tips and now gets a shirt plus an extra half credit towards...uh... additional PCH Tipster glory!

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Many of us took a look at the DOTS '56 Willys Station Wagon and imagined ourselves tearing through the woods or desert in such a fine specimen of vintage off-road machinery. Thing is, parts are getting tricky to find for these proto-SUVs, trickier even than fitting a Super-Fructo Distendo-Abdomen™ five-gallon soft-drink bucket into an undersized European cup holder. What you need is a parts car! That's why you'll be overjoyed to find this pair of Willys Station Wagons, a '51 and a '58, for the survivalist-friendly price tag of one thousand dollars (or a bit more than an ounce of gold, for those of you who fear the Trilateral Commission/Federal Reserve cabal and their so-called "currency"). One of them has a complete-looking Tornado 6-banger (and is "Tornado" one of the best engine names ever or what?), and both have at least half their components; you might even find enough unrusted parts to assemble one good body! Oh yeah, and with a Willys Station Wagon, you don't use a goddamn cup holder for your drink of kiddie sugar-water- you use a canteen full of manly swamp water!

But let's say the SUV/cup holer stigma is so powerful that it manages to taint even such an excellent motor vehicle as the Willys Station Wagon (impossible, but just for the sake of argument). You want cars for your Two-For-One Hell Project, do you? Step right up for this Mercedes/Pontiac deal, folks! For a very optimistic- yet subject to relentless downward negotiating pressure- price tag of $4,000, you could have a 1958 Pontiac "Fire Chief" (we're assuming it's actually a Star Chief or Super Chief) and a 1962 Mercedes-Benz 220. The Benz "has not run in a few years," but we're talking about a car that's just getting broken in at 500,000 miles! How hard could it be to get this Heckflosse rolling again? It's in Reno, so maybe rust isn't a problem... in fact, think of all the things that might not be problems here! Then, once you've finished getting your Mercedes-Benz into perfect condition, you can look forward to many happy decades weeks working on your '58 Pontiac. It "needs engine and rearend," which doesn't make it clear whether you get any rebuildable components. That won't matter, however, because you'll be building up a monster Tri-Power 421 with the biggest, shiniest blower your food money can buy sticking through the hood, and the factory differential might as well be carved from Velveeta when it comes to dealing with all that power. OK, so this project might cost a few bucks, but your Mercedes will give you the requisite feeling of wealth to keep the stress down.

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With Los Jalops never ending love of all things station wagon, and some rare spring sunshine on Saturday, I finally was able to get some shots of the 58 Edsel that runs around the neighborhood. All the trim appears to be in the back, and the seats are a little(??) on the rough side. The windows were up, so there were some reflections when I tried to shoot the interior. A couple of camera issues left me shooting at the equivalent of too high an ISO, hence a little graininess, etc. Here you go:

In the postwar era, Cadillac was a dominant force in the world of luxury automobile, outpacing its previous rival, Packard, with styling innovations such as the famous tail fins, as well as myriad luxury options. Cadillac in the 1950s proudly proclaimed its "Standard of the World" slogan. In order to truly own that idea though, Cadillac needed to build something with unsurpassed luxury, besting even its peers from across the pond.

Originally shown as a concept at the 1955 L.A. Auto Show, the Cadillac Eldorado Brougham was put into production in 1957 and was at the time the pinnacle of luxury and innovation. It featured numerous options, some of which are still not available today. The engine was a 365 cubic-inch V8, breathing though twin four-barrel carburetors and running through a 4-speed automatic transmission. The body was long, low and extravagant, with a pillarless four-door design and the rear doors opening suicide style (and you know how much we love suicide doors). At the behest of GM styling guru Harley Earl, the car recived a slick stainless-steel roof and road-adjusting quad headlights for better illumination. The suspension was as advanced as anything GM had in it's arsenal at the time: a centrally controlled, self-leveling and auto-adjusting air suspension which provided an uncompromisingly smooth ride.

Where the Caddy really shimmered was in the amenities. Independent of each other, they seem underwhelming, but that all of the features lived in one car in 1957 is incredible. On the inside, drivers were greeted with power seats that included memory settings, remote-adjustable side mirrors and an auto-adjusting rear-view mirror, an all-transistor automatic-station-seeking radio with twin speakers, all-electric windows, a power locking system, and a power open AND close trunk lid. Now that's just the normal stuff. Here's where things get crazy. The designers also saw fit to throw in a stainless steel drinking set for the glove box, a cigarette dispenser, various vanity elements for the ladies, and a perfume dispenser filled with Arpege Extrait de Lanvin perfume. Say what?!

Of course, anything can be built when money is not option, and here's where the Eldorado Brougham took no prisoners. The base retail price in 1957 was $13,074, exceeding even the most pricey Rolls of the time. Toss that number into the Federal Reserve consumer price index calculator and that tally in 2008 dollars rings the bell at $100,311. Only the Cadillac XLR-V has ever commanded a sum so high, and that Caddy merely goes fast and has a lovely Eucalyptus wood interior. The Brougham was offered for only two years; total production of the princely luxo-yachts was 704 vehicles. After the initial run, production was farmed out to Pininfarina, where a redesign was executed, but the quality in craftsmanship just wasn't the same.

The '57 Eldorado Brougham was probably the finest post-war Cadillac produced to date. Peerless in its design and attention to detail, it was the pinnacle of what an American boulevardier could ever be. Smooth, technically savvy, staggeringly handsome and cranking out as much power as the average Eisenhower Era captain of industry would ever need. It's not difficult to imagine driving this car on a lazy, cross-country summer roadtrip, dusk creeping across the sky, the calm glow of an old dashboard and a crackly radio serving as background noise. Not all of the best driving is done at the limit of grip. [image credits to Eldorado Brougham]

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The Jalopnik Fantasy Garage:
1978 Aston Martin V8 Vantage | Honda 1300 Coupe 9 | 1931 Daimler Double Six 50 Corsica Drophead Coupe | Ferrari 288 GTO | Chevrolet Corvette ZR-1 | 1970 Buick GSX 455 | First Generation BMW M Coupe | Bugatti Veyron 16.4 | Ford GT | Citroen SM | Porsche 928 | Jensen FF | DeTomaso Vallelunga | Audi Quattro S1 | Buick GNX | Nissan Skyline R34 GT-R | Honorary Fantasy Garager: The LS1 Powered Rotus | Lamborghini LM002 | Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe | Ferrari 250 GTO | Bentley Speed Six | Talbot-Lago T150C SS Figoni et Falaschi Raindrop/Teardrop Coupe | Porsche 917 | Audi RS4 Avant | Lamborghini Miura | Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 | BMW E39 M5 | Jaguar E-type | Mercedes-Benz 300 SL | Dodge Charger/Challenger R/T | Toyota 2000GT | Facel Vega HK500 | Voisin C28 Aerosport | Bugatti Type 41 Royale | McLaren F1 | Maserati Bora | Continental MK II | Tucker 48 | Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato | BMW 507 | Porsche 959 | 1925 Rolls-Royce Phantom 1 Jonckheere Coupe | Land Rover Defender | Lotus Eleven

How did it come to this? We've gone over a month since our last Alfa Romeo in this series. That's like having a hockey team with no Canadians! That's why we're going to skip the frivolous sporty convertible Alfas and go right for the no-nonsense four-door sedan, with this 1974 Alfa Romeo 2000 Berlina. It's got a Buy It Now of just $2,000, it runs and drives, and it's even had the horrible Malaise bumpers replaced with chrome units from an earlier car. The seller clearly doesn't understand the hallowed traditions of eBay description writing; there are no unreadable blocks of CAPS LOCK text in multiple colors, rules of grammar and spelling are honored, and the description itself is coherent and complete. But we won't hold that against him or her, and it doesn't make the project any less hellish that you know what you're getting into- hey, this is a 34-year-old Italian car in Michigan! But just think about how stylish you'll feel picking up the groceries in your Berlina, while the boring-ass Normals carry on their business in minivans and Accords.

Righteous as a high-revving Italian sedan might be, you want a project that will be able to slog through the mud on beer-saturated road-sign-shooting expeditions camping trips to the purple mountain majesties. Now, you could just pick up an old Land Rover and spend the rest of your life fishing Whitworth sockets from the bubbling sulfur pits in your garage, but it's just too easy to find parts for Land Rovers and the cost of admission is too high. But you can still get a cheap, half-century-old British 4X4, simply by peeling off 15 Benjamins from your roll and buying this '59 Austin Gipsy (go here if the ad disappears). The Gipsy had a complicated sophisticated fully independent suspension all the way around, 67 pushrod horsepower, and a tendency to rust that was shocking even by British standards; in other words, it's perfect! Unlike the seller of the Berlina, the Gipsy's seller knows how you're supposed to describe a car for sale, with no very useful information given. It runs and drives, but there's rust and it "needs restoration." We figure all it needs is year after year of metal repair, a grunt-happy diesel engine, and great big swamp-ready tires. And your soul.

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Inspired by the DOTS Mercury Commuter that blew away the competition in the Best DOTS Wagon Poll, I figured we needed a Hell Project Commuter as soon as possible. And, really, it's the perfect mix of must-have coolness (four-door hardtop wagon with every conceivable example of Chromium Rococo Excess) and impossible-to-find parts (MEL engine, weird not-shared-with-any-Fords trim and interior components, wraparound glass). But they're just about impossible to find, and expensive as hell... unless, of course, you head to Texas and score this diamond-in-the-incredibly-rough '58 (go here if the ad disappears) for a very reasonable $1,250. The 410 engine is "stuck," but you can actually find the MELs if you dig hard enough (anyway, we'd want to put a quad-turbocharged Cammer 427 in this thing). The seller is kind enough to inform us: "Missing: radiator, radio, front seat, front wheels," which makes one think that maybe everything else is still there! Could be, could be!

Dropping anchor in a 5,000-pound monster station wagon is fun and all, but it can get tiresome. Don't despair, though- you can still have a machine that glows with 50s optimism yet can maneuver through tight traffic and park in the stingiest imaginable urban parking spots. For example, this 1958 Vespa 400! The seller doesn't pull any punches, with the seemingly self-contradicting "restorable basket case" description right in the main subtitle. What you get here is a "restorable chassis" and seven crates of parts. Seven crates of parts! If ever there was a Project Car Hell mantra, that's got to be it! What's in those crates? How big are they? To add to the fun, the car has never been registered in the United States, but this is the sort of situation where the very flexible and understanding folks at the DMV will stop at nothing to help you sort out the paperwork... right? Yes, of course! Now, you could take the chassis and the Seven Magical Crates and do a period-correct restoration, which would certainly be fun... but we're thinking more in terms of something like this Vespa project. Either way, if you could finish this thing you'd be certain to love your Vespa. Thanks (and the ever-elusive second half-credit towards a Project Car Hell Tipster T-shirt) to BananaDoc for the tip; BananaDoc, as you may recall, sent in the Rolls we saw in the England's Dreaming PCH back in December.

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In Waits' song "Romeo Is Bleeding" (see above), we get the lines:

Well it was just another night,
but now they're huddled in the brake lights of a 58 Bel Air
and listenin' to how Romeo killed a sheriff with his knife.

The condition of the 1958 Chevrolet in question isn't stated in the song, but it very well could have looked just like this '58 Bel Air 2-door, available for just $1,500 (and a trip to Alaska). It needs "some metal work" (iron + oxygen = fun), but it's reasonably complete and even comes with a 283/Powerglide combo sitting nearby.



But maybe you're looking for a somewhat more sporty project. Perhaps a car that gets a shout-out in Waits' excellent "Gun Street Girl" (see above) is a better fit for your lifestyle:

He took a hundred dollars off a slaughterhouse joe
Brought a brand new michigan twenty-gauge
He got all liquored up on that road house corn
Blew a hole in the hood of a yellow Corvette
A hole in the hood of a yellow Corvette

There's no birdshot damage on the hood of this yellow '87 Corvette, and in fact it doesn't look bad at all... in the four not-very-illustrative photos we get in the listing. The seller claims this $3,700 Vette "runs and drives great," but the smog-check problems aren't so encouraging. But come on- a running Corvette for under four grand?

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Wouldn't you jump at the chance to own 1/645th of all the Aston Martin Lagondas ever manufactured? Do we even need to ask? Better start piling up a stack of cash- and don't stop until you get to something in the neighborhood of 20 grand- because here's a 1989 Lagonda just calling your name (go here if the listing disappears). This car has the looks, the temperamental electronic dash, the 4-cam V8... it's got it all! Unfortunately, what it doesn't have is a functioning water pump- well, maybe it's the water pump- and then of course it has some leaks. The paint is bad and so are some interior wood panels, but when you're talking about a car that sold for $180,000 when new (that's over 300 grand in 2007 dollars), you need to count on some additional expenses to get it fixed up. Thanks to T.K. for the tip- no T-shirt for a single PCH tip, but if T.K. sends in one more PCH car the PCH Tipster T-shirt is his or hers.

That Lagonda is cool and all, but can a car that might as well have the custom license plate COCAINE really measure up to a sexy Italian sports car from the 50s? Especially when the car is a super-rare Alfa Romeo Giuletta? Such are the choices one grapples with at the entrance to Hell; take a look at this '58 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider Veloce and see what your heart says (and ignore your heart if it threatens to go on strike if you're crazy enough to buy that car). Current bid price is a bit more than half the Lagonda's, but there's plenty of time left on the auction; you'll need to start assembling a stack of Benjamins now. This Alfa has been in storage since Gerald Ford was president, which means the usual stuff about seals and components that have touched gasoline, plus some fool done hacked up the wheelwells (no doubt for reasons that made perfect sense in 1971). On the plus side, it's a reasonably rust-free California car, the seller seems to be a non-scammer, and... well, it's a Giulietta!

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Ever since we saw a Fairlady down on Alameda's street, I've been looking for just the right one to use in this series, and this 1965 Datsun Fairlady seems just about right. You see, a Japanese project car needs to be old, with plenty of mystery, because Japanese cars tend to be insufficiently hellish. This one has the "mystery" part covered, because all the owner says about its condition is "Complete minus interior and top." Could that mean all the connecting rods have been sawed in half, to make them fit in storage better, and the sheetmetal is a thin layer of paint over crumbly ferric powder? Hey, it's 500 bucks! Maybe it will fire right up! Parts should be difficult, though not anywhere near impossible to find, and if you're willing to drop in the right engine (SR20DET), it will be plenty zippy.

Bah, everyone's heard of Datsun... but we guarantee 99% of random passersby will say "DK what?" when you clatter by in your two-stroke Dampf Kraft Wagen. Of course, 99% of the parts you'll need to restore this '58 DKW will require long, expensive searches to obtain, but the cost of admission to this project is quite reasonable: $450! This car comes from South Africa, where no doubt many of its components still reside. The seller says it has body rust but no rust-through (with the caveat "as far as I can tell," which may translate to "didn't really check"). The windshield has a hole in it, but replacing it is just a matter of heading over to your nearest DKW dealer and... oh, wait. The ominous words "previous owner had started taking it apart, so unsure if everything there" make their appearance here. But don't let any of that stop you- you want something different, don't you?

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