We can thank Wimbles for getting these high-quality photos of a car not often found in nature these days, particularly in a town with 95% garage-equipped modern houses. Maybe there's an even nicer Minx inside the garage!

I was digging through my hard drive looking for DOTS candidates I've snapped in San Francisco and I remembered one I saw right in my own hometown of San Ramon, in the East Bay. It appears to be a 1961-63 Hillman Minx Series IIIC judging by the lack of chrome trim and the "1600" badging on the door which indicates the 1592cc OHV 4-cylinder engine. Beyond that I don't know anything about it. This car appeared in my area for about a week or two in March 2007 and I haven't seen it since.

The driver of the Police Brutality '61 Caddy was a little slow to spot a yellow flag and ended up plowing into a tire wall at a scary fast clip. He's fine, but the Cadillac- though running- looked pretty torn up. In fact, everyone who witnessed the wreck was shocked that the car could still move under its own power afterwards, but The General built his luxury cars of stout materials back in the early 60s.

A little wrinkled sheet metal was no big deal to Police Brutality; a few hours of work and the car was ready to go back out on the track. Not bad for a car that sat for years and hadn't been driven more than a few yards at a time prior to hitting the race track yesterday morning.

Back on the track and looking good!

Let me tell you, this epic battle is gonna make the Cuban Missile Crisis look like a kiddie squabble at the day-care center! Will Soviet-made Fiat technology triumph over 4,500 pounds of very rusty Detroit iron? Let's take a look at the combatants:

Otherwise known as the VAZ-2107, the Fiat 124-based Lada Signet was available in Canada right up through the end of the Cold War, so our own Comrade Teargaskov went up to Canada and brought back a running $200 example. This team isn't messing around; they've got a PA system in the car to crank the Hymn Of The Soviet People on the track, no doubt intimidating the other racers with the indomitable spirit of the revolutionary cadres, in addition to all the requisite red flags, hammer-and-sickle emblems, and the coolest 1921-in-Leningrad-style car numbers we've ever seen. Here's a little video that shows how seriously Total Loss Racing is taking this thing. The Lada is a simple, sturdy rear-wheel-drive machine and might rack up a lot of laps over the course of the weekend. Oh, did I mention that this race is a true 24-straight-hours event, with no overnight break to fix busted cars?

Now, when we heard that a Lada would be racing, we figured that nothing on earth could possibly challenge a Soviet car for the Index Of Effluency. Then Team Police Brutality (whose Lincoln Continental Mark VIII was one of the fastest cars at LeMons South) picked up a terrifyingly wretched '61 Cadillac sedan about two weeks ago… and figured that they had plenty of time to get it ready to race. No, really! Crazy as it sounds, they've got it most of the way there; the roll cage is installed, the engine runs, and the brakes are, uh, awaiting completion. The reason for all the urgency is that Team Police Brutality is racing to raise money to beat up breast cancer, LAPD style, and they're getting backers to pledge a buck per lap completed during the race to Susan G. Komen For The Cure. Want to join those backers? Go here and sign up! The question is, how many laps can a drum-brake-equipped rustmobile that hasn't budged for decades complete? More than the Lada? We'll find out next weekend!

Naturally, we need to make a contest out of this battle, with fabulous prizes from LeMons HQ for the winner. To enter, just put the number of laps you think each car will finish in a comment below. The course is about two miles long and the race will go a full 24 hours, so the faster cars that run the whole time might get 600+ laps. These two cars aren't going to be so fast, and they will almost certainly might fall apart experience some technical difficulties on the track… but you never know! Win the contest and LeMons HQ will send you some shirts that they can't get anyone to buy at the races cool 24 Hours Of LeMons swag!



Total Loss Racing's 1987 Lada Signet


Team Police Brutality - Beating Up Breast Cancer's 1961 Cadillac Series 62

These two classic Ford cartrucks have been picked over pretty well, so at least we know that other Rancheros (and probably Falcons and Comets) will benefit from the resulting organ transplants.

Autocar has been around forever- since 1895, in fact- and even has the distinction of having fired James May (for inserting a secret message in an issue reading "So you think it's really good yeah you should try making the bloody thing up it's a real pain in the arse"). I'm definitely looking forward to some enjoyable reading with this haul; just a quick flip through the stack produced this sextet of PCH Gold machines, including the 1951 Hillman Minx Magnificent, the 1950 Vauxhalls, the 1962 Triumph Herald, the 1951 Singer 1000, the 1957 Daimler One-O-Four, and the 1961 Wolseley Hornet. Whoa, it's a red-letter day for Wolseley Hornet aficionados! Enjoy:

Hanging around with the 24 Hours Of LeMons HQ crew, I've learned that they're the most Alfa-centric bunch of car geeks you're ever going to find; most of them started out on British sports cars and then realized that you have more fun when your ride has performance to match its unreliability… and the next step generally involves ditching the GT6 or MGA or whatever and buying an Alfa Romeo. It's true- Alfa Romeo has made plenty of fundamentally superior cars over the years, and so what if they're all nervous and complicated and all the parts have to be hand-carved from the wood of the True Cross by a 98-year-old man in a dirt-floor Genoa workshop illuminated by a whale-oil lamp? You need an Alfa! And we don't mean some easy-to-find Reagan Era Graduate or 164 here. No, we're talking Sophia Loren-grade machinery from the 1960s! Multiple carburetors or Spica mechanical fuel injection! Partito Comunista Italiano firebrands preaching revolution on the factory floor!

The 2000 Spider sure was a looker, wasn't it? Just concentrated essence of Alfa Romeo, for sure, but it's no easy task to find one for your personal Hell Garage these days. You sigh in relief and start looking for a Miata, right? Wrong! We've found you this 1961 Alfa Romeo 2000 Spider (go here if the ad disappears), just 80,000 miles on the clock and a price tag of just 1,700 bucks… or best offer! No doubt you're already spraining your fingers dialing up the seller at this moment, but we do have to throw in a couple of minor caveats. First, there's rust. Maybe a better way of putting it would be it's rust, as in very few fugitive iron atoms have managed to barricade themselves against marauding bands of oxygen molecules. What the heck, you expect some of the red stuff in Massachusetts, no? The car rolls and the drivetrain appears complete, though the seller acknowledges that the engine is most likely frozen solid. Many trim pieces come with the car, and you even get some glass! Come on, it couldn't be that difficult!

We love Spiders, but say you need to do some grocery hauling from time to time? You need a vintage Alfa Romeo daily driver, we say, and that means you should start shopping for a Berlina sedan. No, no, don't give up- affordable project Berlinas are definitely out there. Say, this $400 1969 Alfa Romeo 1750 Berlina (go here if the ad disappears). Now, if you've ever seen Double Indemnity, you know that a Medford, Oregon, man means what he says and says what he means, and that's just who's selling this car. Ted knows that he doesn't need to go to the hassle of typing out a whole bunch of pointless description when he's selling a classic Italian sports sedan for the price of a clapped-out Olds Ciera with a couple of rods hanging out of the block. Is there an engine? A transmission? Legal paperwork? A plutonium-240-fueled Soviet radioisotope thermoelectric generator kicking out neutrons in the trunk? Hey, we can't say, but all we need to do is repeat the phrase "400 dollar 1750 Berlina" and you get the point.

Not only do the Choppers- who go by monikers like Snooper, The Torch, and Cruiser- use state-of-the-art (for 1943) communication technology, they listen to some of the cheesiest music ever recorded. Meanwhile, a sexy Renault Dauphine-driving cop's wife is on their trail. Made on a C-movie budget that would have had even Russ Meyer screaming about limitations, The Choppers satisfies all our cinematic needs while accurately depicting the societal downward spiral that led straight to the Manson Family and the 1910 Fruitgum Company. Enjoy.


[Isotope Guerrilla Cult Theatre, via BoingBoing]

We've seen a '64 Bel Air wagon, a '60 Bel Air sedan, and a '63 Bel Air Sedan so far in this series, and here's another early-60s Bel Air to check off the Alameda list. The Bel Air was the midpriced trim package during this era, fitting between the El Cheapo Biscayne and the Top Shelf Impala. The '61 Biscayne wagon had the same taillights as the Bel Air, but the holes where side trim once lived help identify this wagon as the latter type.

This car parks nose-to-tail with the '73 Maverick sedan we saw a while back, and right around the corner from the perennially-for-sale '60 Studebaker Lark. This is also the same spot where we saw the slammed '66 VW Transporter, which disappeared about the same time the Maverick appeared. My guess is that we have a serious fan of mean-looking vintage iron here.

Within days of its arrival, I must have received a half-dozen phone calls and emails alerting me to the super-rare Corvair Greenbrier in my neighborhood. Naturally, I had the camera in hand and was walking the several blocks to its parking space right away. Hooray, our second DOTS Corvair, not long after the first one.

From what I can tell, the external appearance of the Greenbrier didn't change much during its 1961-65 production run; I'm guessing it's a '62, and maybe I'm right! There's some good Greenbrier info at this site.

But we're not talking a boring old Chevy, Ford, or Dodge here. If you're going to go to all the trouble of obtaining acres of deep-pile maroon shag carpeting and diamond-tucked velveteen upholstery, to commission an airbrush artist to create a mural representing an Aztec sacrifice on a Hawaiian beach in a space station, and to hire a 37th Degree Master Bongsmith to craft you a four-footer that matches your chrome exhaust stacks… well, all that effort would be wasted on some dime-a-dozen Econoline or Tradesman. Fortunately, Robert has found us a couple of great vans, either of which would make an excellent starting point for a lifelong deeply fulfilling custom van project. For this, he gets a Project Car Hell Tipster T-shirt (unless he takes a size other than S, M, or L, in which case he'll probably get a random 24 Hours Of LeMons team T-shirt).

Try to imagine that Johnson Messenger CB mounted next to an Octophonic Sparkomatic reel-to-reel deck, in a hand-carved mahogany console. What kind of van would best suit such a setup? Why, a Candy Apple Red Thames Freighter van, of course! We've admired the Freighter ever since seeing this super-original example at the Monterey Historics, but finding an example of Ford's British proto-Econoline is harder than finding a buyer for a foreclosed McMansion in edge-city Bakersfield. Don't give up hope, though, because this 1961 Thames Freighter has a top bid of just $1,200 and no reserve! It starts and runs, sort of, but "the interior needs everything," the brakes need work, and some glass is broken. There's rust. But who cares? Someday it will make this Freighter look subdued!

Ever since we first met the Tempo Matador Hochpritsche, we've had this crazy idea that a full-on custom Tempo or Hanomag van would be the proper way to roll. In fact, a green-themed Tempo Matador, powered by a veggie-oil diesel and sporting a full-body airbrushed rainforest mural, hemp upholstery, and a pyramid-shaped meditation chamber in the back- now that's a custom van! Since most of the Matadors were made with clattery, smog-belching VW air-cooled engines (driving the front wheels), such a project has remained but a dream… until today! Would you believe that this Tempo Matador Diesel van is up for sale? We don't know the reserve price, but we suspect that there's not enough crack in the world to have made anyone feel optimistic enough to set the reserve on this terrifyingly wretched basket-case orphan somewhat challenging diamond-in-rough project much higher than the current top bid of $1,250. The seller doesn't provide any much useful information about this van in his or her description ("I don't know much about it but they are very hard to find in the U.S"). All emailed questions to the seller are answered with the following statement: "The I.D. plt says VIDAL U. SOHN TEMPO WERK HAMBURG-HAMBURG MATADOR ED 1.3 TO FAHRGESTELL-Nr serial # D6303581 wat.2700 lbs 1400." However, there isn't much rust, it appears that most of the glass and trim is intact, and that Hanomag diesel engine might be just a total rebuild a few minutes of tinkering away from rod-knocking roaring into death life!

The ID19 was a less expensive version of the luxurious DS, developed as a replacement for the Traction-Avant. This one's been picked over pretty thoroughly (I suspect that Henry Hanzel, who can smell a Citroën from the next county, got here first), but the emblem was still on the tailgate.


And now it's on my Civic! My poor Honda had all its emblems pried off (no doubt by roving bands of Honda hoodlums) while living in San Francisco, so it needed some new ones. I contemplated swapping the Citroën one-spoke steering wheel onto the Civic as well, but the factory airbag seemed worth keeping.


Now all the car needs is a huge portrait of Soichiro on the hood and maybe a rotating radar antenna on the roof. Hey, you have freedom to hack up your car when you know you'll be its last owner!


I also grabbed this beautiful instrument cluster, for use in a really stupid project I'm working on. Best $9.95 I've spent in a while. And, hey, the clock even works (after disassembly and oiling)!

We saw a red '61 V-200 4-door more than a year ago, and I'll bet another one or two live on the island.


The '61 V-200 4-door with base 170ci Slant Six engine listed at $2,110. That was 136 bucks more than the '61 Falcon, $142 more than the Corvair, and $216 more than the Rambler American. But you got one of the most reliable engines ever to come out of Detroit and a level of chrome and crazy lines not often seen on entry-level machines, before or since.

In 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower popularized the term "Military-Industrial Complex" in his farewell address, but what about the Rust-Missing Parts Complex that dominates your typical 1961 Hell Project? You'll have an even more tenuous connection to your sanity than Eisenhower does to Project Car Hell when you peel off 45 Benjamins to obtain this pair of 1961 Lincoln Continental convertibles. Some of you quitters might take one look at those photos and figure there's no way in hell anyone could ever make even one nice car out of those heaps, but that's like looking at the plans for the Bay Of Pigs invasion and saying it could never work! What if Ike had done that? The seller claims these two '61s are "90 to 100% complete," and that each car has "low original mileage." You see? Easy! At most you'll be chasing down 10% of the parts that make up an automobile, and how hard could that be? You could make one car and use the other for parts, or go for broke- literally- and restore them both.

Is it fair to make anything American- even a two-for-one deal- face off against a French car in a Choose Your Eternity challenge? Maybe not, but we're going to give Detroit a shot at a stunning upset over the perennial PCH Champeen today; just imagine that Project Car Hell trophy sitting in the lobby of Ford's HQ... in a mound of kitty litter, to catch all the leaking oil and rust flakes. We're not making it easy for Dearborn, however, because we've got this '61 Simca Aronde, with a what-the-hell price of just $650. Look at that fine French machine and try to tell us you wouldn't feel like a million francs driving it down the boulevard after a full restoration and/or customization. The latter approach might be best, since it already comes with an unnamed Datsun engine. We're sure that engine will work just fine, because the seller wants us to know it "is supposed to be a good one." It might be absolutely impossible somewhat challenging to get all the glass you'll need, because "Some of of the windows are good," but the contacts you'll cultivate in France while searching for a windshield will come in quite handy when it comes time to locate all the missing trim pieces.

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Between the Isetta and the 1500 came BMW's 700, which still had an Isetta-style tiny motorcycle engine in the rear but was shaped more like a normal "three boxes" car. You don't see them around much, since they didn't sell in huge numbers over here (and turned into vaguely automobile-shaped reddish-brown stains on the ground after a few European winters back in the old country). Get one running and looking pretty decent and you're virtually guaranteed to have bragging rights whenever you run into some chest-thumping 2002 owners. All you need is a starting point, and we've got just the car: this '61 BMW 700 (go here if the ad disappears) for only five hundred bucks. It's located in dry southern Colorado, so maybe it's not hopelessly rusted, and- get this- it "was parked running" (how long ago it was parked isn't stated, but we suspect that Richard Nixon was still in office at the time). It needs some body work (which won't be so bad, provided you don't have to find any body parts or trim pieces) and some glass (which will might be absolutely impossible challenging, but perhaps you'll find a kindly old BMW mechanic in Germany who will sell you some of his stash of NOS glass at totally reasonable prices). And hey, you should be able to get engine parts from old BMW motorcycles!

How can you not love the concept of the Instant Junkyard when you're looking to start a Hell Project? You buy several cars at once, pick the one that's slightly less hopeless in better shape than the others, and make one nice project. Meanwhile, your neighbors will be gearing up to lock you in the trunk of one of your parts cars with several angry gila monsters, because it's a truism of Project Car Hell that neighbors are never understanding about half-gutted heaps in your driveway lowering their property values... but the best projects always require total loss of sanity a few sacrifices. And when you see this 3-fer-1 deal on 1955 Austin FX3 taxis (go here if the ad disappears), you'll be willing to make any sacrifice to get these British beauties into your life. In one of those short car-ad statements that tells a long, sad story, these cars "were to be used for a movie, but the deal fell thru," we learn that these cabs have already ruined at least one life... but that won't happen to you! No, you'll have one, two, or maybe all three of these super-rare machines driving in no time! Do they run? How complete are they? We can't tell you, but the seller says all of them roll. What more do you need? Imagine making three small-block-Chevy-powered right-hand-drive British hoonwagons!

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You love wagons, we love wagons, everyone loves wagons! But old Detroit station wagons are a dime a dozen, and parts obtainment is just too darned easy. You need something European, preferably from a defunct manufacturer and packed with weird engineering. We've definitely got you covered here, and we're sure that once you lay eyes on this 1961 Borgward Hansa 1100 Wagon" (go here if the ad disappears) you'll be a believer in a boxer-four-powered 47-year-old hearse-esque German wagon! Don't worry about the body, because it's "almost free of rust," and your Subaru-driving friends will be envious of your wagon's engine: "Subaru bought the blueprints and maybe some tooling too. I am told it uses a VW 36 horse cam and crank." Imagine the fun of getting this engine of dubious ancestry running again (normally we'd advise swapping in a turbocharged Subaru mill, but it would be a sin to dump an engine this hopeless rare). Best of all, the Project Car Hell meme continues to gain fresh territory: "Need a small hearse to carry you off to project car hell?" You bet you do!


They made Borgwards in Mexico into the 70s, so you might be able to get some parts for that Hansa without having to pay vast amounts for shipping, which means you could be taking the easy way out with that car. How about a machine that wasn't even sold in North America, a machine that will raise, then dash, your hopes repeatedly as you scour the world for parts, all the while taunting you with the fact that it was built by one of the world's major manufacturers and should be easier than this? Come on down to eBay and drop a big bid on this 1971 Peugeot 304! There's no reserve price, and the top bid is sitting at $100 with only a couple days to go. Come on, a 37-year-old front-wheel-drive French sedan that's been sitting since 1990... for a hundred smackers? You can't go wrong! We're a bit put off by the seller's punctuation and spelling (where's the traditional eBay CAPS LOCK, not to mention the requisite "i saw restored one a thees go for $$$49000$$$ dollars resently" statement?) but the spare transmissions, heads, etc. compensate for that drawback. And hey, the seller says "it was every bit as reliable and efficient as, and much more "substantial" than, my 77 Honda Accord," so you figure it will be a bulletproof daily driver once you've got it running again!

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It's been hit pretty hard on the driver's-side front corner. And the other corners. And the sides. However, the roof shows no meteorite damage!


The way cars rust around here is that the weatherstripping around the rear window starts to go, and then the surrounding metal begins to rot. Then the trunk stays wet for the entire rainy season and the process accelerates. It takes about 15 years of neglect for rust-through to occur, but it takes a special sort of neglect to allow leaves and dead bugs to build up in the rust hole to the extent that moss grows on the resulting compost. Yes, this car is such a beater that it has managed to develop a moss problem in a dry climate.


It might take more than just Bondo to get everything shipshape on the rear body.


The interior really isn't so rough, considering the harshness of the sun here. I was expecting a lot more visible foam rubber and horsehair, perhaps with some duct-tape accents.


I wonder which engine this car has; most likely is the standard 300-horse 390, but you could a 375-horse version with better compression. Those who wanted a bit more zip out of their 4,000-pound T-Bird went with the Thunderbird Special 390, which boasted triple carbs and 401 horsepower. Somehow it seems only right that this car would have the Thunderbird Special.

I'm going to go with a fine patriotic machine this Fourth of July, a car literally named American. This little Kenosha coupe lives in Alameda's West End.

Kind of an interesting C-pillar/rear-window setup on this car; it's a little abrupt and the overhang is on the Corvair-ish side, but it looks good.

The '61 American came standard with a 90-horsepower six. The folks in Kenosha wouldn't build you one with a V8, but there ain't no no law says a man can't add V8 sap to his American. Is there?

Nice simple interior. I dig the oval speedometer, and three-on-the-tree is a fun way to shift. Of course, if you went for the automatic in your American, you got one of the all-time great transmission names: Flash-O-Matic!

Interesting to think that this car is the direct ancestor of the Pacer; AMC was good at quirky.

It's certainly got that distinctive late-50s/early-60s Rambler grille. This car looks pretty solid, needing only some minor bodywork and a paint job to really shine.

List price on this car was $1845. You could get the 2-door Ford Falcon for $1912, a Chevy Corvair for $1920, a VW Beetle for $1565, or (if you were completely insane marching to a different drummer) a Renault Dauphine for $1645, so the Rambler was priced quite competitively. And, damn, the Beetle was a steal!

Just the slightest hint of fins here- nothing flashy on a sensible Wisconsin car. Of course, some 304 or 343 sap wouldn't hurt... – Murilee Martin

Related:
Rambler Rogue? No, Renault Torino! [internal]