Unlike most claimer races, in which any schmoe on the premises may claim a car for a specified sum, the fine print of the 24 Hours Of LeMons rulebook states that "At the end of the competition, the organizer—and nobody else, you lazy, better-car-wantin' bastids—may elect to purchase any vehicle from its owner(s) for $500. In other words, don't spend a lot on a cheater, cause if you do, you ain't gonna own it much longer." While Chief Perp Jay Lamm had considered claiming a car in the past (often with much encouragement to do so from the LeMons Supreme Court), he'd always chickened out with some lame excuse like "I have too many damn hoopty-ass cars at my house now, where am I going to fit another one?" Not this time! Since the Paraguayan Benz is essentially unregisterable, the engine will end up in a Model A owned by one of the Assistant Perps, while the rest of the car will likely be traded for a couple of boxes of rusty Alfa Romeo parts.

The good news for Team Diplomatic Immunity is that they went home with two major trophies: the Heroic Fix, for their 8-hour heater-hose replacement, and the coveted I Got Screwed trophy, for having their nice car snatched away from their clutches.

That's right, it really is possible to obtain a great big Benz with a V12 engine, dent-free body, and cherry interior for 500 bucks. Now, some of you may be asking yourselves, "How in the hell could a car that sold new for $130,000 just over a decade ago possibly make it past the LeMons Supreme Court without getting issued so many penalty laps that the judges get carpal tunnel syndrome from writing so many zeros on the inspection sheet?"

We had a hard time believing it ourselves, but here's how it went down: the car was brought into the country by a Paraguayan diplomat (it still has diplomatic plates), and then some hazily-defined event took place that resulted in a drug-smuggling bust and the involvement of police personnel from several nations. After that, the car became permanently radioactive in the eyes of the DMV, with dealer after dealer attempting to wash it clean of its sins and register it for street use. No dice! Finally, all the optimism evaporated and the last dealer washed his hands of the car, selling it for a grand to... the same LeMons team that once ran a Jaguar XJ-S. They sold the driver's seat for 500 bucks, and that was that. The heater works, the roll cage was installed without trashing the beautiful wood-and-leather interior, and we bought the whole story. There's talk that one of the LeMons Perpetrators may get the Chief Perp to claim the car (as is his, and only his, right) so that he can drop the engine in a '27 Ford Tudor. The team members say they don't want to see this car ever again, once the race is done, so things might work out well for all concerned.

Matt Groner, the guy who restored the once-bashed Enzo is also a 24 Hours Of LeMons racer. This race, he's running a 1995 BMW E36 (obtained via salvage title, which didn't stop the Chief Perp from slapping a 100-lap BS Penalty on it), and he decided it would look much better with the beat-up original carbon-fiber bumper from the Enzo bolted to its roof.


After a few hours, however, the safety enforcers at MSR decided that Team Enzo Dysfunction's "wing" wasn't the safest accessory they'd ever seen, so off it came. Even so, this Hollywood-famous and LeMons-veteran object is still available for purchase on eBay, with all proceeds going to charity. Wall art? Part of a body kit on your Diamante? It's up to you!

Now we're going with something a bit more recent, with quite a few additional miles on the clock. Still, 22,900 miles on a 13-year-old car isn't excessive, and this '95 3000GT convertible looks to be in very nice condition. The seller's claim that it's a super-rare car because "Only eighty-three 1995's had black paint with ivory leather interior" isn't particularly persuasive, but this is a chance to get a solid original example of a not-so-common Japanese sports car. $29,595 for it? What do you say?
[Auto Trader, thanks to Jose for the tip]

Isn't it great how Ferrari has never built any car you can buy for nickels and dimes nowadays? Maserati has the shameful Biturbo episode cheapening even its best products to this day, but every single Ferrari- no matter how wretched- is worth quite a bit (with a few notable exceptions, of course). You might think this would keep you safe from a vintage Ferrari project; regardless of the strength of your yearning for a prancing horse, it's just not possible! There is no safety, my friends, because anything is possible; how about a genuine 1962 Ferrari 250 GT/E for under 30 grand? OK, we'll allow that perhaps it needs a few parts, and that said parts might be on the pricey side, but how bad can it be? Ferrari purists are no doubt pouring quadruple shots of Sambuca to settle their nerves right about now (that is, if their hands can stop shaking enough to hold the bottle), having read the description of such desecrations as the Chevy 327 engine transplant and the junkyard BMW sunroof. You have two choices with this project: pay what it takes to get a proper Ferrari V12 under the hood... or put a bigger V12 in that baby! Say, this Mercedes-Benz unit, which we think would look really good with six Webers.

Does Enzo Ferrari's arrogance with Ferrucio Lamborghini piss you off, even after nearly 60 years? Why, owning a Lamborghini would be your way of saying that nobody can give you the high hat! Only thing is, only coke dealers and entourage-laden rappers can afford the things... but wait- is it possible your pals at Jalopnik have found an affordable Lamborghini for your garage? Yes indeedy, 'tis true; here's an honest-to-God '95 Diablo with a Buy It Now price of just $45K, and it runs! We're not so sure the fact that it runs with "NO ENGINE LIGHTS" means a whole lot, given that the electrical system might be a bit on the shaky side, and the statement "The steering and main running gear have been restored to close to factory specs, however I don't think I would try for the advertised 200 mph" gives one pause, but: real Lamborghini (though it's technically a Frankenstein made from a coupe and an SE). The seller is even thoughtful enough to provide a Fieroborghini body kit, so you can avoid those costly trips to the Lambo dealer for body parts. Are you thinking what we're thinking? Put a Fiero body on the Diablo chassis for the ultimate Fieroborghini!

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Remember these things? My friend (and future brother-in-law) Jim and I lived in San Francisco at the time, and a CD player in one's vehicle becomes a crucial part of the [rock-through-window + prybar on dash = exchange CD player for 20 minutes worth of crack high at UN Plaza] equation.


So if you want tunes in your SF car, you want a crappy, not-worth-stealing junkyard cassette deck, in this case a mid-80s Subaru separate-radio-and-cassette combo, with a high-tech plywood mounting system. So, in April of '95, each of us found ourselves with a few weeks between jobs and friends all over the country we hadn't visited for a long time. So we figured we'd just drive to see them and see the country- mostly from secondary highways- in between visits.

Here's the obligatory "Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona" photograph... I wonder how many of these have been shot over the years? But getting ahead of my story here... our destination cities were Minneapolis, Chicago, Indianapolis, New York City, Chapel Hill, and Atlanta, and if we decided to crash out between cities we'd just set up tents and build a fire at a campground. It worked great- we had a complete set of cooking gear, so there was never any need to eat fast food, and even the stretch where we drove nonstop all the way across the widest part of Texas was low-stress (although driving across Oklahoma the day after the OKC Federal Building bombing, at a time when the suspects were being announced as "two white men in a pickup truck," was a nail-biter, and before that we had an unfortunate incident with the South Dakota Highway Patrol that involved a lengthy search by lawmen convinced California plates = guns and drugs in the vehicle- they were so sure we were packing 100 pounds of Black Tar and a 20mm antiaircraft cannon that they put us in the Crown Vic's back seat immediately. Imagine their disappointment when we turned out to be clean!).


Here's the truck as it looks today: 250,000 miles and has never required a serious repair. It's still on the original clutch. Say what you will about Toyota's contribution to the Boredom Era of forgettable automotive design, but their 80s pickups may be the most reliable vehicles ever manufactured.


Right. So, the tape. Prior to the trip, I made about ten 90-minute mix tapes, each with the same label design and color-coded according to its intended purpose. For example, the Red Tape was to be played when we were getting tired 18 hours into a stretch of driving; it started with Faith No More's "Surprise! You're Dead," then went to Oingo Boingo's "Cry of the Vatos" and Fear's "Let's Have A War." The Blue Tape was, of course, entirely scratchy 1930s country blues with Death Row, hookworms, and sharecropper's shacks as the subject matter. The Gray Tape was all Tom Waits. And so on. Each tape had artwork featuring my '65 Impala driving into a nuclear sunset, done in my early Photoshop days and printed on a dot-matrix printer (a what?).


The Orange Tape, however, ended up being what we listened to most of the time, and we started writing the date we entered each new state on the back side of its label. It was intended to be sort of the all-purpose tape, not too nerve-wracking yet also non-soporific, with a semi-road-trippy theme (hence "Radar Love" and "Back In The USA," "On The Road Again" etc.). At each stop, we'd play the Orange Tape for our friends and they'd demand a copy. Since then, the Legend of the Orange Tape has spread in our social circles; I still get requests to burn CDs with these songs. They're not the greatest songs ever recorded (although I do think that the Sister Double Happiness song might belong on that list), I've outgrown some of them since I made the tape, and they don't exactly paint us as super-hip connoisseurs of edgy music. But they work great for serious long-distance driving.

You see plenty of JDM bits and pieces on Japanese cars roaming American streets, what with the trendiness of Japan-market stuff these days, but how about entire Japan-spec cars? Imagine the looks of awe you'll get as you howl by in your right-hand-drive '95 Subaru WRX! Sure, Subaru parts- even JDM ones- are pretty easy to come by in the USA, but imagine the excitement at the DMV when you march in with the Japanese title to this fresh-from-the-shipping-container blue beauty! As for the car itself, it has 171,746 hard kilometers of pedal-to-metal Japanese hoonage on the clock, so it's, uh, nicely broken in. The engine, well, she ain't exactly in the car right now, and the seller hints that a rebuild might be needed (probable translation: rods dangling out of the block and/or valve-shaped holes in the pistons). The body is a bit rough, allegedly due to dents received during shipping (probable translation: slid sideways into light pole in mall parking lot during hoonage), but the seller has dropped the price from $6700 down to the low, low, low sale price of just six grand!

Real hoons spit on AWD, you say? Real men battle torque steer, you say? Well, you're in luck! We've found this turbocharged '92 Nissan Sentra SE-R for just a bit more than half the price of the JDM RHD WRX. ZOMG! The seller needs exactly $4375 to pay his tuition, and (in spite of the encouragement of Aaron and Hien) he just needs to sell his baby to pay the school. His heartbreaking loss could be your gain, although some of the sting is doubtless taken out of his heartbreak due to the fact that his baby's engine has "a crack behind the block or the oil pan" (probable translation: rods dangling out of the block). Oh yeah, and there's also the fried turbocharger. But you get an LSD diff, all the turbo/intercooler plumbing, and a whole bunch of cool aftermarket stuff, some of which actually contributes to performance (including the requisite Nismo shift knob). Imagine this car with the engine fixed and lunatic levels of boost- why, just make the exterior look a little less obvious and you'd have quite the sleeper!

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We can just hear guys at the ad agency: "Okay, our budget's 500 bucks, the messaging is asinine, Oldsmobile is going out of business, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it." [Thanks to Michael for the tip.] – Mike Spinelli [UPDATE: Yeah, it's probably a fake. The proper line is "Not Your Father's Oldsmobile." And even Oldsmobile probably wouldn't have referred to its customers as "old folks." Nyah.]

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