Yes, Carlos Platz and Samanta Arenaza are crazy, but it's the kind of crazy that gives us a serious case of Road Trip Envy. Their blog is in Spanish, but even if you can't remember palabra numero uno from your high-school Spanish classes you'll still get the gist from the many great photographs and maps.

Since they began their trip eight months ago, they've spent time in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and now Mexico. We're not sure how roundabout a route they'll take once they leave Mexico, but we're hoping they try to set tire to 49 states, 10 provinces, and three territories before they reach the Arctic Circle. Hey, if a Chrysler Newport can work the India-to-Belgium hash-smuggling route, a Renault 12 should be able to handle another 10,000 or so miles! Thanks to Maxichamp for the tip.

[Con Un 12 Por America]

We figure South Carolinians hadn't heard enough about Governor Mark Sanford's "Appalachian Trail Hike" disappearance to be with his Argentinean mistress, so we created the Cry For Me Argentina penalty with Gov. Sanford in mind. First, the team must mount a flagpole flying the flag of Argentina on the trunklid. Yes, the members of the Greyman Motor Club BMW 320i team are flying the flag upside down; we'll refer all outraged calls from the Argentinean Consulate right to them.

Then the miscreant driver had to write a long love letter to his Argentinean mistress on the car's roof. This dude seemed suspiciously skilled at writing letters to mistresses.

South Carolina was one of the states that more or less prohibited children from watching General Secretary Of The Communist Party Barack Obama's address to American schools, so we decided we'd do our duty as good gay-marriage-enforcing, tax-hiking, SUV-hating Californians by forcing miscreants to read Obama's speech. Because the secret socialist messages in the speech were hidden so effectively, LeMons Justice Lieberman mixed it up with lines from Trotsky, Lenin, Marx, and Stalin- you know, just in case folks didn't pick up on its call to revolutionary action. Judging by the "YOU LIE!" catcalls, we're pretty sure they got it.

So, the miscreant had to gather up all the children he or she could find; they'd serve as future guerilla fighters against the running-dog forces of counterrevolution. Here's a video of the Grayman Motor Club (which ran an E21 and and E30, both painted like Neapolitan ice cream bars and both frequent visitors to the Penalty Box) driver reading Great Helmsman Obama's call to arms:


While that was going on, we decorated the car in much the same manner as Obama plans to paint Air Force One. All hail Comrades Marx and Lenin! Oh, they hated this penalty in Kershaw!

New for LeMons South Fall was the Cone Of Shame penalty. The team currently running the highest black-flag count has to bolt the Black Cone Of Shame to the roof of their car. When another car surpasses their black flag total, we have the corner workers flag the car with the COS back in so they can hand it off to the new honoree.
The USS Enterprise Ford LTD looked especially good with the Cone Of Shame, which they so richly deserved after racking up seven black flags by Sunday afternoon. It brought back memories of the time the real USS Enterprise- which was ported in the Island That Time Forgot while I was growing up; its island was the tallest building in town- ran aground in San Francisco Bay. Badly done, guys!

Another new penalty was the West Virginia Homesteader. For this one, the miscreant's team must put the car up on four jack stands, then set up lawn furniture in front of the car and have high-calories snacks. This one inspired the telling a lot of good West Virginia jokes, most of which we can't repeat here.

The Fiat Of Tomorrow guys were very, very unhappy about getting the West Virginia Homesteader penalty; we wanted to find them a harmonica so they could play some mournful blues. Wouldn't you know, the Alfa Romeo Spider beat them by a half-lap!

We resurrected the Chronic Search, in which the miscreants have 30 seconds to hide their "dope stash" in the car and the judges have 30 seconds to find it, but we replaced the dime bag of oregano with a huge brick of lawn trimmings. These BMW pilots tried to hide the "reefer" in the glove box- clearly we're not dealing with guys who grew up driving Camaros and listening to Black Sabbath here- and ended up donning the orange vests and picking up trash.

Sometimes a team gets punished for something that doesn't even take place on the track! This gentleman had built himself a high-speed, kart-engined beer cooler and was roaring around the paddock at not-so-safe speeds. For that, we made him eat a can of pork brains, using king-sized chicharrones as a utensil, while the team's race car sat and waited. OK, here's a gallery for yez:


And here's another penalty video, courtesy of those Amazon-drivin' Tunachuckers:

Where else do you get daily-driven Peugeot 404s parked on the same block as mirror-world Mopars, just around the corner from a Renault-branded, Pininfarina-styled, Kaiser-engined Rambler Rogue? Evestay was way, way, waaay down south and shot these fine machines for us. Fiats galore, a Falcon, a Maverick, even a Unimog! Here's what Evestay has to say:

I'm not positive that it's a Cambridge. Is it an Oxford? Dunno.
The Jeep pickup might be cheating. I suspect that it hasn't moved in some time.
I *love* the rope hood fastener on the CX.
Enjoy

The Dakar Rally is a 15-day, 5,950-mile off-road endurance race for cars, trucks, motorcycles and quads. This year’s route began and ended in Buenos Aires, passing through the Andes and up Chile’s west coast before circling back via Córdoba.

Featured here is Giniel De Villiers’ Volkswagen Race Touareg 2, which won the car race, and a variety of trucks. That class was won by Firdaus Kabirov for Team Kamaz of Russia.

The Race Toureg 2 is a steel space frame, two-door carbon fiber-bodied prototype that shares very little with the production SUV. Power comes for a 260 HP, 443 Lb-Ft 2.5-liter, five-cylinder supercharged Diesel. That may not sound that big, but the overall vehicle weighs just 3,940 Lbs. It has to survive some of the most extreme conditions on earth over the 15-day race, facing temperatures that range from freezing to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, huge impacts, submersion in water and mud as well as powdery sand. This was the Toureg 2’s first race.

For awesome photos of the motorcycles that took part in the 2009 Dakar Rally visit Hell For Leather.

Photography Credit: Red Bull Photofiles

The straw that broke the camel's back was apparently a study that showed there wasn't a market in Europe for a vehicle with a "huge loading space," which seems to totally miss the point. After all, most people in this country buy trucks absent any overriding need for any of the space features they offer. [Forbes]

The 2009 race is scheduled to go 6,000 kilometers and run from Jan 3rd to the 18th, beginning and ending in Buenos Aires and running through both Argentina and Chile. Details on the route are thin, but the 2009 Dakar site is already up and running. Lobbying for tickets to South America has already begun in earnest, with Wert mentioning something about budgets and overlords. [Central European Details via Sportbusiness] [South American Rally via Dakar Website"</>]

Although it's only one letter off from the iconic jellybean-shaped 1980s family phenom recently reborn with Dave on its face, the Ford Taunus was named after a mountain range. Nevertheless, this Argentine Ford spot seems to indicate that the charging Taunus was equally at home playing either bull or matador. And no, it did most certainly did not come pre-loaded with a set of Pavement eight-tracks, as both Malkmus and Cosloy were still in short pants.

Related:
The Last Cortina [Internal]

OK, it wasn't the fault of those poor green Falcons that the death squads drove them during Argentina's Guerra Sucia; I mean, we don't hate the ZIL just because Beria's thugs had a fleet of them in the Lubyanka parking lot, do we? Of course not. So head over to the lovingly obsessive Todo Falcon site in Argentina, where you'll find endless photographs, scanned driver's manuals, and (if you can read Spanish) interesting info about the '62 Falcon That Time Forgot. – Murilee Martin

Web Oficial de Ford Falcon en Argentina [TodoFalcon.com.ar]

Related:
text [internal]

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

When we were a junior-high-aged Jalopnik, a teacher of ours said that if we could identify every reference in Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" by the next morning, we would be free from certain homework assignments for the rest of the year. We accomplished this feat. (Bear in mind that this was in the days before we had the internet on either side of our head.) And she went back on the deal, assumedly not to encourage a young Jalopnik's smart-assiness. The license plate on her Le Baron convertible read "ALON," which was her first name spelled backwards. We then started refering to her as "Alar" behind her back — an agricultural product shown to cause tumors in laboratory mice. We think this Diablo-based custom Lamborghini would cause tumors in both rodents and K Cars alike. Autoblog's got the specifics. We're going for the Kaopectate. – Davey G. Johnson

Lamborghini Alar 777 Puts the Bull Under the Knife [Internal]

Related:
Abomination of the Day: Dolphins Diablo [Internal]

One of the cars in the above illustration is a '79 Renault Torino, while the other is a '65 Rambler American. Notice any similarities? The story of the Renault Torino isn't just the usual case of a US automaker selling the tooling for an obsolete model to a South American manufacturer, nor was it a simple re-badging of a US model for license-building abroad. No, the Torino is the result of an early chapter in the twisty tale of the Renault-AMC story, which resulted in a unique-to-Argentina vehicle, based on the Rambler American Rogue but with body redesigned by Pininfarina and a Kaiser-designed engine under the hood. The Torino became a legend in Argentina, selling like crazy and having a fair bit of racing success, including a major N rburgring triumph in 1969. Torino production halted in 1982, a dark year for car freaks in Argentina. – Murilee Martin

So What's A Torino? [Rambler Rogue Registry]

Related:
The Go-Anywhere Ford Falcon...From Argentina! [internal]

During the early 1970s in Argentina, before a Per n returned to the president's chair, before that Per n was succeeded by his popular but weak-willed wife, and before that wife was thrown from office by a military junta that would regularly use "disappear" as a transitive verb, a "Dodge GTX" could be had. It was so fast, it could deliver a forgotten ring on the occasion of a friend's wedding. Let's just hope the friend didn't turn out to be a dissident. [Thanks to Martin for the tip.] – Mike Spinelli

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The New Kind of Compact, In The Large Economy Size! Vintage Dodge Dart Spot [internal]

Horacio Pagani started out as the son of Argentine bakers. We wish this stupid cop-chopper would stop circling. Seriously, po-pos, either catch the perp or go home. Sheesh. Anyway, Mister Pagani, like many insane visionaries, bootstrapped himself by building trailers and racing cars. Er. Racing cars. Er, well, whatever. Anyway, if you can wade through the purple ESL prose of the linked piece, it's an interesting look at the man's ideas about automotive design and construction. Meanwhile, we're about to reach for our revolver. Really. Stop circling, dammit! – Davey G. Johnson

What the Mind Thinks, the Hand Creates [Casilda.com]

Related:
The Truth About the Pagani Zonda C12S [Internal]

While reader Tony was visiting Iguaz Falls at the Argentine/Brazilian border, he ran across this automotive anomaly in Puerto Iguaz , Argentina. Not a flower car, but not yet a woman, the Hearsachero was apparently designed to allow hastily-and-not-always-correctly embalmed bodies to air out during the funeral procession in an effort to keep the driver from being overcome by the noxious fumes of decomposing flesh exacerbated by South American heat. We're quite sorry if we just pulled a Cannibal Corpse on your evening. You might try playing some Bread or Jim Croce to cleanse the palate.

More El Caminos!

Reader Martin grew up in Argentina and tossed us over this link to a classic Argentine Ford Falcon ad. According to him, the updates to the South American Falcon were primarily cosmetic, rather than the full do-overs the Australians heaped on the machine over the years. Oh, and Dr. Wilson, we hope you'll note, the Falcon doesn't try to jump the railroad crossing in the ad.

Related:
Ad Watch: Chevrolet Is As American As Fantasy Leagues, Steroids and Cuban Players Lying About Their Age [Internal]