Well, that sounded like a member of the Fiberfab family to me, and I figured the "Porsche engine" would turn out to be a VW Type I with funky carburetors and/or strange-o cooling ducts. Nope! That's a Corvair engine underneath that battered fiberglass body.

In case you were in any doubt about the decade of this car's origin, here's a clue. Four-time DOTS honoree WhatWouldJesseDo was seriously considering buying this car and making it into a totally sensible daily driver, but the battered old GT-15 is now off limits. More on that sad story later today.

Back in those days, aftermarket sunroofs were serious- and leaky- status symbols.

The post-war era in America brought tract housing, TV dinners and a steady stream of quirky little cars to our shores. GM, realizing that there were cars being purchased that weren't theirs, sought to rectify the situation. Most of the new small cars coming over from Europe, and being built by people who were trying to kill us little more than a decade earlier, were rear-engined, the most successful of them air-cooled. GM management decided to bring out their own small-car competitor, and unlike Ford and Chrysler, who pretty much just popped out smaller versions of their mainstream models, GM went radical, and followed the lead of the foreign interlopers.

The resultant Corvair was unlike anything sold by an American manufacturer since the short-lived Tucker. Rear-engined, and air-cooled, the corvair offered four-wheel independent suspension when the domestic competitors were still holding up their backsides with live axles. The engine placement allowed for an amazingly roomy cabin with a flat floor and low, sporty roofline- the Corvair being over five inches lower than the Impala, with which it shared the sales floor. The 'vair was made available in the widest variety of body styles of any GM product- from sedan, coupe and convertible, to pickup (with a side-loading ramp!) minivan, and station wagon.

Today's contender is the handsome four-seater convertible, and it's a spyder, which features the sport gauge cluster and, most importantly, the 150 bhp turbocharged 2.7 litre six. Keep in mind that a contemporary Porsche 911 only put out 128 horsepower.

This black over white ‘vair sports the sturdy four speed with a vague, long-throw shifter. With mastery of that, you will be able to get to sixty in about 10 clicks of the clock. The top is power-operated, the steering is light, and these cars are excellent cruisers. The area where it might let you down is in the twisties, and that brings up an important point about the Corvair, for which many an auto enthusiast can never forgive- it gave us Ralph Nader. His book, Unsafe at Any Speed, lamented the unique handling characteristics of a swing axle rear suspension. Which, when exacerbated by the pendulum-like effect of the engine back there creating excessive oversteer, lead to several Corvair-related accidents.


Never mind that thousands of European drivers had been managing to not get killed by similarly designed cars for decades, Nader knew Americans needed protection from these Detroit deathtraps. Today, things have changed and we're considering the value of a Corvair, and not of Ralph the Mouth.

So, what do you think about this classic example of GM's experimental phase? Is $14,000 a price that's nice, and a fair value to stick it to Ol' Ralphie boy? Or, is that price seem like and unrecoverable spin of the Crack Pipe?

You decide!

eBay at any Speed or go here if the a disappears.

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Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

We saw this Greenbrier a couple months back, and this '64 Monza earlier in the year. Prior to that, we'd seen only this Corvair painter's van in the series, making 2009 The Year Of The DOTS Corvair!
I shot this car quite close to the spot in which the '71 Plymouth Valiant once lived, and just down the block from this '62 Chevy Nova. As far as I can tell, it's a '64… but I could be wrong. Corvair experts?

NASCAR Maximum Warlord Bill France saw that the new American compact cars- the Ford Falcon, Chevy Corvair, and Plymouth Valiant- were getting a lot of attention in the marketplace, so he created the Compact Series, which ran during 1960 and 1961. Some big names participated, including Curtis Turner, Richard Petty, and Fireball Roberts, and a few Volvos even got into the act. The Valiants utterly dominated, thanks to the Hyper-Pak Slant Six engine, but the Corvair managed to earn an all-important NASCAR racing pedigree, 49 years before UDMan's 24 Hours Of LeMons Corvair really put the rear-engined Chevy on the racing-history map. Thanks to UDMan (who else?) for the tip!
[Persh.org]

Nearly a year ago, we saw this Sub Lime '70 Challenger gracing the streets of the rust-challenged isle, and that's been it for Chrysler E bodies before today. Not only is this mean-looking Mopar- which definitely has a Vanishing Point air about it- a daily driver, it's a painter's work vehicle! I ran into Dave, the owner of this '73, while on the same block that brought us the Moto Loco VW Golf, while he was painting a house in the neighborhood.

He's owned the car, which is an original 340/automatic machine, for 8 years and has been gathering parts for a full-scale restoration. The new engine- a hairy high-compression 340- is ready to go, and the bodywork is next. The leaky-trunk rust won't be too hard to fix, and you can buy reproductions of all the interior components, but the damage done to the roof by a previous owner who apparently used a hammer and chisel to remove the vinyl top will be quite a chore to undo.

Since this is Alameda and everyone knows each other, it turns out that Dave works for his Alameda-native uncle, who is the owner of several DOTS machines: the '62 Corvair van, the '61 Plymouth Valiant (which he purchased new, in Alameda), and the 1945 Chevrolet pickup (which he bought in 1966 at an Alameda County Transit equipment auction). I'll try to track him down and get more of the history of these vehicles for later posts, so check in later!

By all accounts, it was the most exciting Index Of Effluency battle in LeMons history. The Corvair proved so reliable that Toyota teams were feeling envious- yeah, we sure as hell didn't expect that from the oldest car ever to run in LeMons- but its lap times were on the slow side and its funky handling characteristics resulted in frequent visits to the Penalty Box. In the end, however, the much faster Saab just couldn't stay in one piece for long, and the trophy that LeMons insiders consider to be the most prestigious goes to the team captained by our own UDMan. Well done, Team Trailing Throttle Oversteer, and may this serve as an inspiration for future LeMons teams trying to decide on the right car!
Image source: Ron Vickers, SmokeyBurnout

According to LeMons Assistant Perpetrator Nick Pon, the Peugeot 504 sputtered to a halt and had to be pushed off the track two laps into transponder testing (which takes place at about 30 MPH, so you know that the weekend will be full of excitement for the Peugeot team if they can get the car out there during, like, real racing). The Team Craptation Chevy Citation X-11 lived up to all the advance billing and crapped out minutes later. The eagerly anticipated first-ever LeMons Datsun 510 fried its alternator and had to limp off the track, according to tweets from Team Knights Who Say Ni-ssan… whose 200SX has already lost an idler pulley. Not only that, the Team Crumpled Rusted And Pathetic Plymouth Laser just shed a wheel on the track, with unpleasant results.

On the positive side, UDMan's '63 Corvair hasn't missed a beat, continuing to rack up lap after lap. It's too early for Team Trailing Throttle Oversteer to start measuring garage shelf space for the Index Of Effluency trophy, but things are looking good for them so far. We'll be passing along photos and updates as they come in from Connecticut, so check in later!

Mostly you see the good ol' small-block-Chevy-powered Corvair, but why do that when the engine/transaxle assembly of the front-wheel-drive Olds Toronado (or, heh heh, its Cadillac Eldorado cousin) is better suited for placement in a rear-engined car? Corvair racer UDMan has found a very nicely done Corvair/Toronado swap and written up a review over on Automotive Traveler.

[Automotive Traveler]

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.

Of course you did! Why, everyone at the track was scared to death in awe of the first-ever 24 Hours Of LeMons Corvair… and now you East Coasters have a shot at inspiring the same sort of dread respect from members of teams running humdrum RX-7s and yawnworthy E30s at the New England 24 Hours Of LeMons. That's right, the Powerglide-equipped 1963 Chevrolet Corvair 700 four-door being race-prepped by UDMAn is running fine, UDMan is starting to assemble an all-star team to drive it… and two openings remain on the roster! If you've got more guts than brains, know your way around a race track, and have sufficient greenbackage to pay your share of race expenses, UDMan wants to hear from you. Write your "I Think Ralph Nader Is The Devil - Sign Me Up!" essay in a comment below, comment in UDMan's CarDomain Blog post, or email me with a suitable rant and I'll forward it to UDMan. Index Of Effluency, here you come!

Why, I remember wheeling and dealing to buy a beater '60 Corvair while I was in high school, but the seller wouldn't listen to my totally reasonable $200 offer. As we know, the Corvair has some funky handling characteristics, but so what? Look at it! This is a '64, right? Corvair experts?


It appears that the owner of the DOTS Austin Cooper S is also the owner of this Monza coupe. For some reason, he's trying to sell the Chevy. It has some dings and a bit of surface rust, but seems to be a pretty solid restoration candidate. Nicely priced at $2900?

You can't make out the car photos in the new/improved page layout anyway, so we'll put the "traditional" PCH image after the jump. Right, back to business as usual in the Hell Garage: last time, the turbo rotary-powered Datsun 510 just barely beat the small-block-Chevy-powered Austin-Healey Sprite, according to the results of the Choose Your Eternity poll. It may be that the certain rage of 510 worshipers upon seeing that blasphemous engine swap tipped the balance in favor of the Datsun- or against it, depending on how you interpret these things- and so we'll continue with a couple of cars with heavy zealot followings: Chevy Corvair and Renault Gordini!

Never mind that Dan Neill wrote that the Renault Dauphine was "a rickety, paper-thin scandal of a car that, if you stood beside it, you could actually hear rusting." The nerve- he probably got that Pulitzer at a yard sale! The Dauphine was a fine motor vehicle, and then that Renault hot-rodder Amédée Gordini worked his tuning magic on it and upped the horsepower by nearly 16 percent. Yes, the Renault Dauphine Gordini packed 37 French ponies in the back (not the measly 32 you got with the regular Dauphine) and you can get yourself this '65 (go here if the ad disappears) for under a grand! The seller is asking for $900, but you won't have to pay that much once you point out that those "newer tires" are space-saver spares (though we can't help but think that driving on four of those things would be quite entertaining). There's rust. Lots of rust. It doesn't run, but you'll be ditching the Renault engine and swapping in something a bit more powerful, like f'rexample this 2165cc VW unit. Add some turbocharging, a beefed up Type 4 transaxle, and you'll be broke driving the quickest Dauphine in your time zone!

Rear-engined cars from the 60s are deadly exciting, but why go with European oversteer when you could drive patriotic American oversteer? The Chevrolet Corvair is the obvious choice, and the 1969 model may be the very best one. It's also the very last one, so they're pretty rare; The General was only building '69 Corvairs to prove that he wasn't going to knuckle under to that paranoid communist agent, Ralph Nader, and so the cars were all assembled by hand in the "Corvair Room" in Willow Run, Michigan. That's right, lovingly handcrafted by the same perfectionists who made the Nova the envy of the Mercedes-Benz quality-control department! The '69 Corvair is hard to find these days, but we've found a pair of them for just $2,875 (go here if the ad disappears). Both are running, Powerglide-equipped hardtops, and one is the sporty Monza model. These Southern California survivors have "very little" rust, though decades of blazing Ojai summer days mean that the upholstery is likely on the crumbly and/or faded side. While you're searching for repro carpets and getting the seats recovered, you can also go shopping for a bulletproof leisure suit; you'll need one to protect yourself from the high-velocity projectiles fired at you by Corvair zealots, once you stuff this Porsche 997 six in the back of the Monza (which leaves the other car available as an "instant junkyard" parts car, to be deposited on your front lawn). In fact, you'll probably have the Porsche guys after you as well, so better add some Kevlar longjohns to your sartorial shopping spree. You won't have to worry about the Corvair guys catching you on the road, though- not with 385 horsepower behind you!

The image quality isn't so good; in fact, identifying the cars is much like trying to extract useful information from the Zapruder Film (which was shot using similar hardware). The ASA 24 film means there are some dark parts, and my film-to-video conversion technique (camcorder + projector) doesn't help matters. There's definitely a Corvair, a 356, and a Beetle, and what appears to be a Renault Caravelle. Maybe a Sprite as well? Mostly you just get atmosphere from this; the sense that it's really freakin' cold, with maybe a mournful whistling of grim Scandinavian-style wind through the skeletal trees, punctuated by the roar of engines at rod-throwing revs and the occasional crunch of sheetmetal on snowbanks. You might check out this Land-O-Lakes SCCA history of racing in Minnesota when you're done here.

Within a few minutes and several blocks of each other, I caught the beater 1970 Impala and the 1962 Corvair painter's van in action, going about their business just like all the Sentras and Tauruses you might see. Later on, I saw the Austin Cooper S in motion as well, but couldn't get a photo.

The winner! Not much more needs to be said here, but we'd like to point out that the Metro Gnome's best lap of 1:36.298 was only the 12th-best of the race. That's right, consistency (and a 10-lap bonus, awarded by judges who felt sure that chain would snap) wins this race!


This car was moments from winning the SF '08 race when the fuel pump failed. Here's more proof that you don't need to be fast to do well in a LeMons race; just stay out of trouble and don't break parts and you can win. This time around, the Spirit Of San Diego cruised to a solid 7th-place finish, which should give you 305 drivers some ammunition in your debates with the 350 guys.


Sure, this car spun out quite a bit, but Team Unsafe At Any Speed added greatly to our enjoyment of the race. The best lap time was 1:54.807, which wasn't so quick, but they beat nearly half the other teams in the lap totals with their 54th-place finish.








We can't find any photos of the incident- which apparently took place on the back side of the hill- but the super-veteran Cavalier finally ended its racing career with a rollover. No injuries, and we're hoping the ONSET guys will be back with that Cimarron they've been threatening to buy.

Here we see a nicely edited video, put together from in-car footage shot in the Pandamonium Racing BMW during the 24 Hours Of LeMons Arse Freeze-A-Palooza race last weekend. We see some drivers who have Chicane Perception Disorder, an extremely ill-considered track reentry by an off-roading Mustang, the Unsafe At Any Speed Chevy Corvair showing some funky handling characteristics, and much more. The Pandamonium driver's shouted comments on the action really add comedic value here. When you're done here, be sure to check out LeMons Supreme Court Justice Lieberman's 20 Coolest Cars Of The Arse Freeze list. Thanks to Adam of Pandamonium Racing for sending this in!

As everyone who has been following the run-up to the 24 Hours Of LeMons Arse Freeze-A-Palooza- which takes place on the weekend after Christmas- the crop of Index Of Effluency contenders absolutely smokes anything we've seen at prior races (and, in the case of the British Leyland machinery, we mean the "smokes" part quite literally). The team that claims the Index Of Effluency trophy- which goes to the car that exceeds all expectations in the most glorious fashion- is the real winner of the 24 Hours Of LeMons, so we're gearing up for an all-time battle at Thunderhill (where, to nobody's surprise, the weather is expected to feature near-freezing temperatures and stinging horizontal sleet).

And because LeMons aficionados love nothing better than a debate on how fast- yet effluent- cars should perform when the real deal goes down, we're going to have a little contest here. Below are the 13 big-league Index Of Effluency powerhouses that will be running the Arse Freeze-A-Palooza- the "Lucky 13," as they shall henceforth be known. You need to estimate how many laps you think each of the Lucky 13 will complete during the weekend of racing, sharing your predictions in a comment in this post, for all the world to see. After the race (probably long after the race), I'll get around to doing the math and seeing who came closest overall (by calculating the difference between prediction and actual performance for each of the 13), and I'll send that winner a few team T-shirts and other LeMons goodies.

"But Murilee," you may be whining at this point, "I like the idea of blowing off work while I figure out the 13 lap totals, as my boss is a cruel, Simon Legree-esque figure, but I don't know where to start! How many laps would a not-so-effluent car manage in this race?" Not to worry! There's a new track configuration this year, with a total length of 1.9 miles (last year, it was more like 1.3 miles). Last time, the more reliable entrants managed to finish 400 laps or more, with the lap winner knocking out 461 total. With the longer track configuration, we can expect to see the cars that don't blow up, fall apart, or otherwise crap out to grind out totals somewhere in the 250 to 300-lap range. Some of the Lucky 13 are really fast cars, when working properly, and many of the teams are totally stacked with ace drivers, so we might just see some of these teams go on to totally dominate the race, leaving those boring Acuras and Mazdas to choke on their dust! Anything can happen out there! Here they are, in no particular order. Note: Because I was short on sleep when I calculated the lap totals in my estimates, I multiplied when I should have divided. Feel free to update your estimates if you made the mistake of trusting my numbers.

I just retrieved the 1963 Corvair from its previous owner on Monday. The Body is in amazing shape with only surface rust, and one slight rust area in the front valance. The interior is almost mint, with the exception of the parcel shelf where the back window shattered. This car was owned by a Vermont woman, who bought it new, and then parked it in the early 70’s. It hasn’t run since, and has only 46,000 original miles. The engine turns freely, and I should be able to get it running right after the first of the year. The tires are all dry rotted, and period correct bias construction. So this is what I plan on doing very soon.

1. Sell as many things off the vehicle to get the purchase price down further.

a. Front and Rear Seats

b. Dash Pad

c. Original Equipment Radio

d. Glove Box Door

e. Wheel Covers

f. Headlamp Bezels

g. Those wonderfully decorated tail lamps

h. Side Door Window glass

2. Get the engine running by performing the following:

a. Replace all the fuel lines

b. Install a new starter

c. Install a new Battery

d. Rebuild the fuel pump

e. Install 2 NOS Carburetors

f. Use aftermarket air cleaners rather than the stock units.

g. Install new ignition components (Rotor, Points, etc.)

h. New plugs, wiring, etc.

i. Replace, and stock up on fan belts

j. Completely change the oil (a couple of times, once I get the engine running, then re-drain, and re-fill)

3. Once the engine is running, then I’ll turn my attention to the Powerglide:

a. I’m thinking of replacing it altogether (and bringing a spare!!!)

b. Install a UD Transmission Oil Cooler, just under the trunk lid, where the spare tire usually sat.

4. By this time the interior should be stripped, and a rollcage should go in

5. I’m going to stick with 13” stock wheels and upgrade the tires (somehow)

6. Concentrate on the braking system

a. Upgrade fronts to discs (I have heard they there are kits available, from the later Monzas)

b. New brake lines

c. Rebuilt the wheel cylinders for the rears

d. All new linings

e. High temperature brake fluid

7. It should be going strong by this time

The roof of the car was damaged by a collapsing carport, and that’s the reason why I got it for $400.

So what theme am I going for? The Ralph Nader thing is too easy….. lets have a survey…

Oh, and I need volunteers for driving and track duty. Waaaaay too many people have already backed out on me. I’m doing the build by myself right now.

Yes, I loaded that car by myself from a field in Springfield Vermont

Hey man,

Down in Key West I found two classic, American forward-control vans still rolling daily and parked on the street. You can find the photos attached.It's a GMC Handivan and a Corvair Greenbrier, two classic examples of America combating the Volkwagen Type 2. I saw the Greenbrier cruise past me the next day, driven by a woman no less. Cool!

P.S: I also included a pic of the very...interesting...Key West Bible Class official van, which is very, very professional.