24 hours of lemons
Those of you who watch a lot of automotive TV shows are probably familiar with Year One's Keith Maney, who appears on
My Classic Car, Dream Car Garage, American Muscle Car, Hot Rod TV, MuscleCar TV, Horsepower TV, etc. What you may not know about is Keith's insidious influence on this site; both yours truly and Andrew Stoy worked for Keith at
YO (along with Driveshaft Through The Skull creator
Walker Canada and military-vehicle expert commenter
Clinto), and he's a bad, bad influence on anyone who might want to retain some semblance of vehicular sanity. Naturally, I figured he'd be perfect for the
24 Hours Of LeMons, and he agreed that building a car for next year's LeMons South race would be a fine idea. The initial plan was to use "The World's Rustiest '78 Trans Am," conveniently sitting in the woods behind Year One's Georgia HQ, but that's not what happened…
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la carrera panamericana
Remember the
Carrera Panamericana-veteran '67 Nissan Fairlady
we saw at the Motoring J Style show a few months back? Those
locos from Lucha Libre Racing are at it again, donning their wrestler masks, climbing in the Datsun, and heading to Mexico next month to race some more! These guys aren't just crazed Datsun racers looking for hoonage kicks- they'll be delivering much-needed school supplies to rural Mexican schoolkids en route. And because those supplies cost real money, they're selling team caps, shirts and decals; make the jump to see what I've done with my LLR decal.
[Lucha Libre Racing]
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down on the street
Welcome to
Down On The Street, where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Today we're going to check out one of my all-time favorite Japanese cars, the one that started the whole hot-rodded Japanese machinery thing here in the US of A: Datsun 510! Sometimes I get asked whether irate car owners come running after me with a shotgun when they see me shooting their cars, but my experience with this Datsun was more typical; the owner came out to see what was going on, was glad that someone appreciated his car, and opened the hood and trunk so I could get better photos.
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choose your eternity
Wouldn't you know it, the 60s BMW coupe beat the 80s one in
our last Choose Your Eternity poll. Sure, the 633CSi is more complicated, but you might be able to find a parts car or three in your local wrecking yard... and where's the Hell there? Today we're going to return to the perennial France-versus-the-world battle for the All Time Global Project Car Hell JiggaChampion Trophy (which leaks rusty water and has to be jump-started), and- just because we love an underdog- we're going to let Japan take on the mightiest of PCH Superpowers!
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new cars
You may have a yearning for extreme Japanese weekend racers, but the real question is: do you have the Yen? Specifically, do you have 28.4 million Yen? That's what the 2008 Nismo Fairlady Z 380RS-Competition race-ready is going to set you back. For all that change, equivalent to $285K, you get a stripped-down Z with the 3.8-Liter VQ35HR V6, good enough for 395 HP and 311 lb/ft of torque. Because they're nice folks, they'll also throw in a close-ratio 6-speed gearbox, mechanical LSD, roll cage, fire extinguisher and a wing big enough to double as a twin bed.
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down on the street
All right, this car wasn't sold as a Fairlady in the US (where it was the Sports 1600) but the home-country-market name is so much more fun than the export one, so I'm using it here. The Volvo Amazon is another example of a car where the home-market name is better than what we got, and the list goes on. Whatever you call it, what we have here is sort of a proto-Miata, a Japanese attempt to make a small British sports car that didn't break every few minutes.
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news
Effective immediately, there's a higher spec Nissan Fairlady Z (that's Japan's 350Z) tuned by Nissan Motorsports in the land of Nihon. Nismo's given the Z a few tweaks to provide extra body stiffness, better cornering and more downforce. Power's still the same, at 313 hp for the JDM model, which makes a seven-horsepower mockery of US-sold 350Zs. Now is that fair? I ask you.
– Mike Spinelli
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retro
While American youngsters tend to think of the Nissan Silvia as a 180SX-type drift car, if they think of it at all, there was an era, long, long ago — when their fathers were slogging it out in the jungles of the nation formerly known as Indochina — that the Silvia was actually a limited-run Fairlady Roadster-based coupe. However, the corporate masters in Nihon feared that interior-wise, the Silvia was simply too cramped for the typical American frame, so although there
were a few LHD examples, they were never exported to our shores. Pity. A few of us would have a torsoectomy to drive such a fine-looking automobile.
– Davey G. Johnson
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Jalopnik
Last week, we learned that 63% of you prefer eternity with a basket-case American kit car to eternity with a rattletrap French beach car. What lessons to be learned from that remain unclear, but what is clear is that today's Classic Ad Watch post dictates that we include a DKW in today's Choose Your Eternity competition.
