Even though I live in a parking-challenged downtown neighborhood and have maxed out my off-street parking with several cheap heaps, I really really really wanted to go over to San Francisco and buy this car, that very minute (the listing included the ominous words "MUST SELL THIS WEEKEND"). My parents bought two brand-new 1973 128 sedans when I was 6 years old, and at the time I thought they were the most awesome-sounding motor vehicles on the face of the earth. In fact, the engine noise produced by those Fiats may have been what turned me into a car freak at an early age (I choose to not dwell on the fact that both cars were completely kaput within several years and sent my parents scurrying back to Detroit iron for the next decade). Foolishly, I decided that buying a Fiat wasn't my best move, and I never called the seller.

About a week later, I spotted a very Italian-looking profile in the holding yard of the now-defunct Hayward Pick Your Part wrecking yard. Orange, plenty of surface rust, hatchback- why, it's got to be the same car! At this point, I'm really kicking myself; this super-rare Fiat is about to get picked up by a forklift and dumped on the yard, where maybe 1% of its components will be purchased prior to its final ride to The Crusher a few weeks later (and yes, that's an early Scirocco in the background, also doomed to the same fate).

The engine looked intact and the car seemed complete. Junkyard employees just laughed, in traditional junkyard-employee fashion, when I asked about buying the car before it hit the yard: "¡Ja, Ja! ¡Gringo estupido!"

Fast-forward to last weekend. I was at the All-Italian Car And Motorcycle Show and here's an orange Fiat 128 Sport Coupe that sure looks familiar. What the hell's the deal here?


It turns out that the car on Craigslist and the car at the junkyard weren't the same Fiat after all; had I been a bit more knowledgeable about the 128 hatchbacks- which, needless to say, weren't exactly hot sellers in North America- I'd have recognized that one car was a Sport Coupe, while the other was a later 3C; similar cars, but different taillights and badging. The differences might be obvious to you Yurpeans, but I hadn't seen any 128s in the wild for many years.

And, in one of those weird small-world twists, it turns out that I know the car's new owner. It's Jalopnik reader Superasiaone, of Wedginators Buick-V6-powered TR7 24 Hours Of LeMons fame. The car just needed a tune-up to become a decent driver; you can read more about its story here.

The Buick-ized TR7 is long gone and Scratchy Bottom Racing is considering making the 128 Sport Coupe into their next LeMons racer. The car got pretty rusty during its long spell sitting in a San Francisco driveway, but the mechanicals are in great shape. Cars don't get destroyed in post-Altamont LeMons racing, so we might end up seeing a caged 128 SL getting track and street time in the near future.

Meanwhile, we can assume that the poor 3P and its Scirocco neighbor have been crushed by now, no doubt packed into cubes of metal in a Guangzhou-bound container ship at this moment. Contemplate the randomness of automotive survival versus death as you enjoy these galleries:
Fiat 128 3P On Death Row


Fiat 128 SL Gets Rescued

Bernice, of the Italian Stallions 24 Hours Of LeMons team (that's her on the left, replacing a head gasket on a Fiat SOHC in the bracing 36° air at Arse Freeze-A-Palooza '08), wants us to know "This FIAT engine often ignored in the US due to its small displacement, regardless it is IMO one of FIAT's best engines from the 1960's. While the FIAT twin cam gets much of the glory and noted attention, this is actually the better of the two in some ways. Designed by Aurelio Lampredi, famed Ferrari engine designer before he went to work for FIAT. He is also the one who designed the FIAT twin cam from this era. Production of this engine ran from 1969 to 2005. By the mid-1980's FIAT produced over 6 million copies with numerous variants."

Originally designed to power the Fiat 128 (which, as we know, Enzo Ferrari chose to use as his daily driver) the Fiat SOHC had a good long run, from 1969 to 1999. In addition to 128s and X1/9s, a version of this engine was used in that Balkan legend, the Yugo (including turbocharged examples). The Ritmo/Strada, Punto, and 127 also had Fiat SOHC power, and a number of Lancia machines were fitted with this iron-block/aluminum-head workhorse as well.

[Mirafiori.com, Wikipedia]

Sure, sure, you could wait for the Fiat 500 to show up in dealerships here, but who needs all that heavy sound insulation and mollycoddling safety gear? Not you! What you need, Giovanni, is a classic high-performance Fiat, made back in the day when an American had to be utterly insane really serious to buy one!

You've got a few grand burning a hole in your pocket and you've got your eye on vintage Italian sports cars. Now, you could get a pretty decent Alfa Spider for that kind of money, a very nice Fiat X1/9, maybe even a Lancia Scorpion. But what you really dream about is a Fiat Dino, the Ferrari-engined machine that 93% of you thought was nicely priced at $15,000. Find a Dino on an X1/9 budget? You might as well start looking for Picassos in the Salvation Army… but what's this? A genuine 1970 Fiat Dino 2400 coupe (go here if the ad disappears) for just $3,500! How could such a thing be? Here's how: the original Ferrari V6 has gone AWOL, along with the transmission. Otherwise, the car seems to be in pretty good shape, and it lives in rust-free Southern California. Face it, you can't afford to buy a replacement Ferrari engine, but you could get even more power and stay Italian, simply by picking up a beat-to-crap Alfa Romeo 164 with the 4-valve V6 and doing a little engine swappage. That's right, 208 horses instead of the original 180, and only the most obsessed of Fiat zealots (Fiat zealots do exist, right?) would be sufficiently offended by such a swap to stab you in the eye with a screwdriver.

You'd have a great time driving that Dino around town, but what happens when you take it to your local race track for some track-day hoonage? It'll sound good, no doubt, but you'll be eating the dust of them goddamn kids in their 10-year-old Civics. You need a Fiat race car! In fact, what you need is a Fiat race car that you make quasi-street-legal, so that you can squirm through rollcage bars every time you make a run to the convenience store, then be unable to carry on a conversation because your ears won't stop ringing. Everyone will know you're the dorkiest geek on the face of the earth a first-rank wheelman when they see you blatting down the boulevard in your new daily driver: this 1974 Fiat 128 SL Coupe racer (go here if the ad disappears). It appears to be ready to race as it sits, but getting it street-ready might take some doing. You'll need to install all the gear that nanny-state socialists- the sort that would get a quick smackdown from the Founding Fathers, were they to rise from the dead and see what weaklings Americans have become- demand of drivers: wipers, turn signals, horn, etc. Then you'll need to befriend the helpful folks down at your local DMV, because it's a sure bet that the registration paperwork on this thing will be impossible challenging. And, unless you feel like waiting in line behind Cessnas at your local airport's Gas-N-Fly every time you need some go-go juice, you'll have to do a piston downgrade; 14:1 compression, though awesome, might be a bit extreme for the street.

Serbian automaker Zastava Automobili
announces end of Yugo production

November 14th, 2008 - KRAGUJEVAC, Serbia - At 9am on November 11th, 2008, Yugo
#794,428 – a red Koral In1 – left the lines at Zastava Automobili’s factory in Kragujevac.

The first Yugo, a hand-built prototype, emerged on October 2nd, 1978.

Zastava workers affixed a small piece of paper to its tailgate, labeled “ćao, nema više”
(“goodbye, no more”). Thus did the famous budget car, once the pride of the former Yugoslavia,
drive into history.

A few tears were shed; the machines ceased whirring, and the group that had gathered around the
car slowly dispersed, somewhat stunned that no formal event had been prepared. While the last
car headed to Zastava’s museum, the men and women who built it were given the task of
preparing the space for Fiat’s purposes.

55 years ago, the late Prvoslav Raković founded Zastava Automobili from the WWII ruins of
century-old Zastava, a cannon foundry and producer of some of the best rifles in the world.

Automobiles. Trucks. Buses. Architecture and construction. Horticulture. Zastava did it all. Well
before World War II, 400 Chevrolet trucks rolled off Kragujevac lines, slated for the Yugoslav
Army. Postwar production began in 1953, when Zastava built 162 Willys jeeps, before
inextricably tying itself to Fiat. 1955 saw the first fruits of this agreement: the Zastava 600D, a
car for the people, and the Zastava AR-51, the truck which would drive Yugoslavia’s postwar
reconstruction.

With production beginning in 1955, Zastava ventured into front-wheel drive in 1971; Europe, in
1972; America, in 1985, and fuel injection, in 1988. As their world imploded in the ‘90s,
Zastava’s workers continued to come to work each morning. When in 1999 NATO used the
factory for target practice, they dutifully cleaned up the damage and, seemingly without need for
dollars or euros, managed again to turn out their budget cars.

In 1945, Toyota could make no more than fish paste. BMW built pots and pans. Volkswagen
produced nothing. Yet bombs could not stop Zastava. Even without the foreign investment
enjoyed by Toyota and Volkswagen, a Zastava Skala 101 rolled off the line just six months after
the factory had been ripped apart.

For an encore, Zastava’s engineers forged an alliance with PSA/ Peugeot-Citroen, and developed
Europe’s most affordable diesel car, the Florida TDC, a five-door hatchback which was praised
by Britain’s Autocar magazine (in its February 20th, 2008 issue) in the last throes of the
company’s independence.

Zastava also builds the Oktopus Finiss which, being rated for 150 km/h, is the world’s fastest
professional-driver training device.

On November 11th, 2008, the final Yugo followed the last Florida2, number #29,950.

The last Zastava 10 (Fiat Punto II.5) was built a few days earlier. When production restarts
(expected to be by the end of the year), it will be rebadged, Fiat Punto.

The last Skala 553 (#1,273,532) will be built on November 20th, marking the last Zastava after 4.2
million cars, of which 700,000 were exported (145,511 to the United States).

Zastava Automobili is currently working with authorities in Congo, Africa, to transfer Skala 55/
Koral In/ Florida In production lines there.

Meanwhile, the Zastava 128 is still assembled in Egypt by El Nasco, where it is a favorite among
taxi drivers.

The success of Zastava is important not only for its Kragujevac home (where metalworking, in
2007, still accounts for 70% of industry), but for Serbia as a whole. Roughly 100,000 people
across 56 towns are directly and indirectly employed by Zastava. Their fate remains unclear. For
them and their families; for Kragujevac, and for Serbia and its economic recovery, it is hoped that
Zastava's rollercoaster ride over the last quarter century is again trending upward.

[Source: Zastava]