project car hell
Welcome to
Project Car Hell, where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! After a
24 Hours Of LeMons race, I like to do a PCH pitting the #1 and #2 cars against each other, but this time it's going to be a bit different. You see, the #2 car in Houston was a 2nd-gen Camaro, and they're
really easy projects- cheap, simple, and with ridiculously easy parts availability. That means we'll be going for a Japan-versus-Germany 80s Hot Hatch Challenge today, and you Camaro fans can console yourselves with the fact that you can fix most problems on your cars with a pipe wrench and zip-ties.
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24 hours of lemons
The race is over and they're packing up the Traveling LeMons Circus now. The winner more or less led the race the entire time, flag to flag. To absolutely nobody's surprise, it's the Team SCHWING Toyota Corolla GT-S FX16, which avoided penalties, ran fast laps, and finished several laps in front of the #2 car (the Bikini Racer Camaro). I've got thousands of photos of the action to show y'all, but they'll have to wait until the carnies have packed the Tilt-A-Whirl back into the trailers. Check in during the week for further Yeehaw It's Texas LeMons madness!
24 hours of lemons
What a day! Being a LeMons Supreme Court justice at the Yeehaw It's Texas 24 Hours Of LeMons event means that the action
never stops; the black-flag brigade at
MSR cut no slack to those who bash into each other, slide off the asphalt, spin out, or otherwise commit acts of hoonage in the low-buck race cars, which means there's always a big line of cars stacked up in the punishment area. Everyone is innocent, of course, and there was drama aplenty, but the upshot is that it's 1:00 AM and I've only just now had a chance to break out the laptop and fill y'all in on the all-important Day One standings. First, the SCHWING Team Toyota Corolla FX16 finished the day on top, with 206 laps...
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24 hours of lemons
Too busy to post much now (you'll get more details about the day's action after the dust settles), but felt that the LeMons-loving world should know that Team Schwing's Corolla FX16 now sits at the top of the standings. Amazing quantities of penalties and broken cars- at last report, only 34 of the 76 that started are now moving under their own power- but some machines are still racking up the laps. Will the Miata grab the lead soon? Perhaps one of the RX-7s or Integras? Or maybe one of the half-dozen Fox Mustangs will power its way to the front of the pack. There's just no telling- this is a wild one!
project car hell
There was some grumbling over the choices in
our last Choose Your Eternity challenge (which was won by the '77 Levis Edition AMC Hornet AMX by a healthy margin), ostensibly because they were too easy… but we know the
real reason: being reminded of the Malaise Era brings up the uncomfortable parallels between the hard economic times
then and those
now. Of course, there
are differences; sure, the current war is more expensive- in dollar terms- than was Vietnam, but inflation isn't the raging beast it was back then (though the bill for our 15-year debt binge looks to be just as painful as 20% inflation was). What we need is a flashback to
Morning In America! The 80s, when the Evil Empire was crumbling and Toyota still built cars that didn't hit you like a triple Valium with cough syrup chaser; yes, it's Corolla Time!
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down on the street
We
saw a rear-drive Corolla GT-S a few months ago, but we haven't yet seen one of the front-drivers. Things involving the Corolla name in North America got a little confused in the mid-80s, what with the different platforms available at the same time and then the Corolla-clone Nova (and Toyota-branded Corollas as well) being
built in California. The AE86 gets all the attention from the donuts-in-mall-parking-lot kids these days, which may be why even rarer GT-S FX16s like this one survive as reasonably original daily drivers.
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Jalopnik
24 hours of lemons
