This Lamborghini Diablo Kit Car Has More Aura Than Any Real Supercar Ever Could
Kit cars are typically an inherently uncool subgenre of the enthusiast world. By driving a kit car you're living a lie, pushing a narrative that you can afford more car than you really can. Supercars are already decidedly uncool, but spending the time and effort to emulate the supercar looks without any of the supercar performance is just pure dork behavior. That is, unless you lean into it and build something that nobody would ever mistake for the real deal. Pushing your kit car build from mere facsimile to wild manga drawing brought to life is a step toward making your fake Lamborghini kind of cool again. This fiberglass job is slapped over the top of a stretched Pontiac Fiero chassis, because of course it is, and it's on its way toward being a really cool machine, but I think I know how to make the switch flip all the way to cool as heck. It needs an engine swap.
All V6 Pontiac Fieros used the unkillable but hardly high-performance L44 2.8-liter making 140 horsepower and 170 lb-ft of torque. This engine is holding this Lam-faux-ghini back from its true potential. Some Fiero enthusiasts will swap in the relatively easy-to-install Cadillac 4.9-liter L26 V8 with a slightly more impressive 200 horsepower and 275 lb-ft, but this is even still not enough. An early 5.7-liter Lamborghini Diablo, by comparison, pushed 485 horses and 428 lb-ft of torque from its V12 engine, so in order to make this kit car really something special, it should be able to exceed that number. Thankfully General Motors made a 303 horsepower transverse FWD V8 that can be installed in the Fiero engine bay, and fitted with a supercharger for at least 550 ponies. Yeah, that should do it.
Heck, maybe I should buy it and do that very thing.
The Lamborghiniest
"I have a lamborgini diablo kit car foresale.....car runs drives stops and everything functions as it should both doors go up and down custome interior new exhaust car was built on a fiero frame that was stretched v6 motor 5peed trans"
This car is an aesthetic victory looking like it was ripped from the pages of a comic book, it needs enough power to back up its good looks. The show should never outshine the go, it has to have enough cash in the bank to cover the checks its bodywork has been writing. The Fiero is pretty uncool, but fitting it with a Diablo body made it deeply uncool. Kicking it up a notch with a "manga livery" makes it slightly cooler than a stock Fiero, but it won't be truly cool until it can embarrass a stock Diablo at every race track in the world. Spend a lot of time and effort perfecting the handling, balance, grip, and power of this mean green machine, and you could have one of the coolest cars ever made. A factory Diablo ran a quarter mile in about 12 seconds, so you'll want to make sure this one can do it in 11 seconds. Don't worry if it makes sense, just do it.
Beating a Diablo at its own game with good old-fashioned American hot rodding is the way forward, my friend. None of us can afford to go pick up the Diablo we dreamed about in the 1990s for a cool quarter mil or more, but maybe we can build our own. This seller, in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, is asking a measly $15,000 for this car. At this point it's just another cool-looking kit car with nothing to back it up, but with another fifty to one-hundred thousand dollars invested, you could have a home-built hypercar for a fraction of the money. Oh dang, we can't afford that either, can we?