One of the most beautiful off-road-style builds we’ve ever seen is this 1974 Alfa Romeo GTV 2000, which started its new life when it was dropped off a flat-bed trailer. Owners Nikita and Ilya Bridan rebuilt it into an safari-style hoonmobile, which inevitably came to Hoonigan’s yard where it died as it was meant to live: by sending it over a sweet jump.
The lovely Alfa was a canyon-carver with a high-compression 2.0-liter build which loves to rev but isn’t ideal to take off-road. Regardless, the rest of the car around that revvy engine was built up (sort of) to take on trails and off-road, which they did—but they hadn’t found a place to jump it yet.
Here comes the Hoonigans to the rescue—well, sort of. They just happened to have a couple ramps sitting around to set up a small jump. Problem is, there wasn’t exactly anything protecting the front end of the car, where the oil pan dangled down perilously under the nose of the car. The build was a bit too far on the form over function end of things.
The Alfa’s first jump wasn’t impressive enough, so they lined up the ramps a little farther without running the math of “will this actually work?” That’s when the poor car met its end, nosing down on the landing and smashing that oil pan to bits. They lost brakes upon landing as well, resulting in the front end hitting the fence at the edge of Hoonigan’s lot.
Hoon-in-chief Brian Scotto told Jalopnik that it’s the first car that’s been “basically totaled” in their yard. I’m not so sure. A little frame straightening, a new oil pan—they rebuilt it once already, so why not again? Fortunately for mad Alfa lovers everywhere, that’s what they owners said they’d like to do.