PCH, Maximum Cartruck Edition: Dragamino Or Mark VIIchero?
As most of you know by now, the Shorty Chopped Corvair was judged to be cooler/more hellish than the T-Bird-esque Auto Union 1000SP by the voters in Friday's Choose Your Eternity poll. With all the G8amino excitement today, we're going to turn away from two-strokers and groovy customs and get straight to some car-with-truck-bed goodness.
The problem with an El Camino as a Project Car Hell entrant is that it's just too easy. Even the most decrepit example shares most of its components with made-by-the-millions cars that benefit from a vast reproduction parts industry and pool of junkyard parts, making the parts-obtainment process nowhere near hellish enough. But when you get into an El Camino that's been converted into a drag race car in someone's back yard... well, now we're talking! See, what you really want to take to the dragstrip is a vehicle with apocalyptic amounts of power combined with zero weight over the drive wheels, preferably with drum brakes on at least two wheels. Watch the video below and tell us you don't envy the El Camino drag racer!
The Camino above probably cost quite a bit to build, but you say you want to run 10s on a shoestring budget? Picking up this '73 El Camino (go here if the ad disappears) for $4,000 (or less) would start you well on your way to the dream of getting all sideways out of the lights and munching the guardrail at high speed! This one has a small-block with tunnel ram and dual 4-barrel carbs... but the seller neglected to specify much else about the engine, including its displacement. Is there a dead-stock '73 350 (as the "numbers-matching" part seems to indicate) beneath that intake? What about the rear end- does it have a 2.73 one-legger 10-bolt to go with those ladder bars? We can't say!
Where's the fun in a cartruck just like countless others, you ask? Right! You're not like the others, are you? That's why your cartruck needs to be a luxury model that no automaker would have Caminoized in their wildest DMT-inspired hallucinations... say, something like this 1990 Lincoln Mark VIIchero (go here if the ad disappears). The seller says it was "done pretty nice," and we'd agree; it appears to have a functioning tailgate, and that's what sets the hurried backyard hack jobs apart from the patient backyard hack jobs! Watch out, though, because this machine needs TLC... and you know what that means in a Craigslist ad. Anyone who knows these Lincolns is going to groan a bit when they read "air suspension fills and raises car alittle," but all the hours de-sagifying the suspension will be worth it when you start heaving sacks of cement into your Mark VIIchero, not even deigning to glance at those lowly proles loading up their boring old F-150s. Overall, this thing seems fairly solid, needing only a supercharger on the 5.0 and perhaps a more distinguished paint color to cover any conceivable cartruck need.
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