Back in 2008, I was a longtime reader of this site who dreamed of being like the people who wrote here. There were a lot of in-jokes and running gags in those days, and one of them was the idea that anyone would be dumb enough to actually buy one of the cars that Murilee posted in her recurring Project Car Hell series.
I happened to be looking for a car to run at LeMons with my colleagues at Hagerty, and for some reason, I decided that the Lada in this post was perfect. Thinking it would make me seem cool, not desperate, I emailed Jalops and LeMons Chief Justices Murilee and Jonny to let them know. They’re the reason I showed up at Nelson Ledges State Park in Ohio in a Goodwill-sourced Brezhnev costume.
If memory serves (increasingly it doesn’t) I initially conned 50 co-workers into giving me $10 to buy the car. Or maybe it was 10 co-workers giving me $50? Regardless, just a handful of us ended up turning the Lada into something like a race car, and trailering it down to Nelson Ledges to take on some guys in an old Cadillac in a battle billed as communism vs. capitalism. We won that battle, and took home the coveted Index of Effluency.
We raced one more time, with a different team and a much less serious approach to prep. It was a catastrophe. The car caught on fire and got into a wreck. But, one of the guys who drove with us that weekend had a recurring gig at the NYT’s old Wheels blog. Because he was with us, he wouldn’t be able to deliver them a story on deadline and he asked me to fill in. I did, and I ended up sticking around, writing there in my spare time—until Murilee recommended that Autoweek reach out to me about a digital editor job, something so completely off my radar that I never would have thought to seek it out. And then I had a career writing about cars, and then I became the EIC of this site.
After that disastrous race, I shuffled the car between multiple houses in three different cities, always paying to store it inside somewhere. Eventually, Kamil Kuluski from Hooniverse sent me a trailer and a promise that it would race again, so I sent him the car. He worked to get it running again and fixed a few things, but life intervened and the car never returned to racing condition. It spent years in a garage outside of Boston before Brad brought it back to me this summer.
One of the other running jokes from an earlier version of Jalopnik was suggesting that the site make one hateful shitbox or another old Tatra its official “staff car.” It never happened, but as a reader, it was fun to imagine Davey ramming around in a DAF.
Well, here we are. The first real Jalopnik staff car will be the car that put me in touch with some former Jalops, who would push me into a car-writing job that eventually landed me here.
It’s in my barn right now, and it needs some work. A lot of work. We’ve talked about running it at LeMons again and/or K-swapping it, flaring it and getting it ready for the Empire Hill Climb. Because you all have been nice enough to click on our posts, we have a little budget for the build. Keep an eye on the site: Jalopnik’s first staff car has arrived.