Project Car Hell, Affordable 60s Alfa Romeo Edition: 2000 Spider or 1750 Berlina? [Project Car Hell]
Welcome to Project Car Hell, where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that’s coolest… and most hellish! Look how well the trio of Alfas did at Lemons New England- great cars, obviously!
Hanging around with the 24 Hours Of LeMons HQ crew, I’ve learned that they’re the most Alfa-centric bunch of car geeks you’re ever going to find; most of them started out on British sports cars and then realized that you have more fun when your ride has performance to match its unreliability… and the next step generally involves ditching the GT6 or MGA or whatever and buying an Alfa Romeo. It’s true- Alfa Romeo has made plenty of fundamentally superior cars over the years, and so what if they’re all nervous and complicated and all the parts have to be hand-carved from the wood of the True Cross by a 98-year-old man in a dirt-floor Genoa workshop illuminated by a whale-oil lamp? You need an Alfa! And we don’t mean some easy-to-find Reagan Era Graduate or 164 here. No, we’re talking Sophia Loren-grade machinery from the 1960s! Multiple carburetors or Spica mechanical fuel injection! Partito Comunista Italiano firebrands preaching revolution on the factory floor!
The 2000 Spider sure was a looker, wasn’t it? Just concentrated essence of Alfa Romeo, for sure, but it’s no easy task to find one for your personal Hell Garage these days. You sigh in relief and start looking for a Miata, right? Wrong! We’ve found you this 1961 Alfa Romeo 2000 Spider (go here if the ad disappears), just 80,000 miles on the clock and a price tag of just 1,700 bucks… or best offer! No doubt you’re already spraining your fingers dialing up the seller at this moment, but we do have to throw in a couple of minor caveats. First, there’s rust. Maybe a better way of putting it would be it’s rust, as in very few fugitive iron atoms have managed to barricade themselves against marauding bands of oxygen molecules. What the heck, you expect some of the red stuff in Massachusetts, no? The car rolls and the drivetrain appears complete, though the seller acknowledges that the engine is most likely frozen solid. Many trim pieces come with the car, and you even get some glass! Come on, it couldn’t be that difficult!
We love Spiders, but say you need to do some grocery hauling from time to time? You need a vintage Alfa Romeo daily driver, we say, and that means you should start shopping for a Berlina sedan. No, no, don’t give up- affordable project Berlinas are definitely out there. Say, this $400 1969 Alfa Romeo 1750 Berlina (go here if the ad disappears). Now, if you’ve ever seen Double Indemnity, you know that a Medford, Oregon, man means what he says and says what he means, and that’s just who’s selling this car. Ted knows that he doesn’t need to go to the hassle of typing out a whole bunch of pointless description when he’s selling a classic Italian sports sedan for the price of a clapped-out Olds Ciera with a couple of rods hanging out of the block. Is there an engine? A transmission? Legal paperwork? A plutonium-240-fueled Soviet radioisotope thermoelectric generator kicking out neutrons in the trunk? Hey, we can’t say, but all we need to do is repeat the phrase “400 dollar 1750 Berlina” and you get the point.
Which cheap 1960s Alfa will make itself at home in your once-happy garage?(polls)
Project Car Hell’s Greatest Hits
It was getting close towards the end, with the 
By all accounts, it was the most exciting 
They came in second 
Since an Integra 
The 
The General, hoping to ring up a few extra sales, tacitly supports some gay Camaro fan-boys who make videos featuring their favorite car. The result: collapse of civilization!
They’re well into Day Two of racing at the 
If you care, the 
The Corvair has had zero mechanical problems, but by all accounts the handling has been on the scary side and the little air-cooled Chevy has been a regular defendant at the LeMons Supreme Court. The Saab… well, it breaks a lot, but it’s actually getting around the track quite smartly during its periods of functionality.
Meanwhile, the 
Reports from Stafford Motor Speedway indicate that the target of the racers’ race was the #699 Pimpala, a 2000 
According to LeMons Perpetrator Nick Pon, the Pimpala spent five hours in the penalty box yesterday, due to “terrible” driving. When it came time for 
We don’t have any photos of the actual destruction yet (check in later), but here’s how it worked: each team was allowed to choose one representative, no doubt selected on the basis of physical strength and/or width of mean streak, and one Implement Of Destruction (technically, the IOD was supposed to be a tool of some sort, but many interpreted this to include such “tools” as baseball bats and 6-foot lengths of steel pipe). Each team rep would be allowed five minutes with the Curse winner, to do his or her worst… and, by all accounts, the destruction was quite thorough.
Some chose to simply beat the crap out of the car’s body, no doubt while howling imprecations at the Angry Racing Gods, et cetera, but others went apeshit with wire cutters and completely destroyed the wiring harness. Here we see the Pimpala team attempting to get the car back into raceworthy condition. Good luck with the wiring, guys!
Of course, when you’ve got 55 destruction-maddened racers going at the car for five minutes apiece, a few of them are going to play bumper-jack drum solos on the engine itself, with unpleasant- and way difficult to fix- results on the valvetrain and intake manifold. Still, Team Pimpala isn’t giving up!
It seems that at least a couple of Taurus SHOs show up to any given 
I’ve also become quite familiar with the sound of exhausted SHO mechanics screaming as they flay all the skin off their knuckles during the inevitable all-night wrenchathons that take place whenever this engine hits the race track. It’s totally worth it, though, because this Yamaha-built DOHC V6 was an engineering masterpiece of its time and still looks and sounds incredibly good. 220 naturally aspirated horses out of 3.0 liters may not sound terribly impressive these days, but it was flat-out amazing back in the late 1980s. Ford originally hired Yamaha to design and build this engine for a mid-engined sports car, but- apparently taking a lesson from their main rival’s experience with the Fiero- Ford cancelled that car and started looking around for some other recipient for their new powerplant. The Taurus got the honor, but imagine how things might have been different with the SHO V6 in, say, the Merkur XR4Ti? Yamaha designed it for transverse or longitudinal mounting, so why not?
The 
There’s just something extra cool about a full-sized fastback Ford from this era; all the NASCAR-inspired style of the Torino/Cyclone fastbacks, but with the added presence of the big machines. An up-and-coming young mobster might have chosen a fastback Galaxie, but the really hip ones would have gone with the slightly snazzier Monterey coupe- slick, but not trying to outshine the high rankers’ Continentals and Fleetwoods.
How about one of these cars with a 428, four-speed, and fat rubber on big steel spoked wheels, maybe with a few inches taken out of the springs? Not for this one, though… next stop, Crusher!
