Here’s a Junkyard Find that really takes me back. My dad bought a Bonneville new in 1979, and it seemed like a very nice car when I was 13 years old. A few years later, I borrowed the Bonneville to take my date to the high-school prom (in spite of this being the early 1980s, I did not wear a robin’s-egg-blue tuxedo, though now I wish I had), and I felt classier than Frank Sinatra in a brand-new ’61 Imperial. A few years after that, I was given the now-quite-worn-out Bonneville to make the drive between the San Francisco Bay Area and my new home in Southern California… and it crapped out every 100 yards while trying to climb the Grapevine. So, mixed feelings when I saw this very similar ’81 Bonneville Brougham in a Denver self-service yard. (Read More…)

Yesterday’s Junkyard Find from 1993 wasn’t the kind of car most of us would find interesting enough to seek out today (though I’m considering buying a Dynasty, caging it, and starting a new race series: Spec Dynasty). Today’s ’93 car is a different story. A Bonneville with 205 supercharged horses under the hood? I’ll take one! (Read More…)

The Index of Effluency, the top prize of LeMons racing, goes to the team that accomplishes a feat far beyond the apparent capacity of their horrible, never-belonged-on-a-racetrack “race car.” Sometimes the IOE goes to a team that climbs way the hell up into the standings in a moderately terrible car (e.g., the Exhibition of Slow Tercel EZ grabbing 10th overall in Texas)… and sometimes it goes to a team that somehow keeps an apocalyptically terrible car on the track all weekend and finishes well inside the top third of the field. We have no idea how such a thing could be possible, but the Speedycop and the Gang of Outlaws 1980 Pontiac Bonneville donk managed 16th place out of 52 entries this weekend. (Read More…)

Yes, when it comes to GM, there were definitely more than seven deadly sins. Actually, there were tens of millions of them. And while this is perhaps one of the less conspicuous and pernicious ones (I didn’t label it as such until I put up the first picture and had to rewrite the title), it is one nevertheless. And what is the sin this innocuous sedan embodies? Thou shalt not take thy godly names in vain. (Read More…)