Question: What Car Most Needs a Spec Racing Series?
After my idea for a DUI Telepresence Crown Victoria Racing series failed to attract the shadowy Eastern European investors I’d hoped to line up, I got to thinking about spec racing. Everybody in a spec racing series runs the same kind of car, which makes parts easy to get and (in theory, though sure as hell not in practice) puts the focus on driver skill rather than vehicle price. There’s Spec Miata and Spec E30 and Spec Neon and all the rest, but it’s sort of boring watching those races. Spec racing needs better cars, and we’re going to pick the best one right now!
The key to a good spec-race car is availability and cheapness. You need the kind of car that you can find under tarps in countless side yards across the country, that’s so common in junkyards that The Crusher gags when it sees yet another one approaching. One of my top choices, therefore, is Spec Eighty-Eight. The downsized B-Body Oldsmobile 88s of the 1977-1985 model years are omnipresent in junkyards, they’re tough full-frame monsters that can take a lot of punishment, and they came equipped with a wide assortment of torque-happy Oldsmobile V8s. Plus, “Spec Eighty-Eight” just sounds cool.
But maybe racers would prefer something a little more modern, with four-wheel disc brakes and electronic fuel injection. That’s why Spec Leganza is the way to go! Imagine a track full of Guigario-styled Korean pseudo-luxury sedans, each with a screaming 136 horsepower under the hood. I predict that Spec Leganza will be bigger than NASCAR within five years.
My all-time top choice for a spec racing series is, of course, Spec Dynasty. Inspired by the French Cathouse Red interior of this junked ’93 Dynasty, I’ve been pushing Spec Dynasty to racy types ever since. So far, there hasn’t been a run on solid examples of Dodge’s mid-size luxury sedan of the late 1980s and early 1990s… yet. The rules of Spec Dynasty wouuld permit badge-engineered sibling New Yorkers of the same era, which would lead to heated rivalry between the Dynasty and New Yorker racers. OK, now it’s your turn. Spec Scoupe? Spec Tempo?
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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I gotta say Spec Versa. They never have made a performance variant of the Versa and there are boatloads of them now approaching beater status. I would say Spec B15 Sentra, but there was the SE-R, which would have to be disqualified, else you'd have to handicap all the rest of the "regular" Sentras.
Citroen 2CV in full James Bond spec.