Engine Swap

A 2,000 horsepower 1970 Dodge Challenger was selected Best in Show from a group of 50 vehicles at the Barrett-Jackson auction this past weekend in Scottsdale, Arizona, and awarded the 2021 Barrett-Jackson Cup. The Challenger was among five finalists, including a ’32 Ford Tudor, ’55 Chevrolet Bel Air, ’63 Chevrolet Bel Air Wagon, and a ’70 Ford F-100 Pickup.

Holley is about to do for ’72-’93 Dodge D-100 pickups what it did for ’67-’72 GM C-10 trucks, which is to raise their performance profile exponentially and make those old Dodge trucks highly sought after.

Hawthorne, California-based AEM EV will soon debut an EV conversion control system that increases horsepower when using Tesla’s Large Drive Unit (LDU) base drive.

A replica of the 1992 Land Rover Defender from the 2015 James Bond movie “Spectre,” has been created by Wilmington, North Carolina’s Osprey Custom Cars, specialists in restomodding classic Land Rover Defenders, Ford Broncos, and Toyota FJs. One of Osprey’s latest, the truck’s outward appearance is identical to that of the movie vehicle, but the similarities begin and end there.

Chevrolet plans on showcasing a 1977 K5 Blazer converted over to all-electric propulsion for SEMA360, foreshadowing the Electric Connect and Cruise package General Motors hopes on selling in the latter of 2021. But it would first like to take the public’s temperature on the concept by surveying SEMA attendees interested in building their own electric projects before finalizing its “eCrate” offering.

That makes the modified Chevrolet Blazer-E a proof of concept to help customers realize what kind of projects might be possible and get the creative juices flowing — something which never seems to carry over when it comes to naming EVs.

The prolonged journey of TTAC’s Ford Sierra is partly because of my prolonged recovery from Stevens-Johnson Syndrome. While other projects never help matters, the excuses end now.Because, even during the depths of my recovery, my vision never faltered; thanks to prednisone’s side effects during treatment, said vision became a C4 Corvette-like laser-infused slalom but with Young the Giant screeching in the background.So it’s about time I drove to my friend Brian’s shop and made it happen.

Adios Amigo…

Farewell to our Ford Sierra’s reasonably adequate, high compression and emissions free 2-liter Pinto motor because it’s time to visit Lima, Ohio — not Peru — with a bonus question for the truly tech-savvy among the B&B.

Merkur? ZOMG SANJEEV Y U NO LS1-FTW?

No surprise, the auto journo that insists on everything LS-swapped is actually a big ol’ fraud. Do as he says, not as he does with TTAC’s Project Car — a 1983 Ford Sierra Ghia previously reviewed with the promise of more to come.

Promises: kept.

“How will you sync the engines?” whined the naysayers when they heard about the plan to weld an ’89 Corolla front half to an ’87 MR2 rear half. “How will you cool it? The handling will be terrible! It’ll never work!” If there’s one thing that 24 Hours of LeMons racing has taught the automotive world, it’s that the experts’ preconceptions can be thrown right out the window when it comes time to drop a cheap race car into the crucible of an all-weekend-long road race. For example, who would have imagined that Chevy small-block and Honda B engines would turn out to be among the most fragile in the crapcan endurance racing world? And who would have imagined that the DoubleSuck MR2olla would do so well at the notoriously car-killing Reno-Fernley Raceway?

The crazy thing about 24 Hours of LeMons racers is that they actually follow through with their terrible ideas. Maybe it’s the urgency of the deadline, or maybe it’s the peer pressure to keep one-upping the last ridiculous project. Last month we admired the radial aircraft-engine-powered MR2, and now we’ve got another MR2-based team taking on one of the long-discussed LeMons Holy Grails: the twin-engined sub-$500 race car!

What does it take to win the Heroic Fix trophy at the heroism-heavy Southern Discomfort 24 Hours of LeMons? Frantic engine swaps are a dime a dozen in LeMons racing, but what happens when the replacement engine goes bad?

The thing that got me hooked on LeMons racing was the mentality that makes a statement such as “Hey, I’d like to install a 540-cubic-inch, five-cylinder radial aircraft engine in the back of a Toyota MR2, then try to make it run all weekend in a grueling endurance race” seem totally sensible. The craziest most devoted racers find themselves locked into an arms race for the Unununium, and this is the result.