#Spirit

Much like when Carroll Shelby applied sporty touches to the compact Dodge Shadow to make the Shelby CSX, Dodge added zest to the midsize Spirit in the early Nineties to create the Spirit R/T. Let’s go.

In case you missed it, the 92nd Academy Awards were splashed all over television and social media last night, with a film by the name of Parasite taking home multiple Oscar trophies. This surprised many and was generally considered an unexpected choice.

Few of us around these parts can be considered movie buffs, despite our occasional “TTAC at the Movies” post, but we do know our cars. This leads us to today’s question: what cars can you recall as being extremely surprising … for reasons good or bad?

The AMC Spirit-based ’82 Eagle SX/4 Junkyard Find that we admired last week was an interesting car, but it was pretty well picked over and started its junkyard career as a basket case. In the very same Denver junkyard, however, sits this much nicer and more complete ’79 Spirit DL. It was so nice, in fact, that I had to buy some parts from it!

They don’t build them like this anymore.

At the back of the car lot was death row. It was there where the real “one foot in the grave” cars were lined up, where desperate men with cold hard eyes gave the deadbeats serious looks, weighing the options while nodding gravely to themselves. Whether I wanted to be or not, I was just such a man.

Sales of the Gremlin-based AMC Spirit in the United States were pretty dismal, but perhaps that was just the result of the suits in Kenosha choosing the wrong ad agency. Let’s head south of the border to see how VAM, which built certain AMC models under license for the Mexican market, pitched the ’81 Rally AMX.