Following the automotive world on these here interwebs for as long as I have, I've seen unusual cars come and go. Those of you too young to remember the pre-Reddit/Twitter era won't remember it, but once upon a time, every automotive niche had its own website with its own UBB forum. And on those forums, automotive lore would quickly jump from one site to another.
John Hennessey has a meltdown and starts calling one of his customers a "nutswinger?" That customer has a Chrysler 300. He tells members of the Chrysler 300 forum. One member of that forum is also a member of the Jeep Cherokee forums, so he spreads the story there. Soon the story goes to the Dodge Charger forums. Most of Hennessey's customers drive Vipers, so naturally it spreads to the Viper forums. Forums for completely unrelated brands - and even non-automotive forums - are soon also spreading the story, linking to the original forum, and everyone is talking about it. Internet lore is propagated. There are countless incidents from back in the day:
- The Suzuki GSX-R rider who stopped at a gas station to put NOS fuel additive in his bike, only to realize too late that he had put NOS energy drink (!) in the tank.
- The Honda Prelude owner who decided to port his engine by "sand-blasting it," meaning putting a bag of sand up to his throttle body and having his buddy rev the engine ("Now it won't start? Does anyone know what I should do?").
- A Spanish wannabe-tuning outfit calling itself "Cracker Competicio," which built a Mitsubishi Eclipse (the "Eclipse Proway Project") in the most bodged-up way possible, including not replacing rings or gaskets for the high-mileage engine, installing a new crank without measuring or plastigauging the bearings, painting over the door window mechanisms, and most egregiously, filing "sin grooves" into the cylinder head - ostensibly intended to be Singh grooves - without measuring or even spacing them.
- Or one of my all-time favorites, a fresh-faced amateur engineer who posted to the GM Modern Muscle forum and announced that he had invented a new form of aspiration, which he dubbed DEI - Direct Exhaust Injection, and even uploaded this proof of concept
The automotive equivalent of routing your colon directly to your mouth
And yes, based on his defensive reactions when the other users laughed at him, I think he was entirely serious.
One of these that I recently recalled was a certain ever-evolving monstrosity documented in photographs from the Fort Worth, Texas area. I first saw it on
Ricecop's Rice or Not, a site which against all sanity I still visit and post on in 2022, despite being one of only about five people still regularly doing so.
So here's how it starts: In 2005, a member there posts the following image, which he got from another forum (natch), and none of us can believe our eyes.
Were you fooled into thinking it was a Corvette?
At the time, nobody even knew what this thing was. Just looking at the shape, I kept thinking it could have been a Renault Fuego, but the joke was on me: Renault Fuegos all stopped existing long before 2005.
So the various automotive fora spread this oddity, had a laugh, and then moved on to the next laughing stock. But this thing wasn't done. It...evolved. Fast forward one year.
GAH!
Well, beyond the obvious change of the new red, white, and blue paint scheme, now we know what those two random antennae sticking up from the back of the car were. They were braces for that strange, multi-level Cosworth-style rear wing assembly. Other photos of this thing started popping up.
A member of a certain Honda forum finally got too curious, and apparently either being or having access to a private investigator, looked up the license plate. The car was apparently registered to a woman named "Stormy," and the mystery of the car's original manufacture was finally solved: It's a 1986 Acura Integra. A rare photo of the front taken not long after this made this a bit more obvious.
You can see the Acura trapped inside if you look at the front edge of the hood on those pop-up headlights.
Now we move ahead four years: 2010, for those of you keeping track. Although there's no telling what happened to the Acura all of this crap was stuck on, a photo surfaces of that same red, white, and blue Corvette rear stuck to the back of an unsuspecting GMC Sonoma, stretched to fit with lots of black streaks of fiberglass filler.
In my quest to find the photos of this thing for this blog entry, I unfortunately was not able to find this picture, though I can still clearly remember it. I was however, able to find the next evolution, from not long afterwards, where the rear has now been primered black and the truck has suddenly spawned three wings, including one on the roof.
The aerodynamics aren't the only thing that's a drag.
Move ahead another 2 or 3 years. Now the whole truck is primered, covered in random strakes and scoops, and has a 5th generation Camaro front. The truck is also being posted on the brave (at the time) new world of Reddit, and a low-res video of it even popped up on YouTube.
What in the name of SANITY?
It's not done, though. Far from it. Not long after, the thing popped up for sale in the Facebook marketplace for $10,000, with a claimed $15,000 invested. The truck also seems to have gained some hood louvers since the last picture.
8 people liked this, though we're not sure why.
A picture of the rear from around this time doesn't reveal much new, other than apparent Chevrolet emblems now cut into the fiberglass beneath the taillights.
Finally, around 2015, the final images of this thing hit the internets, being covered by the likes of Jalopnik (the blue-haired SJW Gawker bitch-fest posing as a car blog).
Are those supposed to be turbo scoops, or its EYES? Also, is that the shape of Texas cut into the center of the hood scoop?
This seems to be where the story ends, at least as far as I can follow the thread. But for all I know, this vehicle could still be out there, ever-changing, turned into something I can no longer even tie to its earlier form. Perhaps, as with its earlier change from the Integra, pieces of it live on in a third car or truck.
Who could even speculate? Or dare to dream?
Until next time....
