The Last Interesting Thing the Automobile Did, Ever

Two candidates, to my mind, are Group B rally cars and '90s European touring-car racing, especially in its German and British iterations.

Group B:




Touring Cars:



I've speculated about builds based around both philosophies:


What if Carrera Panamericana had gone full Group B in 1954?


What say you? What was the last interesting thing the automobile did, ever?

 

My 07 f150 started today. That was pretty amazing!

 

I say I need to see more of this beast!

 

Is that unusual?

 

Which one? The last two pics are Photoshop exercises I did.

 

Sneaky devil!

 

It’s a ford, so yea it’s amazing!

 

My wife and I owned a Lancia 037 for 16 years and I only drove it once.
Sold it to an acquaintance earlier this year.
First time he drove the cam belt failed and ate all the valves.
Stupidly fragile and why I never drove it.

 

How old was the cam belt?

 

I'm with Beanscoot. How old was the belt? I've been around the Lampredi 4 cylinder since I was a little kid. My Dad loved them and we never had a cam belt breakage. Replacing the belt regularly is cheap insurance to avoid that sort of problem.

 

It's like the '61-'65 F1 era, when limited to 1.5 litres the cars were built light to the to the point of pulverulence.

 

This thing gets an engine rebuild around every 18 months or 1,000Klm. The belt wouldn't be more than 18 months old.
My mate has spent a small fortune trying to keep it going.
They used a fairly narrow belt that was prone to snapping so he has custom wider belts made for it.
Glad to see it gone.

 

Wow, what a lemon!

 

Speaking of lemons.....If I understood this assignment correctly, the last or newest Auto phenomenon to inspire? TROG comes to mind, and the Concourse of Lemons races. I'd throw "Drag Week" and the various spinoffs in the mix too, like those 'Duct tape Drags".....things that have reinvigorated some "Run what ya brumg" in the Auto arena.

 

If you mean the Lancia, it was built to last the duration of a rally.

 

I am in the process of googling litres and Klm. I thought Klm was an airline. I did find a socket this morning on the floor. I think it came as a prize in a candy bag... it had MM on it.

 

Cars & Coffee. That people get up so early on any & all Sundays.. they used to go to church, noe they go to Cars & Coffee.

 

I can't afford a hot rod that can only last until the rally is over, unless that rally is really long.

I need something that can take the abuse for a long time. I put between 8,000 and 10,000 miles on my hot rod every year. I need something that will go at least 10 years and 100,000 miles.

Investing into a fragile ride that pukes a timing belt and bends the valves every 18 months is not the last interesting thing they did, it was one of the dumbest things they did. The sad part is the modern auto companies are trying hard to follow this trend.

 

The 037 was also responsible for the death of a few famous drivers.
It was also the last 2 wheel drive car to win the World Rally Championship. It beat the AUDI Quattro.
I'm glad its sold and certainly would never have another.

 

SI (Système Internationale) units have symbols, not abbreviations, and the symbol for kilometres is km. These symbols are case-sensitive. Millimetres is, strictly speaking, mm (I used to give people grief for putting MM — or worse, M.M. — on drawings. Ideally everything on a technical drawing to SI standards should be in mm, so it's customary to leave the symbol out entirely.) The proper expression for kilometres per hour is km/h, not kph or anything like that. Litres is a lower-case L, which can be confusing because it looks like a 1. It helps to italicize, l. I've gone as far as to use a different font to clarify it.

By the way, the customary unit for engine sizes in metric contexts is cc, which isn't an SI unit. Nor is cm³, as used by pedantic publications. You'd use litres to establish a ballpark, but cc to identify an actual engine, especially if there are several versions of roughly the same size. Below two litres it's customary to round cc's to the nearest 50 as a ballpark figure, as much as to talk in litres. Below one litre you'd talk in cc's exclusively, rounded or otherwise. So the engine in my daily is a one-point-eight or an eighteen-hundred, but if you want to be specific it's a seventeen-eighty-one. But nobody calls a BMC A-series '850' a zero-point-eight-five: it's eight-fifty or eight-forty-eight.

 

Jeez, remind me not to joke around again...
Thank you for the explanation.

 

Thank God we don't use those dreadful French units in the English speaking world.

 

Now that's funny, right there. It may go over some heads though...........

 

How about a 800 hp Dodge Demon Challenger

 

There are two 2nd World Countries using the same system as you Americans.
Liberia and Myanmar. Neither a World power.
Puts you in good company.
The rest of the World works on the Metric System and functions quite well.

 

Well we’re half metric lol Have you worked on late model US car - about the only fastener they don’t have are clutch drives and I might be wrong about that. Why would you want something as simple as SI, using something that simple will turn your brain to mush. Lol
Dan

 

Because @Beanscoot is in B.C.?

I was about to point out that the USA represents about 17% of the English-speaking world.

 

Exactly. Gotta love his grasp of irony.

 

I throw away Imperial nuts & bolts so they don't end up mixed with my Metric nuts & bolts so they don't ruin my boxes of Metric nuts & bolts collection.
As for my old Imperial spanners, quietly stashed in the bottom drawers of a chest I haven't opened in years.

 

Hopefully you chaps haven’t metricfied your flat heads,SBCs, and Hemis, that would be blasphemy lol
Dan