SJ, my first car after I got married was my dad's Vega station wagon, a true rustbucket with fake wood on the side. I remember driving it on the expressway through downtown Philly when it dropped its muffler. I tied a rope around the muffler and my wife, in the passenger seat, held on to the other end to keep it from dragging on the road and throwing off sparks. As we limped home, a dude passed us and yelled "GET THAT PIECE OF SH!T OFF THE ROAD!". And my wife yelled back "WE'RE TRYING!!!"
My brother had a '74, 4-banger, bone stock and still < 1 year old at the time, manual tranny (he bought it new, for $1,999.99). I got the power lag down (pedal to the floor, about 1 sec to what actually wasn't bad power for a car that size), and could actually do far, far, better on more serpentine roads and gravel than the guys who were driving cars set up to drag race. On the straight stretches they blew the doors off that thing, but I had them cold in the turns.
In a contest of speed on the approach road to the Steel Plant (fabrication, not a mill) I worked in during a couple of summers in college, I beat a Mustang which was very nicely set up for drag racing over the two mile course. He had me in the straight stretch (as I knew he would) but I closed it up in the turns and started beeping my horn to rattle him. He went high, I went low, and a lot of money changed hands back at the plant. He thought I'd pulled something with a sleeper until I popped the hood and showed off the factory 4-banger.
(Physics is our friend.)
If my brother had known...he would have killed me.
Years later, as a favor to a friend who was moving, I bought a '73 hatchback which was a complete bondo buggy. It would have been banned in Bowman, ND, which has an ordinance against ugly cars in town. No matter how vague the ordinance, this mustard yellow, peeled bondo, and rust brown car would have unquestionably qualified.
One of the last things my friend had done before leaving town was park the car on a fairly sizeable rock, and he'd bent the bottom of the oil pan among other things. The oil industry had been flat a few years and money was tight, so I gave him the 20 bucks and parked it in back, thinking maybe I'd use something off it. Unfortunately, my daily driver suffered a catastrophic failure and I
needed a vehicle.
I jacked the front end back into something approximating original specs with a jack between the cross member the radiator mounted above and the front of the engine, got another radiator, put it together (as well as the bolts would hold anything) and fired it up. The crank journals hit the oil pan and made a hideous racket, but the darned thing ran--sorta. Anyway, well enough to get me around town, which was what I needed at the time. I'm cheap, I drove it for a couple of years before upgrading, just because it kept running. On the highway, though, it shook and shimmied like Chuck Yeager's controls while breaking the sound barrier at 55, and I scared a few people who rode with me, just going down the road. Of course, I expected it, knew it was the fouled up "frame" geometry, but they didn't.
Anyway, after upgrading to a van, I parked it again, and finally sold it to a guy who wanted it for the steering gear to use in a hot rod he was building, and got more out of the car than I'd put into it, and got to drive it for a couple of years, too.
All in all, they don't owe me, and I found them to be pretty good cars for their weight class.
