PCH, Challenging The King Edition: Citroën SM or Four Ferraris? [Project Car Hell]

[Andy]

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/jalopnik/2008/11/PCH_SM_4Ferraris.jpg" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="494" height="332" style="display:block;float:none;" /Welcome to a href="http://jalopnik.com/tag/choose-your-eternity/"Project Car Hell/a, where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! We all knew that the Nixonian Cadillac Fleetwood limo had no chance against a Citroën, and a href="http://jalopnik.com/5076129/pch-presidential-ride-edition-nixon-cadillac-fleetwood-or-de-gaulle-citron-ds"our most recent Choose Your Eternity poll/a confirmed our assumptions. emAny/em Citroën is tough to beat in a Project Car Hell Challenge, due to the off-the-scale readings Citroëns always register on both the Hell-O-Meter and the Cool-O-Meter. And a a href="http://jalopnik.com/cars/jalopnik-fantasy-garage/citroen-sm-264002.php"Citroën SM?/a Forget it! Even with a fairly nice SM, you'd need some kind of emweapons grade/em project to have any hope against the car made by the French and Italian governments, the pure Essence Of Hell Project centrifuged down from a large quantity of seriously cool machinery and then offered at a price that draws you in like a black hole dragging you past its event horizon. Well, guess what?br/p pbr Even if we'd found an ad for the actual a href="http://jalopnik.com/cars/moonage/the-lunar-rover-hoons-on-the-moon-271534.php"Apollo 16 Lunar Rover/a, hauled back to Earth by a North Korean spaceship, burned up on reentry, scattered all over Nunavit, and then gathered into a shipping container and mixed with the remains of a burned-out pinball machine warehouse, it emstill/em wouldn't be as tough a project as a basket-case Citroën SM. For this reason, we're going with a pretty solid example, in a href="http://sfbay.craigslist.org/scz/cto/901659574.html"this '73/a (go a href="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/jalopnik/2008/11/73CitroenSM-SS.jpg"here/a if the ad disappears), which is priced at only $5,250. It starts up and the hydropneumatic suspension rises, so you figure you can just do a little bodywork and you'll have a nice car, right? Sure thing… only first you'll have to do a little futzing about with the fuel system, because the car has "fuel delivery issues due to dirty fuel tank carbs could use a good cleaning." You know, delnobody calls/del they call that Maserati V6 the "Mopar Slant Six Of Italy" because it's amazingly simple and dependable, so most likely it will work emperfectly/em after just a few spritzes of carb cleaner down those Webers. How can you lose?br br A Maserati engine is great, and that SM is a gorgeous machine… but you're looking for a full-on Italian Hell Project, and we don't mean some lame Biturbo or prole-grade Fiat Spider. It's got to be a Ferrari for your garage… no, wait- it's got to be emmany/em Ferraris, in your garage, down the driveway, and parked on the lawn. Did I say "parked?" Maybe that's not the right word here; let's say "dropped" instead, because that's what you'll do with a href="http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItemru=http%3A%2F%2Fshop.ebay.co m%3A80%2F%3F_from%3DR40%26_trksid%3Dm38.l1313%26_n kw%3D170276281837%26_sacat%3DSee-All-Categories%26_fvi%3D1item=170276281837viewitem="these four Ferraris/a. The eBay price is $3,000, with an unspecified reserve, but they're a href="http://orangecounty.craigslist.org/cto/907454116.html"on Craigslist/a for only $1,500. They're apparently 308s and 328s, and with the addition of a few delincredibly costly/del parts here and there you'll be able to put together one perfect car! OK, scratch that- with the addition of four 1978 Pontiac Bonnevilles and some plywood body panels, you'll be able to slap together four fully drivable 301-powered machines, and they'll be emregistered as Ferraris!/em Thanks to a href="http://jalopnik.com/people/A_Benz_Apart/"A Benz Apart/a for the tip!br br script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://static.polldaddy.com/p/1081927.js" /scriptnoscripta href="http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1081927/"Citroen SM or four Ferraris?/abr span style="font-size:9px;"( a href="http://www.polldaddy.com"polls/a)/span/noscript/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/Wip_qsIuvImoHG6aB79mI4mPihQ/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/Wip_qsIuvImoHG6aB79mI4mPihQ/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/jalopnik/full?a=TooSCT30"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/jalopnik/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/jalopnik/full?a=TP36evvL"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/jalopnik/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/jalopnik/full?a=xDDmni91"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/jalopnik/full?i=xDDmni91" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/jalopnik/full?a=lrR2XXsl"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/jalopnik/full?i=lrR2XXsl" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jalopnik/full/~4/dulpM-i9wok" height="1" width="1"/

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