Manta was a custom car company based out of Southern California (run by brothers Brad and Tim LoVette) in the 1970s/1980s that built speedy looking fiberglass superkits using donor parts from Vettes and Beetles. The Montage was one of their later offerings and used a Volkswagen Type 1 donor engine/transmission to underpin a fancy looking […]
Dick Dean was born Richard Dean Sawitskas, but ditched his unpronounceable and cringeworthy last name when an announcer at the 1959 Autorama car show gave it an impromptu shortening. A customizer by trade, Dick went on to run George Barris’ famous Kustom City, where he did much of the dirty work on classics like the […]
Most of the cars built with Volkswagen Beetle pans as backbone have considerably compromised styling due to various constraints but a few have escaped the blight of the”ugly kit car” style department (TM) and emerged from the custom fiberglass body shop with something that you might want to be seen with. Find this 1969 Kelmark GT offered […]
The second generation of the VW GTI soldiered on until 1992 in the USA. The later MK2 cars benefited from a roarty 16V 4 cylinder engine which made a respectable 134 hp. Today’s GTI rewrote the playbook for what can be done with one of these cars. It’s close to 300 hp 3.6 V-6 engine […]
CFlo’s State of the Fleet Address Here at the DT offices double-wide in the sky, it seems everyone has some sort of cool project car, wacky daily driver, or cheap performance machine. I think I might be the most deranged though, because at any given moment I need more than two full hands of fingers […]
Turbo diesel engines large fan base out there love their ability to rack up miles and produce stump pulling amounts of torque. VW and Mercedes were the only two brands who offered passenger cars with diesel engines back in 1998. Today’s GTI has had the venerable 2 point slow engine swapped for the same year […]
It’s getting pretty tough to find any running & driving car for less than $2,000 these days – the proverbial $500 car may still exist, but more than likely the engine is long gone and a family of feral cats have set up base camp where the back seat used to be. Blame a variety […]
If you are a gear-head, your taste in 60’s spooky sitcoms probably leans more towards the Munsters vs. The Addams Family. The Munsters had their Barris Koach and Grandpa’s Drag-u-la whereas all the Addams Family had was a V-12 Packard. Maybe if they had this VW with a 351 Windsor in it, your viewing habits […]
I’ve always felt like the 5-cylinder was the red headed stepchild of the inline internal combustion engine family. Four-bangers are everywhere; inline sixes are “teh sex” and normally reserved for silky German machinery (unless we’re talking pre-V6 America, in which case they were completely pedestrian). But the 5-pot never got much attention. Maybe that’s why […]
The VW Cabrio has a well earned reputation for being a hairdressers car and is not normally associated with performance engine swaps. The factory Cabrio SOHC 1.8 engine only put down 94 hp so there are no tears lost at its disappearance here. Somehow today’s car ended up with a 16V engine, but this […]