The last time we saw this Lada, the one that has had a V8 engine from a ZiL work truck dumped into the engine bay, we got to see torque on display, and not much else. The 7.0L engine is not a rev machine and wasn’t quite tuned up, but most of the problems could all be traced back to one item: the ZiL’s transmission. The gearbox wasn’t happy doing…well, anything. There was no amount of coaxing, pleading, double-clutching or even triple-clutching that was going to make the gearbox happy. Which wasn’t good…the entire point of increasing the displacement of a car by a factor of seven is to haul seven times the amount of ass than before. How can you do that when you’re trying to jam the shifter into fourth and you’re realizing that you’d have better luck getting to third base with a nun?
The answer that Garage 54 came up with is simple: add a transmission. Yeah, you read that right. Attached to the back of the ZiL transmission is the four-speed manual transmission from a Volga, mounted backwards via a bunch of driveshaft work and “hell with it, let’s see what happens” engineering. Loose throttle, no brakes, and a ton of engine (literally) in a car that genuinely might fall apart if you look at it wrong. Is it wrong that we are really digging this thing?
I love the total lack of fear… and common sense…