(Lead photo: Hemmings) It’s safe to say that most “exotic” cars are safely kept away from me in some form or another. I’ll probably never own a Lamborghini or a Ferrari, let alone something from Sweden with a ton of letters in the name that could trip up Top Gear’s Stig. My car taste is like my food taste: I can appreciate classic Italian dishes, I don’t mind a little bit of Asian food, but when it’s all said and done, get me a freaking burger. Why? Good money will get you the best burger, and even when you are scraping your last nickels together, you can still get something palatable. (Bad analogy? Probably. But it works for me.)
I have a friend, Paul, who I met out in Arizona a few years ago. He’s got a Miata fetish, at one point in time owned a Volvo 740 limousine, and daily drives a lightly modified Nissan Frontier that he would use in his duties as a search-and-rescue volunteer for the Yavapai County officials. He’s a car-geek through and through, but he’s got one problem: he let me mess with the closest thing to an exotic car I’ve ever put hands on, a Lancia Scorpion like the lead photo car, blue paint, black nose and all. The Scorpion is the U.S. market name for the Lancia Montecarlo, the base car that the wicked 037 Group-B racer was (very questioningly) based on. I had no idea Paul owned the car until our friends started cracking jokes about whether or not the Lancia was done yet. Paul’s Scorpion is a fairly complete car, but it has items that need to be fixed…nothing unusual for a car that sat unused for eighteen years. Like the carburetor that would flood out by puking fuel out of the top, or the nonexistent and near-unobtanium shifter linkage bushings. It’s a neat little coupe in shape and sadly, is so damn small that I simply do not fit, period. I fit better in a Lotus Elise than I do a Scorpion. I couldn’t shut the door and couldn’t get my head under the roofline. Luckily, Paul significantly smaller and shorter than I am.
I think I need to find out if he is still working on that Italian doorstop or not…
Lancia’s love affair with chronic rusting means that there’s precious few of these beauties left these days.
So this should be celebrated by canning the tired Lancia motor and swapping in a Mazda rotary and a fully upgraded transaxle. Then you’d have a car that would go as well as it looks!