A straight-six early Camaro on Watanabe wheels with triple Webers. A BMW motorcycle engine crammed into a Bugeye Sprite. A C4 ZR-1 heart beating inside a 1957 Nomad. These aren’t Bring a Trailer listings. They’re the fever dreams of people who spend too much time thinking about cars and not enough time finishing them.
Jalopnik recently asked its readers a deceptively simple question: What’s your dream car project? Not just the car, but the specific work — the swaps, the mods, the obsessive details that separate a fantasy from a plan. The responses revealed something car culture doesn’t always admit about itself.
Most of us are never going to build the thing.
The answers split roughly into two camps. First, the sentimentalists. A reader named JohnnyWasASchoolBoy wants to recreate the 1965 Mustang GT he and his father owned when he was seventeen. Stock paint, stock interior, period-correct-looking wheels hiding modern rubber.
A 289 bumped to 400 horsepower with contemporary internals. Modern suspension, Wilwood brakes. He says he has the project drawn up in a drawer somewhere. A drawer is where most of these builds live permanently.
Then there are the unhinged. A commenter called Norm DePlume proposed stuffing a BMW S1000RR engine into a Bugeye Sprite with Miata running gear. The pitch: 200-plus horsepower, under 1,200 pounds, and a 14,000-rpm redline.
He also mistakenly called the RR’s inline-four a flat-four, which suggests the build may still be in the napkin-sketch phase. The editorial response — “a good way to die” — was generous.
The standout, at least in the eyes of the Jalopnik staff, was Jake Wetherill’s vision: an early Camaro with a de-stroked straight-six under three liters, triple Weber carburetors, bolt-on fender flares, an external oil cooler, and period-correct Watanabe wheels on slicks. It’s a Japanese-influenced take on an American icon that doesn’t lean on the tired LS-swap playbook. His backup plan — a Honda Beat with a VFR800 motorcycle engine — only sweetened the deal.
What threads all these together is the gap between ambition and execution. One reader openly admitted to the ADHD cycle of starting a project, making a minor fixable mistake, and then pretending the car doesn’t exist. That’s not a personality quirk. That’s the default human relationship with project cars.
The garage is a graveyard of good intentions.
A few entries leaned toward genuine restraint. A reader named Mike wants a 1992 Volkswagen GTI 16-valve in Montana Green, restored mostly to stock with coilovers and wider BBS lips. It’s the kind of build that sounds modest until you try to find clean parts for a thirty-four-year-old hot hatch. The editorial aside — noting how “just some coilovers” is always the first domino — knows exactly where that road leads.
Others went big. Cintrocrunch1 wants the LT5 from a C4 Corvette ZR-1 in a 1957 Nomad, with the dual overhead cam setup functional as a party trick. Clay Horste floated the idea of Singerizing a Porsche 944, applying the obsessive restoration philosophy of a $3 million 964 build to one of Stuttgart’s least-loved children. That one has legs, if anyone with deep enough pockets and a sharp enough sense of irony ever tries it.
The list also included a Pontiac Fiero with a Buick Verano turbo drivetrain, a choice so oddly specific it practically guarantees the builder will spend years hunting down wiring harness adapters.
These projects share a common DNA. They’re less about cars and more about identity — who we were when we first fell in love with something mechanical, and who we think we’d become if we ever finished the damn thing. The drawer full of plans stays closed. The fantasy stays perfect. And the garage stays full of cars that almost were.
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