One thing that makes a project car especially hellish — yet rewarding — is the choice of a car that hasn't become particularly collectible yet. You know that one day this overlooked treasure will be the star of the big auctions, but for now the herd followers just point and laugh.
The General Motors X-body is a good example of this; all those recalls and dashed hopes of the early 1980s meant that the special-edition Citations, Omegas, Phoenixes, and Skylarks got crushed early and often. Sure, we've had the occasional harsh word about these cars, but today we're going to push open the NaK-cooled gates to the Hell Garage and give you a couple of classic X-bodies to choose from.
A numbers-matching, final-year-of-production X-11 could be your next project.
The Chevrolet Citation was built for the 1980 through 1985 model years, selling well at first but then acquiring a reputation for unreliability. Citations still show up in wrecking yards these days, but they've become exceedingly rare sights on the street. The X-11 Citation was the high-performance version, complete with stiffer suspension and big X-11 graphics, and enough of them remain that we had no problem finding this pretty straight '85 in Ohio with an asking price of $1,500 (go here if the listing disappears). There's some rust, but it appears to be complete and ready for restoration and/or performance upgrades.
The first Chevy of the Eighties!
The stock 130-horsepower engine and 3-speed automatic in this car would be OK, but we suggest that you grab a 3.9-liter, 240hp LZ9 V6 out of a junked Uplander, then bolt it to a Getrag 5-speed transmission pulled from a late-80s Cavalier Z24 or Fiero. Sure, you'd have to work some wizardry on the engine computer to make it happy with that manual transmission, but it will be worth it. Fix up the interior to showroom-grade condition, double the horsepower, and life in your X-11 will be good.
Don't be scared of a little rust— this is one of just 696 SportOmegas built.
Rare as the Citation X-11 is, it's nothing next to the ultra-rare sporty edition of the 1980-1984 Oldsmobile Omega: the SportOmega (or, if we are to go by the graphics on the car's doors, the SportΩmega). With only 696 SportΩmegas made, you're not going to have an easy time finding a suitable project. Not to worry! We've gone to the rustiest corners of Minnesota and spotted this 1981 Oldsmobile SportΩmega (go here if the listing disappears).
The seller started with a beyond-basket-case car with no floors, fixed them, and even commissioned reproduction decals, and he's asking a mere thousand bucks for the car. Granted, it still needs a firehose spray of dollars few more bucks invested and relativistic quantities a bit of time investment to be done, but just look at those stripes!
You gotta drive it. You're gonna love it: The sportiest Ωmega of them all.
Just imagine this car with 240 horses of LZ9 V6 power, frying those front tires. You could be living the SportΩmega dream!
