Our hero finds a partial project car on eBay, a 2000 GTi with no powerplant and a gutted interior, but with an Audi 4 wheel drive drive train. He gets this carcass for $10k. Then he mates it to a turbocharged VR6. It puts out over 400 hp. Later all that power breaks the differential. It's a neat story because he does it all himself and he has a budget. Other project cars are involved too.
The link and part of the introduction is below.
http://www.editorscharitychallenge.com/mot...build/phaseone/
The plan: Give a bunch of Primedia magazines 25 grand each to build the coolest, fastest, "phat"-est—Is that really a word?—tuner vehicle they could. Make them buy the car/truck/motorcycle and nearly every part from the vast cache of goods at ebaymotors.com. Give them a time limit for project completion. Then, have each team show up at a test track to duke it out in some sort of vehicle Olympics to determine the most potent mode of transportation. Afterwards, sell off each of the vehicles to see which one is the most desirable and then donate the proceeds to a worthy charity. That is the plan. Now here's my story.
With regards to the choice of a project vehicle, I faced a perplexing situation. While many other teams could buy a low cost econocar or a clean musclecar, the demographics of an average Motor Trend reader reveals a person who's college educated, a professional, who earns a strong wage, and one who likes nice cars. Unfortunately, "nice car" usually translates into a high price. Thus, how could I buy a decent condition pre-owned vehicle that was of a high enough quality level to appease an affluent MT reader without breaking my $25K piggy bank? Truth be told, I could have spent the entire budget on the purchase of a nice car (BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Corvette, Caddy, etc.) with nothing left over to perform modifications. Thus, after careful consideration I determined that Volkswagen seemed to offer a good mix of luxury, performance, style, mixed with a premium nameplate—yet it remains fairly affordable. With that in mind, I set my sites on searching the eBay Motors website for clean (yet affordable) examples of Golfs, GTis, and Passats that would work for the build-up. Shortly after my search began I did a flashback to a recent vehicle test in MT's monthly Tuners column [January 2004] where I tested a positively wicked VW R32 build-up from the folks at HPA Motorsports. The R32's 3.2L V-6 was treated to a twin turbocharged, twin intercooled upgrade that raised power to a whopping 550 hp which translated to stunning 11.49 second quarter mile times. The HPA R32 was also fitted with a full KW Suspensions coilover setup, grippy 18-inch wheels, and various other suspension tweaks. The result was an amazing 70.9 mph average speed through our 600-ft slalom. For comparison, a new Ferrari 360 Modena runs the cones at a 69.0 mph speed. About now, you probably see where I'm going with this story.