From Another Mother: What’s Your No-Expense-Spared Dream Car & Engine-Swap Combo?

2002 photography by Patrick Stevenson, Bavaria photography by Andrew Golseth, Range Rover photography by Daniel Piker, 912 photography by Ian Wood

“Hillclimb specials” have benefited from some weird and wonderful marriages of motor and chassis for some time now (look up a certain Fiat X1/9 and a Judd-powered M3 if YouTube isn’t blocked in your office), and the swaths of pushrod V8 GMWs and LSX-7s popping hoods at Cars & Coffees only seem to be expanding the population of cars powered by heart transplants in the last few years, but let’s get a little hypothetical and pretend we have access to the machinery and bank accounts that we see in dreams; imagine a Matra V12 stuffed into a BMW M1, for instance. Perhaps a 917/30’s turbo flat-twelve matched in unholy union with a carved-up 914.

Obviously some combinations won’t fly in any stretch of the practical world, but let’s just say you have a team of engineers who like helping you modify frame rails on their days off from their NASA contractor’s gig. What would you put into what? And better yet, if you have an inkling of it might feasibly be done, please don’t be shy in sharing some of your keyboard speculations.