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

My actual hillclimb car is an 86 bmw 325 with ford 302 (306) power. Maybe a less exotic dream, but still my dream and she’s real…and rad.

I have three considerations. First would be to find an amg hammer coupe or maybe an even older benz and swap a manual trans and a supercharged 55 motor and handling upgrades. The other idea is to take a hudson hornet and put either an s52 or a 55 in it. Lastly if I could I would buy back my corvair that was my first vintage car and swap a porsche flat six in

A Jaguar V12 with electronic ignition and electronic fuel injection, coupled with overdrive automatic transmission and lockup converter on Series I XJ 12.

I dream of one day building a Mercedes (c124) 300CE AMG Hammer coupe replica/tribute with the 6.2 l v8 from the 63 AMG-models (M156). I think the wide body AMG-styling looks stunning, and I really like that engine. If the budget is sufficiently large, I would even swap the entire floor with everything from a newer car, like Piper Motorsport has done with a 190E EVO replica/tribute.

In the late-1970s I owned an Austin-Healey 3000 Mark III (BJ8, the model’s final iteration). The engine was very tired, however. I was renting a London house from a director of the company that owned the BMW distribution franchise for the UK. We discussed the possibility of putting a modern BMW 3.0-litre six and gearbox into the Healey, and were close to getting agreement up the line for a free engine to demonstrate ‘what if’. Then my landlord jumped ship to take another job, and the project inevitably died without his ‘sponsorship’. My lottery-win Q-car would be a Citroen 2CV… Read more »

Aston Martin 5.3L V12, one of the later variants from the DB9. Slap that son of a gun in to a Series III Jaguar XKE 2+2.

It’d need a six speed too, but a conventional one mounted behind the engine, not a rear mounted transaxle.

It’d need the requisite big brakes and uprated suspension, but I’d want it to look as stock as humanly possible from the outside.

Alternate: Fox Body Mustang Pace Car Edition with a 2.3 Ecoboost, 6-Speed, and built suspension. An Uber-SVO if you will.

And at one time I was hell bent on installing a 2.4 liter Ferrari engine in a VW transporter but then two guys came and offered me more than I could refuse for both my old flat window buses.

My favorite has to be a small block Chevy V8 that was installed in a Porsche 911 by a friend of mine who was a machinist at Dan Gurney’s All American Racers in Santa Ana, California. It blew people’s minds when John opened the engine cover and they saw it in there.