me too Y'know, Kim... if you raced Yugo's, you could have a race team named YuGo Gurl! Racing... Something tells me that alone wouldn't be inspiration enough to start racing Yugos, though...
I noticed that this week too! Maybe now we will get some respect! There's a junk yard near me and they have a Yugo. I don't know why they haven't crushed it yet, it has been there almost a year now. The thing just such a POS. But it is fun to look and remember when as a kid I would see them on the road sometimes. I don't know about a racing team of Yugos though. You would have to be really fast runners. Remember, you push you go.
I had a customer that insisted on keeping his running. It is nothing more than an Easter European Fiat Uno (or was it Panda?) and you can still get lots of parts for them. Hell, I knew one mechanic that put a Fiat X1-9 suspension on one of them (still not sure why.) IIRC, he might have actually put the whole drivetrain in it.
It's a bolt-in job is why. The Fiat 128 was the 'granddaddy', introduced in 1969 as a FWD 2-door sedan, a 4-door sedan, and a wagon, later joined by a 3-door 'Treporte'. Three years later, they took that drivetrain and moved the whole thing, right down to the tie rod ends, into the back of the X1/9*. Yes, you could easily make an X1/9 rear-wheel steer if you wanted to engineer a linkage to a steering box. Another variant of the 128 was the 127, which was a shortened liftback body on the same chassis & drivetrain. It was the 127 that got licensed to Yugo. As such, you can swap the drivetrains among all these cars quite easily. I once owned (aka: 'paid my dues in') a new Fiat 128 in 1978. The thing was an absolute riot to drive - when it ran. You could redline it relentlessly all day long and apex corners without leaving your lane. With only 1290 cc, nobody could tell you were driving like a maniac - until you got them into the twisties. * Toyota did essentially the same thing with the original MR-2 and the FX-16 in the late '80s, only they started with the rear mid-engine sports car thing and then built the FWD hatchback to hold the same drivetrain. I owned one of these (FX-16), too, and shocked the hell out of an awful lot of folks who only saw it as some little sawed-off Japanese snotbox until it left them in the dust at over 100 mph (Can you say "Beretta GTU"?). Chevy used the same (NUMMI) plant to build the Nova TC with the Toyota drivetrain.
