There is no slow season at BaT: only busy, busier, and borderline swamped, which usually occurs during the summer and early autumn. With nearly 1,300 listings currently live on the site, even we have a hard time keeping up! But we love to take time each week to pick out a handful of the most interesting and significant vehicles from the last seven days, just for you.

Enjoy today’s edition of the Weekly Weird and Wonderful, and let us know what else caught your eye!

Ex–Mark Donohue/Penske Racing 1968 AAR-Chevrolet Eagle Indy Car

Image: russthompsonracing.com

In 1968 USAC season, the AAR Eagle was the car to beat. Mark Donohue and Roger Penske had limited success with this Chevy-powered car, but those with Ford or Offy power dominated the season; Dan Gurney’s personal Eagle won the three races it entered, and Bobby Unser drove his Eagle to the championship, which included a win at the Indy 500 over the Granatelli turbine car. Donohue, meanwhile, was cleaning up in Trans Am and the US Road Racing Championship.

Mechanical troubles hampered this car, but when everything was working, it was as fast as can be. In the final race of the season, Donohue was able to keep with the leading pack of Gurney and Mario Andretti until lap 35, when he retired with broken suspension components.

1953 Mercedes-Benz 220 Cabriolet A Art Car by Hiro Yamagata and 1997 Mercedes-Benz SL500 Art Car by Joshua Vides

Usually it’s the BMWs and the Porsche 911s that get the “art car” treatment, but these two Benzes responded just as well to their respective transformations. The W187 is one of 24 (!) painted by artist Hiro Yamagata as part of his “Earthly Paradise” series, this one is named the “Flower Bouquet” for obvious reasons. Though it’s an exquisite one-off art piece, the paint job has the same practical effect as a Hawaiian shirt—its visual complexity easily masks mustard stains and other smudges.

Joshua Vides’s R129 looks like a Lichtenstein come to life, but rendering his pop art style into reality has a surreal effect. He has given this treatment to models as diverse as a Volkswagen Beetle, Citroen SM, Ferrari 308, and Acura NSX as part of his “Check Engine Light” series. His process is fascinating to watch.

Record-Setting 7-Second Twin-Turbocharged 1987 Buick Grand National NHRA SS/DX Drag Car

Turbo Buicks are so effective on the drag strip that the Buick GS Club of America is able to conduct an entire drag racing series of Buick-only brackets every year. This evil whistler holds a special place in Grand National lore as the first NHRA Super Stock car to break the 7-second barrier, which it did with John Gallina at the wheel in 2003. We’d encourage the next owner to work their way up to that mark slowly.

Cannibal-Chevrolet IMSA WSC Race Car

OK, one more race car and we’re done for the week…we think. This was once an Oldsmobile Cutlass silhouette racer, believe it or not—and a pretty good one at that. It took 8th place in the GTS class at the 1994 24 Hours of Daytona, and one year later was transformed into a funky WSC Prototype racer under @FantasyJunction founder Bruce Trenery, who campaigned it in the big Florida endurance races and some IMSA events through 1998. After a dormant decade, it came back as a vintage racer, and as of right now sits with just seven hours on its gnarly dry-sump 388ci Chevy small block.

c.1960 Ford Prototype 3.5-Ton 6×6 Amphibious Vehicle

Per the listing copy, in the late 1950s, the US Army Ordnance Corps solicited proposals for a medium-duty 6×6 designed to be air-dropped and operate amphibiously with minimal preparation. Following the brief, Ford’s design team also operated with minimal preparation, and turned out a prototype that met all design requirements but looked like it was sketched by a first-grader. But simplicity is a virtue in military applications, and this truck basically consists of two aluminum tubs on a ladder chassis with a boat prop that would have been connected to a PTO. It has been refurbished and runs and drives, but if it’s going to get wet it will need a new driveshaft at the least.

11-Mile 2019 BMW C 400 X Golden Age by NMOTO

“What if a prewar 328 turned into an Art Deco scooter?” is a question that nobody ever asked—well, almost nobody. But design studio NMOTO did such a great job answering it with the C 400 X Golden Age that the question then becomes “why did nobody ask?”

1982 Honda CT50 Motra

The Motra is a tough little off-road scooter with a hi-lo gearbox that was sold in the Japanese market for just two years. As the Motocompo is to the Honda City, the Motra could be to the Honda Vamos.

1977 Maserati Khamsin 5-Speed

Only 155 Khamsin were delivered to the United States, and this was one of them. The NHTSA didn’t take kindly to Gandini’s glass panel taillight treatment, and forced the manufacturer into an utterly clunky workaround that ruined the design of the car (click here and prepare to be appalled). Thankfully, this one got its rightful Euro-style transparent tail panel and bumpers back during a 2000 refurbishment. The Khamsin was built while Maserati was under Citroën ownership, which becomes obvious with the hood open. Underneath it, one will find very French features like a spare tire in front of the radiator and bright green oleopneumatic spheres for the hydraulic system, which operates a pump for the self-centering power steering (shared with the Citroen SM), and even controls basic functions like seat height adjustment and headlamp motors. Weird…and wonderful!

1938 Velocette KTS

We often see patinated vehicles on BaT that make us say “it’s perfect how it is.” But seller @Overthetop did a lovely job on the cleanup of this prewar Velocette that we last saw here in 2020, and it looks like he’s got it running pretty nice too!

1970 Fiat Moretti 850 Sportiva S2

Moretti S.p.A was a boutique motorcycle and automobile manufacturer that, thanks to its founder’s cozy relationship with Giovanni Agnelli, turned out a series of interesting Fiat re-bodies in the 1960s and ’70s. The 850 Sportiva was one of their most successful from a design perspective, even though only 52 were made. We are big fans of the versatile Fiat 850 platform here at BaT, and get excited any time we see a coachbuilt one. We’ve listed examples trimmed out by Allemano, Michelotti, Cisitalia, and Zagato, and the Moretti’s “baby Dino” lines hold their own with the best of them.

Honorable Mentions:

c. 1945 Blackhawk Bantam Porto-Power Tool Kit

Remember when industrial design was a thing? We miss those days too.

1992 Porsche 911 Carrera RS N/GT and Thomas Harris’s 15k-Mile 1992 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 Coupe 5-Speed

The Euro-spec 964 Carrera RS was already a hard-edged track weapon, and the addition of the M003 package turned it into the N/GT: a legit racer with a fully stripped interior, a roll cage, a larger fuel tank and cutoff switch, and even further weight reductions.

You could probably scare yourself in an N/GT, but that’s more visceral physical excitement, rather than the psychological (well, and visceral in a different sense) horror one might experience behind the wheel of the 964 formerly owned by novelist Thomas Harris (author of Silence of the Lambs).

2011 Ford F-650 Super Duty Cummins 4×4 Six-Door Conversion

Sometimes too much is just right. We know we don’t have the kind of visible veins in our forearms that would allow us to pull off this look, but there’s probably someone out there in BaT-land can make it work.

Thanks for checking out this edition of the Weekly Weird & Wonderful! Follow this page to get updates when new installments post, and tell what caught your eye or what you think we’ve left out!