Finding a car (Page 1 of 2)

Go to Crazedlist, specify $1 to $500 as the price range, and use such search terms as "Fiat," "Packard," "Hillman," "1952," and "Rover" in order to find good Lemons cars.

Shhhhh!  Don't give away our secret weapons!

SHO's are good too, just bring lots of engines......

Or with a user name like yours, http://forums.24hoursoflemons.com/viewtopic.php?id=2486 would be a good choice.  They are actually pretty good, and they seem to last.

Sometimes you find the unexpected

http://orangecounty.craigslist.org/cto/1467379369.html

thanks for all the tips. I would love to buy that fiesta but unfortunatly I live in Virginia.

Also think about wrecked or otherwise broken cars if your team has the mechanical aptitude to fix them. Sweat equity doesn't count toward the $500 cap, and we made the most of it. We found several cheap beaters on CL with problems as simple as blown head gaskets or bad clutches for next to nothing. When the shop bill for an old beater is going to be $500-$1500 or more, a lot of people just get rid of it. One example was a dead '95 Geo Prizm (re-branded Toyota Corolla) with 150K miles that ended up needing a distributor, alternator, shocks, brakes, tires, and a front crank seal to get it road-worthy, plus the AC worked! That car was free for the pickup. I used it as a daily until I sold it, but it would have been fine for Lemons. We ended up using a Civic that had been in a 35 MPH front end collision and was undrivable. A come-along, wire rope, immobile object, and a sledgehammer got it back in shape pretty quickly though, and we had a lot of budget cap room to buy parts with.

I like searching CL for "rare" with a $1000 cap. You find a lot of interesting vehicles that way...

Also look for "mechanic's special" and "my loss, your gain." I believe the catch on our car was "car overheat but don't know why"...

BINGO that worked for us!!   You would be surprised what gems in the rough you can find on Craigslist. No doubt the best deals will need some work.  I like searching for  Lemons type  cars on CL and find potential ones  all the time.  Like a previous poster said about tow and storage yards. Great places to find one as are auto repair shops. There are more and more people that can't pay repair bills and after a lawful amount of time passes, the shop can sell the car. There are great deals out there if you look hard enough especially if you're in a larger metro area.

I found the Anglia's by searching "no title".  worked like a charm!

I'd bet that if you got the car from a Tiger Woods divorce sale, and had the documentation to prove it, the judges wouldn't assess any BS laps, like they did for the Paraguayan Diplomatic Mercedes. Of course, expect it to get claimed at the end of the race!