EDIT BY BEN: Patrick never ceases to amaze me with the things he finds. This post of his is so EPIC I’m going to let it run all weekend. If you don’t believe this, just listen to the last 20 seconds of the YouTube video and marvel in something that is so insane you cant help but laugh out of pure shock! I’d pay good money to watch this car battle Japan’s best at Tsukuba!
On to the post…
Ask 10 guys what the ultimate sleeper is and you’ll get 10 different answers. None of those 10 could hang with the Alfa Romeo 164 Procar.
After BMW decided to stop running the Procar support series at F1 races, Alfa Romeo proposed a series that would use cars that looked like entirely stock Alfa Romeo 164s on the outside, but were actually silhouettes with F1 chassis underneath. Because open wheel cars have inherently poor aerodynamics and already produced copious amount of downforce by the time the Procar concept was created it was actually capable of beating a contemporary F1 car in a straight line. What exactly was under the skin? A 600hp 3.5L V10 is all. Not insane power, but couple that to F1 rubber and the fact that the car would likely need ballast to meet the minimum weight for an IRL car (1,640lbs) and you have a recipe for brutal speed.
Who would suspect that such a potent package is lurking beneath the skin of a car that would appear to be the vehicle of choice for Italian septuagenarians on their way to the market even to those who know what an Alfa Romeo 164 is? The huge tires and centerlock wheels are a tiny bit of a giveaway, but imagine what it would be like to take a RWB Porsche or an MCR Skyline on the wangan in a car like that!
EDIT: BART JUST OFFERED SOME USEFUL TRANSLATION IN OUR COMMENTS SECTION:
because not everybody might be able to understand what the dutch voiceover is saying:
top 212.5 MPH
0-60 in 2.4sec
