Yahoo Autos I Drove a 797-HP Hellcat and a 26-HP Two-Stroke Car in the Same Day
I count 15 cars parked outside the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., for the 12th annual Parade of Trabants-16, if you count the Lada. Which means that if there were 15 more Trabants, then the total horsepower would almost equal that of the car that I drove here, a Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Redeye. That’s if I generously assume each one has the Trabant’s most powerful two-stroke engine and still makes its factory-spec 26 horsepower, a number that may or may not be accurate. I’m not sure there were a lot of dyno tests going on in East Germany.
The Trabant is widely regarded as the worst car ever made, a two-stroke Commie ox cart with cotton-and-resin bodywork and seating for four miserable souls. So of course it has a huge following. Well, maybe not huge. But Trabants continue to generate enough interest that otherwise-sane Americans go to the trouble of importing the things from Europe. I wanted to meet these people and possibly drive one of their cars to help restore some of my eroding automotive perspective. The night before, I went into the Hellcat’s performance menu and detuned the engine before I handed the key to the valet-detuned it to 500 horsepower. Cue Yakov Smirnoff: What a country!
Trabant owners embrace self-deprecating humor, which is probably a prerequisite. A sign in front of a 1988 601 reads, “One of only 2,818,547.” They’re also dedicated historians. An owner named Roger Fuller tells me that he went so far as to research East German musical tastes so he could find some period-appropriate tunes. “I tried to find some East German cassettes,” he says. “But you know what they were listening to? Phil Collins.” Trabant: Can you feel it (and hear it and smell it) coming in the air tonight? Fuller gave up on East German audio material after deciding, “I really don’t want to listen to the collected speeches of Erich Honecker.”
It’s time for a drive, courtesy of Andy Burzynski of New York. First, he gives me a quick walkaround of his greenish machine. The ignition key and the door key are different, but the ignition key has a small notch cut in it, so you can feel which key is which in the dark. Suspension is a single transverse leaf spring at each end, so, you know, pretty much just like a Corvette’s. The gas tank is under the hood above the engine, so there’s no need for a fuel pump. Or water pump, or valvetrain. If this thing were any more elemental, it would be a hydrogen atom.
The Trabant does have a luxurious electric starter, but Burzynski finds that his freshly charged battery is dead. No worries. We’ll just give it the ol’ East German jump-start-which is to say, push it up the street while Burzynski pops the clutch. You know why Trabants have a rear-window defroster? To keep your hands warm while you’re pushing them! Just kidding. There’s no rear-window defroster. (It was an option.)
The push works, and the car cackles to life with the fitful staccato pop-pop-pop of a cold snowmobile. Burzynski pulls back around and offers me the wheel. “Keep the choke on for a little while,” he advises.
The first thing you notice driving a Trabant is that everybody notices a Trabant. We’re only half a block down the street when an older guy on the sidewalk fixes us with a stare and blurts, “Trabant!” Burzynski says he’s accustomed to this sort of attention.
I blip the throttle as we wait at a light, since neither of us is entirely confident in the 594-cc two-stroke’s ability to idle. When the light goes green, I give it full throttle and we surge off the line, trailed by a faint blue cloud that in the Redeye would be burnt rubber but here is pure exhaust. “I’m running a 50-to-1 gas-to-oil ratio, but you can do 40-to-1 if you want that blue smoke,” Burzynski says. Comrade, supplies are meager and winter is long, so let us not roll the coal.
The Trabant is not as lethargic as its 26 horsepower would suggest. In fact, it can keep up with traffic, in an urban context. The thing to remember is that it has more engine than brakes, and it doesn’t have much engine. The column-mounted four-speed is one of the rare gearboxes where you shift and shake your fist at life simultaneously.
Did you know that Phil Collins is a huge fan of the Alamo? It’s true. And the East Germans were fans of Phil Collins. There’s some kind of theme there involving lost causes but I don’t have the patience to sort it out. I’ve got a fast car waiting for a long drive home. I climb back into the Redeye and remember it’s still in 500-hp mode. Suddenly that seems like more than enough. But I put it back to 797 horsepower anyway. Then I do a burnout down the block, for America.
From the February 2019 issue
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