Norwegian gearheads on the right Way

Now, the Maserati Quattroporte IV and the Maserati Ghibli II — well, those ain’t your run-of-the-mill beat-up cruisers. Truth be told, these rides are more like high-end luxury sports cars than any ol’ burnout-mobile. Honestly, they’d probably fit better in my street racing blog than in a blog about small-town redneck cruisin’. But hey, Maseratis were actually some o’ the cheapest Italian sports cars you could get your hands on back in the day. Word is, even them fellas in the A and B gangs in Oslo used to roll around in ‘em like they owned the town. Design-wise, they were pure 1980s — slick lines, sharp corners, the whole nine yards — and stayed that way right up till around the year 2000. You could compare ‘em straight up with the Lancia Delta Integrale, which I’ve already written about in another post. These machines came with engines as small as 2.0 liters — not exactly muscle car size — but mostly ran with 2.8-liter V6s under the hood. Some had a V8, sure, but even that one only p...

The Skoda Favorit came before a car that a school assistant at my elementary school had, from around 1996 and probably well into the 2000s. It looked a lot like the Favorit. This was Volkswagen’s big investment in Skoda, but they sure didn’t bother spending money to make Skoda as tough as a VW. My teacher actually bought a Felicia, made from '96 to '01, but it wasn’t any better. He bragged about paying an extra 40 grand for a Volkswagen engine instead of a Skoda one, but that didn’t help much. After just 3-4 years, that car was already falling apart, and by the early 2000s, I was seeing these rusted out everywhere. The Skoda Favorit, though, has a more classic look and was built until '95. I reckon it’d work just fine as a country cruiser. I remember a guy—his folks knew my folks from the orienteering scene—driving a Lada Samara back in the late '90s. That was the last time I ever knew someone who drove one. Not long after, in '99, Lada quit selling in Norway. At th...