Car Throttle

Sometimes, as I go through the internet I find something that’s so damn cool it must be shared. This is one of those cases; I actually stumbled across this gem of a car on CarDomain’s most excellent blog, and went in search of more information on this wicked custom Saab.

All the images are from this build thread on the forums of savarturbo.se, which -- although I don’t know any Swedish -- I’m going to venture a guess at being a Swedish tuning car forum.  The car started life as an early-build Saab 99, which had around 85 horsepower.  It’s still got a Saab engine, but it’s turned around backwards and mated to the Quattro 4WD system from an Audi 100.  It’s hard to gather details considering my lack of Swedish language knowledge, but honestly the pictures here speak louder than words.  Enjoy, and I’ll throw in the few details I figured out along the way.

I suppose everything starts out as a bare shell at some point.  Still, it looks like a pretty straight body -- a good find for a 99.

This is the original setup, using a Garrett GT40 and twin Dell’orto carb’s.  You can watch the setup of the car change as flip through the 30-odd pages of the thread, although it’s hard to imagine going up from a 600+WHP 4WD Saab.  If you’re a Saab nut (like me) you’ll notice that the motor is flipped around 180° -- distributor on the back, exhaust manifold on the driver’s side, intake on the passenger’s.  That’s so it’ll mate (with an adapter plate) with the Audi 100 transmission.

The original setup, fully assembled.  I can’t imagine Dell’orto 40′s stay in tune for long when you’re cramming 1.7bar over atmospheric pressure down their throats, but the whole carbs+turbo thing is still a mystery to me.

This is a later setup utilizing MSD electronic ignition, a Holset HX50 hybrid turbo, and VEMS standalone engine management/mapping software for better fuel delivery.  And yes, that’s over 700 peak wheel horsepower -- to all four wheels.

So what you have is a Saab 99 that looks like this from the outside:

And under the hood it looks like this:

And it runs down the strip like this.  Oh my god.  No more words need to be said.

So that’d be a 700+ whp Saab 99, that runs a 9.8 second quarter mile.  Who else is feeling inspired today?