Do you know what kills most project cars? Believe it or not, it’s not money. While money is the number one highest rated cause of divorce in this country, money (or the glaring lack thereof) is not what shuts down production of hundreds of project cars a year; it’s mission creep. What is “mission creep,” you ask? Well, according to Wikipedia, the official definition (that is until somebody decides to arbitrarily change it) reads: “Mission creep is the expansion of a project or mission beyond its original goals, often after initial successes.”

Mission creep is a pretty common phrase, particularly to those of you who are veterans of the military. While originally coined for wayward or misguided military operations, mission creep has since been adapted for civilian projects as well, usually connoting a slippery slope of more and more ambitious or even muddled goals, ultimately becoming so convoluted or unclear that the project itself collapses under its own uncertainty.

"You think you hate it now, wait 'til you drive it."

This of course, can happen to any project; be it landscaping a yard, refurbishing a house, or planning a family vacation. Trying to cram in too much or changing the course of the project’s goal can spell certain doom.

Thinking of my final example, I am always reminded of “National Lampoon’s Vacation” starring Chevy Chase. The plan started simple: take the family cross-country to Wally World. What could be more simple, right?

From picking up a new car the day before leaving, to stopping to drop off Aunt Edna’s corpse in the rainy side yard of a cousin’s home in Arizona, to holding up a major nationally-known amusement park using an air soft gun, the family outing became a tangled web of sidetracks, last-minute stops, breakdowns and wacky antics that forever resides in people’s consciences particularly whenever they punch a polystyrene moose in the face.

The lesson learned? Forgo the good-intentioned pleasantries, and just stick to the job at hand. That, and stay as far away from Randy Quaid as possible.

Can a project car have Multiple Personality Disorder? Image: Popular Hot Rodding

Car magazines are usually the biggest (or at least, the most visible) offenders of project car mission creep. This is mainly because magazine project cars are fed by a steady diet of free products. The example that readily comes to mind is Popular Hot Rodding’s “Project X.” This ’57 210 post-roof Chevy has been kicking around PHR for nearly half a century! The ’57 has seen so many different iterations and manifestations, that nobody is quite clear what it is anymore.

Growing up, I remembered Project X as a steel-wheeled, back-halved blown big block-powered Pro Streeter. At another time, it rode on polished Cragars with a tunnel ram poking up through the hood and even starred in “Hollywood Knights” with Tony Danza. It’s been converted into a g-Machine, a Pro-Tourer, a customized cruiser, and even a makeshift-gasser.

Sure it's cool and it's gonna make more horsepower than 90-percent of us can handle. But can any of us even afford something like this? Image: Lateral-G.net

Advertisers want to showcase their products on cars that will garner them the most popularity, so it only makes sense to canoodle the magazines to get their latest doohickey installed on the magazine’s current test mule.

How many rear end installs or camshaft swaps have you seen in print? Countless, right? Well, it’s not always the manufacturers who initiate the deal, so don’t get mad at them, either.

A great way so grease an advertiser into advertising in a magazine is to lure them in with project cars. It took me until around college to realize that anything Hot Rod Magazine was up to would require Jay Leno money and means to duplicate. 1,000-horsepower twin-turbo small block Chevys are not within any middle class American car enthusiast’s budget. But people don’t read magazines to see stuff that they could do, right?

Apparently, wrong.

In these tight times, people are looking for cheap performance gains that can be done on their shoestring, do-it-my-own-damned-self budget. Not every friggin’ engine build needs to be an all-aluminum LS motor with the latest fuel injection or crank driven supercharger; and in fact, most readers would rather learn how to rebuild a junk motor fished out of a salvage yard for pennies on the dollar.

Magazines have a tendency to forget this, especially when some top dog aftermarket company waves a $20,000 motor or a full rotisserie paint job in front of their noses. Other times, it’s just car envy that gets the best of us media types.

Dan Weischaar joked, "I've got less money in this '68 Road Runner than what RideTech has in their transmission." Image: Hotchkis Sport Suspension

Here’s a good example: I few months ago I drove Dan Weischaar’s ’68 Road Runner. His ‘Runner, unlike any of the other B-Body Mopars I’ve been lucky enough to drive, rode like a modern late-model sport-tuned car. Best of all, the autocrossing-built Plymouth uses an insanely simple bolt-in kit from Hotchkis. While other companies will try to convince you that torsion bar suspension is garbage and will suggest taking a Sawzall to your shock towers, Hotchkis says, “Why not improve upon what your car was designed with?,” which makes perfect sense.

Driving Weischaar’s Plymouth made me immediately reconsider my ’69 Dodge Charger R/T’s current suspension setup. Riding high on Weld Drag Lites, tall skinnies and towering 30×9 cheater slicks, my Mopar project (Killer Kong) stands on Mopar Performance Super Stock leaf springs, Mopar gas shocks and factory torsion bars with a thumb-thick front sway bar; not exactly the equipment needed to achieve the same road manner’s as the Hotchkis ‘Runner.

In fact, the temptation to scrap my current suspension package for a similar Hotchkis one was nearly too much for me to resist, particularly when I was assured by John Hotchkis that I would be able to drag race with his suspension parts just as effectively as my current “old school” pieces.

Thankfully, I came to my senses and declined the offer. Not because there’s anything wrong with going with the modern suspension – far from it, I still want to do the swap in the future – but because I need to hold true to my designated plan of action until it’s completed.

Many car builders and designers call this “staying true to the theme,” the military calls it a “plan of operation,” either way, it’s the far-off goal that inches closer with each Saturday spent wrenching.

Killer Kong’s theme is pretty simple: if it went 10’s in 1970, it’ll go 10’s today. ‘Kong is going to be mainly retro, employing old school tricks and tactics used by some of the best in Mopar racing history, all the while keeping it basic, streetable, oddly affordable and built in a single car garage. These parameters might not mean much to the guy who only cares about big dollar builds, but for the Average American Joe, I think it’s speaks volumes.

And it’s because of this thematic validity that I refuse to wholly sway from it at any given time. The same should apply to all of us, it’s easy to be distracted with prospects of building other or additional cars while in the midst of our current project (why do you think it’s taken me so long to piece one Charger together?), but it’s truly a challenge to stick to our guns, tune out the temptation of mission creep, and do what we originally set out to do.

Light ’em up,
Kevin