By Murilee Martin

The 24 Hours of LeMons is the perfect venue for deranged engine-swappers, whether it’s a Honda Z600 with Saab 900 Turbo power or a twin-engined Toyota Corolla/MR2. Some teams have decided that motorcycle engines are the secret to LeMons success, and so we’ve seen a Honda CBR1000–powered Geo Metro, a Honda Magna V65–powered Honda Z600, and the Hell’s Treehuggers Harley-Davidson–engined Toyota Prius on the race track. One of the greatest LeMons motorcycle-powered race cars of all time drove in just a single race a few years ago, and LeMons aficionados still speak in awed, hushed tones about the Italian Stallions’ Moto-Guzzicated Fiat 600. Here’s the story!

The Italian Stallions first appeared on the LeMons scene way back in the early days, when they showed up to the 2008 Arse Freeze-a-Palooza race with this Fiat X1/9. The X1/9 has been one of the most heartbreaking heaps in the LeMons world, although it does offer some performance potential. Just last year, we saw an X1/9 win the Chubba Chedda Enduro at Road America, but that car had a potent V-6 pulled from an Alfa Romeo 164 and required a lot of races to tame its quick but ill-handling ways.

The Italian Stallions’ X1/9 was fairly quick for a stock-engined econo-Fiat, but it suffered from not-very-unexpected reliability problems. The team eventually swapped some motorcycle carburetors onto it and turned decent lap times in the brief period between the green flag and something breaking.

Nowadays, the Stallions run their X1/9 with Mazda rotary power, with results about as good as those of the Scuderia Craptastic Opel GT.

But let’s go back to 2010, to the Arse Freeze-a-Palooza at Buttonwillow Raceway Park, where we first laid eyes on the Italian Stallions’ 1964 Fiat 600D with Moto Guzzi 1000-cc motorcycle power.

The mastermind—if that’s the right word—behind this project was Italian Stallions team captain Chris Ice, who has been kind enough to write up the story of how this race car came to be:

We wanted to build an Index of Effluency car, and were trying to figure out a concept. We had already put motorcycle carbs on the X1/9, and the Geo was hammering it with a motorcycle engine. So what Italian car could we put a motorcycle …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Car & Driver