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We've seen some ill-advised-yet-brilliant engine swaps at 24 Hours of LeMons races, including a Mazda rotary-powered Opel GT, a Polaris snowmobile-engined Miata, and a bunch of even more ridiculous stuff, but the DoubleSuck Toyota MRolla is the first to feature two engines.
 It all started a few years back, when this Toyota MR2—then known as the Volatile RAM car—campaigned at many of the early California LeMons events. We see a lot of MR2s (mostly in the pits, getting their overheated engines repaired for the nth time), so we didn't pay much attention to this car. 
Then we got a very strange email from the Stick Figure Racing team: "We have found an AE92 Corolla GT-S cheap, may we weld its front half to the rear half of our MR2?" LeMons HQ said that idea sounded just fine, assuming that it would never happen. But the thing about LeMons racers is that they almost always follow up on their crazy ideas, so out came the Sawzalls and torches:
 
It turns out that the MR2 and the AE92 Corolla have very similar body shapes and dimensions, so the cutting-and-pasting job didn't involve as much tar paper, Bondo, and pop-riveting as you might expect.
After endless thrashing, the DoubleSuck MRolla—the name the team has given its MR2/Corolla mashup—showed up at the 2011 Goin' For Broken race at Reno-Fernley Raceway in the Nevada high desert.
It looked a bit rough at first glance, but it turned out to be quite the backyard-engineering masterpiece. In the front, the Corolla GT-S's 130-ish-hp 4AGE engine and five-speed manual transmission.
In the MR2-half rear, another 4AGE engine, this one pushing around 115 horses through an automatic transmission.
There are radiators front and rear.
The DoubleSuck team opted to keep the two cars' electrical systems completely separated, with two alternators, two batteries . . . and two LeMons-mandated kill switches.
In the cockpit, the transmissions are controlled by a pair of shifters. This is getting confusing!
The driver must keep track of two separate instrument clusters, with MR2 stuff marked in orange and Corolla stuff marked in green.
It's a little intimidating, but the driver just puts the MR2 transmission into drive and works the Corolla shifter while underway. There's the occasional unexpected automatic upshift making things a little squirrelly out of the turns, but this system works pretty well for the most part. Somewhere around 245 hp, eight cylinders, and all-wheel drive!
A fellow LeMons Supreme Court judge suited up and took the MRolla out for a few laps. "It feels like driving a very powerful Civic with two fat guys sitting in the back seat," he said.
The real weakness of the MRolla turned out to be the exhaust system; the mid-mounted, automatic-equipped engine had the much louder exhaust, which meant that the driver kept ignoring the quiet Corolla exhaust sound and shifting according to the noise made by the wrong engine. This resulted in the destruction of the front engine and a DNF at the Goin' For Broken.
Still, we knew the MRolla would be back, and we were right.
Since then, the MRolla has competed in several LeMons races, and it's getting quicker and more reliable with each one. At last month's Sears Pointless race, Stick Figure Racing's MRolla finished 25th out of 171 entries, with a best lap time of 2:15. That's about 8 to 10 seconds off the pace of the quickest cars, but certainly quick enough to make a statement. Keep an eye on the MRolla in future races! Now, who's going to build the GM-equivalent Fiero+Citation?
from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com | 
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