The Worst, Cheapest Cars On The Internet Are Secretly The Best Racecars

The Internet is littered with terrible, broken cars that are just one bad day from meeting the crusher. Most of these cars will meet an unfortunate end, but before they go, there is one last place they should be set free. A couple of weekends ago, I joined a bunch of weird folks from the Internet in battering the worst possible cars on a racetrack, and all of these people and these cars came together for an unforgettable weekend. As it turns out, the worst possible cars are actually the best racecars.

On March 29, the second annual Oppo RallyX kicked off in rural Michigan with the firing of a literal cannon. If you’ve somehow made it this far on the weird car Internet without finding Opposite-Lock, you’re really missing out. Longer than a decade ago, Oppositelock, as it was originally called, was the enthusiast community of Jalopnik. Then, Jalopnik divorced Oppo, and it became its own beast.

Oppo isn’t like other car enthusiast sites. The denizens of this car forum are accepting of everyone, and all cars are championed there. It doesn’t matter if you love million-dollar Ferraris or a forgotten Pontiac Sunbird; all are welcome at Oppo. Some Oppos drive broken-down Toyotas and some drive the latest BMWs, and we love them all. What’s really awesome is that Oppo has flourished into something way bigger than it started as. The site has had its own website for years, and it’s entirely user-supported and funded.

Oppo has also had meetups for years, but in recent times, these have expanded into some real high-octane events. There’s an Oppo Rally each year, and as of last year, there’s an Oppo Rallycross event. Sadly, I missed last year’s Oppo RallyX, but I was determined to make it this time.

This year’s Oppo RallyX happened in the same location as last year. The wonderful Oppo going by 454SS hosted the event, and through him, we scored access to an abandoned farm outside of Big Rapids, Michigan. Sadly, the farm’s sandy land made for bad farming, but as Oppo found out last year, it made for a great track. The lovely hosts of the event and the farm were kind enough to carve out a track using tractors and skid-steers.

The meetup on Friday night was heartwarming. I got to see some faces I hadn’t seen in years, while I was finally able to attach faces to the screen names I’ve seen online for years. A bunch of us partied on Friday night for a bit, then retired to our accommodations to prepare for full-throttle fun that Saturday.

A Fun Bunch Of Characters

While Oppo RallyX is officially an unsanctioned event, there has been some great organizing. Oppo and Autopian reader Shop-Teacher gets a lot of credit for organizing these events, while 454SS has been a fantastic host. One enthusiast, Taylor, also gets a ton of credit for setting up picturesque Airbnbs for the Oppos who wanted a more affordable option than a hotel room. But really, Oppo RallyX is a community effort. A lot of people don’t really want to rally their daily drivers, so what’s really cool is that the Oppo community pitches in some dough to buy some terrible cars.

These will often be the absolute cheapest cars found online that are described as still running and driving. What’s amazing is that through some serious hunting, Oppos have found running and driving cars for well under $1,000. Sure, many of them aren’t safe for road use anymore, but they work just fine to be rallied to death.

Others are cars were sold to the Oppo RallyX host for scrap. These cars already have three tires in the junkyard, and at the end of Oppo RallyX they meet their fates.

This year’s setlist was amazing. Among the so-called community cars was a Jeep Liberty, a Ford Expedition, two Chevy Impalas, a Chevy Malibu, a Pontiac Vibe, a Ford Escape, a Chevy Tracker, a GMC Sonoma, and a GMC Jimmy. Make no mistake here, almost all of these cars were total piles, cars that had no business being on the road anymore.

We also got some surprises. Oppo and Autopian reader Dottie donated their Saturn Astra to the community car fleet. While the Astra looked great on the outside, Dottie noted that the car had succumbed to a hard life of Detroit winters, and it was time for it to be retired. Another Oppo donated a remarkably clean Kia Rio. This car was shockingly nice with a perfect interior and not really even a speck of rust. However, the donating Oppo said that the car wasn’t allowed to come with him.

We all felt weird about the Kia being so nice, so we had to hurt it somehow. This was achieved when we discovered the vehicle’s battery didn’t have a tie-down and didn’t have a place to secure a ratchet strap. So, we made one by taking an angle grinder to the bumper. Ah, that’s better.

Oppo RallyX officially started at 10:30 a.m. that Saturday, so we had a lot of time on Friday evening and Saturday morning to prep. Really, that largely meant defacing the community cars. Some of the guys got started by cutting out the trunk latch on the Malibu.

Update: Taylor gave us the scoop on the Malibu’s story:

The Malibu you saw at this event was a tribute to the community Malibu that debuted at the first OppoX (which did have a trunk that wouldn’t close, as well as no bumpers, a missing headlight, and dents on every panel).

But the first Malibu we brought put on such a performance that me and a buddy bought one that showed up right next to my house. This is the Malibu you know, and has been toured to Cincinnati and Rochester for other Oppo events.

So Oppo has killed two 5th gen Chevy Malibus. One last year, and then this one this year. I don’t think we’re bringing another one next year, we’re kind of sick of them

Someone handed me a can of spray paint and I ran straight for my favorite car in the field, the Ford Expedition. I don’t know what it was, but the idea of hooning a whale of an SUV on a track seemed delightful to me, so I started by tagging that. I also can’t explain why I decided to go with a weeb theme, but I committed to it.

I also started running around and rebadging the cars. The Expedition became an Aston Martin while the Malibu with the floppy trunk became a BMW. I then branded the Jeep Liberty as the “Sus Jeep” because it smelled of some of the strongest weed I’ve ever gotten a whiff of.

Foot To The Firewall

On Saturday morning, Shop-Teacher got us all together and laid down some ground rules. In the driver’s meeting, he stressed that we should all be safe out there. No insanely reckless driving, no intentional crashing, and really, just use some common sense. Are you driving so unsafely that someone can get hurt? Well, maybe you shouldn’t be doing that. Likewise, Shop-Teacher was quite firm on one big thing. The second you popped open a can of booze, you became a passenger, which was more than fair.

With the driver meeting over and the track finished, the cannon fired, opening up Oppo RallyX 2025. Some people slowly walked over to their cars. I sprinted for the Ford Expedition, or the Weebxpedition, as I called it.

The Weebxpedition was a total pile. The rockers were gone, the running boards were connected via Bluetooth, and the vehicle’s electrical system was shoddy at best. The only functional window was the driver window and the regulator broke the second I tried it. The stereo was dead, the wipers didn’t work, the airbags were shot, the entire underbody was crusty rust … but the SUV did have a working four-wheel-drive selector, brakes, and heat.

That heat was important, too, as Saturday largely hung around 50 degrees with some light rain. It was one of those kinds of days where you got cold pretty quickly if you didn’t prepare the best. And guess who brought a sweater dress and a couple of hoodies but no pants?

Anyway, the track was dry enough on Saturday that I left the Weebxpedition in 2HI, and that was a great choice. I spent my first couple of laps getting that lengthy beast very sideways on every turn. It felt like I was drifting a bus and honestly, I was crying laughing. Equally entertaining was the tabletop jump baked into the track. Nobody really knew just how the hooptie fleet would react to hitting the jump at speed, but I didn’t care. I hit the tabletop at 40 mph, 50 mph, and then even faster. I wanted the most air physically possible.

Here’s a photo of me hitting it at roughly 40 mph. Sadly, our lovely photographer, AkioOhtori, didn’t catch my biggest jumps.

Once I got my fill of a couple of laps in the Expedition, I turned my attention to the perfect Kia Rio. I’m not sure why, but I became obsessed with getting it all covered in dirt.

To my surprise, this crappy economy car was shockingly good on the track. All you had to do was drop the automatic transmission into the two position (giving you just two gears) and punch the throttle to the floor. The crappy car made just enough power to keep it within optimal speeds for turns on the track. All I had to do was just flick the steering wheel, keep the throttle jammed, and that little red car wound around the corners with grace.

Yet, the car was also quick enough and light enough that it routinely got mega air on the tabletop with impressively soft landings. I then kept my foot in the throttle, leaving the tabletop with momentum, sweeping into the back straight and hitting perhaps 45 mph before an S-curve. The Kia was terrifically good at building speed and then keeping it there for the entire lap. Other drivers found the Kia to be a ton of fun, too, and it quickly became a crowd favorite.

Another beloved car was a Pontiac Vibe, a car we scored for just $350. Like the Kia, this car actually wasn’t a pile of crap. When we received this car it was in good enough condition that it could have been someone’s daily. Sure, the weatherstripping was failing and the car had over 200,000 miles, but it was quiet, smooth, and comfortable.

The Vibe also proved itself to be as good, if not slightly better than the Kia on the track. The Vibe had more or less the same quality, where you could keep your foot in it, and the car flicked around turns with aplomb. However, the Vibe’s transmission was far more responsive than the one in the Kia, allowing the Vibe to hit perhaps 50 mph on the back straight with me behind the wheel and overall faster speeds than the Kia in the turns.

The Sus Jeep Liberty earned its new name the second the engine fired up. A huge plume of sickly sweet smoke emanated from the engine bay and jetted out of the exhaust pipe. Oh yeah, this thing definitely had a blown head. The engine also wasn’t incredibly happy, as it only sometimes ran on six cylinders at first.

Yet, the Jeep had more than enough power to lay down some quick laps. The Sus Jeep was bewildering to me because while I found it easy to keep control of the Weebxpedition, the Sus Jeep was somewhat hard to keep on track. It was quite squirrely and was somewhat difficult to maintain a decent cadence in. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that the steering wheel adjustment bar kept loosening by itself, leading to a wheel that bounced all over the place. Oh, and the driver seat reclined by itself when I landed from the jump.

Yet, even this chaos had me laughing. I completed laps with the steering wheel infinitely bouncing up and down in my hands and with the driver seat set to a “gangster lean.” Was I fast in the Jeep? Absolutely not. But I had the time of my life. Later, an Oppo took a can of orange paint to the Liberty and renamed it the Sus Jeep Liberty Biberty after a Liberty Mutual commercial.

A Surprisingly Good Saturn

The real champion of the weekend arrived when Dottie gave his Saturn Astra to the group. The car, which he renamed to “Asstra” for all of its rust and faults, was unfathomably good on the track. The Astra was one of the only cars that weekend with a manual transmission, which did make it a ton more fun, but it wasn’t just that.

Dottie had a really great set of tires on this car, and though the car is a slug at highway speeds, the first- and second-gear ratios were near incompressibly good for this Opplication. I found myself shifting into second and then keeping it there for entire laps. When I did so, the car was pretty much always at the peak of its power band, keeping all 138 HP on tap.

Seriously, this car had less power than many others, but it was a complete beast. In my experience, the Astra was able to reach and maintain the highest track speeds through every corner and every straight. It also jumped remarkably well. On the back straight, I sometimes hit above 60 mph, or redline in second gear, or the highest speed of any vehicle on the track.

I also found the Saturn the easiest to control and the best at sliding. Getting the car to do dramatic drifts was super easy, barely an inconvenience. The Saturn would also become one of the champions of reliability, too.

The first car to die that weekend was a GMC Jimmy. It completed just two laps of the track before blowing a transmission line and setting its engine bay on fire. We extinguished the fire and just left it for dead.

I quickly became known for being perhaps the fastest driver of the weekend. If you got into a car with me, you knew you were in for a ride, regardless of whether it was the Weebxpedition or the Asstra. I’m not sure what got into me, but I became obsessed with going faster and faster at any cost. Nobody at the event was timing laps, so it wasn’t like I was trying to get to the top of a leaderboard. No, I just loved seeing just how fast I could get these crapboxes and just how high I could get them to jump.

You always knew it was me when I got into a car because I always started a lap by banging off the rev limiter and hauling away from the starting line with my foot buried in the firewall. Shop-Teacher said it might have been my unique mix of crazy and a lack of self-preservation instinct. Hey now, I did wear a helmet!

The Cars Start Falling Apart

As the day went on, drivers got faster and ruts were dug into the track, making for a dangerous cocktail for tires. During the roughest parts of Saturday, the two Chevy Impalas popped the tires off their wheels almost every five minutes.

I did get to drive these two, but never actually got to do a full-send lap in either vehicle. One downside with trying to send a big front-wheel-drive land yacht is that you’ll eventually pop a tire off its bead. In my experience, the two Impalas were actually almost as fast as the Asstra thanks to their mighty and healthy V6 engines, but because they had a knack for killing tires, you had to slow down in certain sections of the track just to keep the rubber on.

Still, that didn’t stop me from smashing tires in both Impalas. I’ll illustrate just how fast I was going when the tires came off the cars I was driving. Here’s the front tire from the Dave’s Discount Surgery car, which ripped off the wheel so hard it turned inside out:

It wasn’t just the Impalas, either. The Kia began losing tires on both front wheels, as did the Vibe, Jeep, and Malibu. Amusingly, the tires on the Weebxpedition didn’t blow, but did get a catastrophic leak, so it was taken out. At one point in the day, nearly every single car was down with some sort of problem – but not the GMC Sonoma and the Saturn Asstra. Sure, the Asstra lost its bumpers, but it never, ever gave up on us.

The Sonoma’s body wanted to quit, but the powertrain never received the memo. That truck was freaking scary, and that’s coming from a daredevil like me. The brakes basically didn’t work, and the truck was so rotted out that the door actually became a structural component. I’m not joking, if you accidentally opened the driver door like I did, the cab folded on itself just a little, preventing the door from closing.

Yet, the Sonoma was actually a highlight for other drivers. Some of that appeared to be because of the other folks not driving as crazy fast as I tried to. You don’t have to worry about bad brakes as much if you’re not trying to break the sound barrier in a rustbucket truck, after all.

Eventually, the vehicles began to show why they were all headed to the scrapyard. The Kia let out tons of heavy, oily smoke. The smoke clouds produced by the Kia were so thick that they stuck around in the air for a full ten minutes after they came out of the exhaust. The Kia would later stop smoking, and we never really figured out why.

Conditions also worsened in the Liberty Biberty, where the V6 became a V5 and then a V4. The cat under the Jeep also didn’t look particularly happy.

Two other cars in the Oppo group included a lifted Mercury Grand Marquis and a Cadillac CTS on a truck chassis. These vehicles weren’t community vehicles, and they regularly put down some of the most spectacular-looking laps.

Both usually got huge airtime, and sometimes the guys driving in them liked to chase each other like they were playing ‘Cops and Robbers.’

Yet, even these cars had issues. The catalytic converter in the GrandMa began burning the firewall insulation, while the Caddy even lost a tire once. Other cars had it worse, where the Malibu began overheating, and the Biberty also began overheating on top of losing cylinders.

There was also a Chevy Tracker as a community car, and it also had a rough time. First, the front right suspension collapsed, then it eventually blew a driveshaft. The little SUV died before I could drive it.

Later, the Malibu was taken out when one of its hubs failed. I was told this wasn’t the first time this happened, but nobody was in a rush to repair it again, so this time it was left to die for real.

Sadly, Taylor’s Volvo, which also wasn’t a community car, ended its race weekend with what sounded like a bottom-end knock.

So Much Fun

Despite all of these failures, we were all having a spectacular time. One Oppo, Derp, cooked some of the best breakfast I’ve had in a long while, and our hosts even cooked us burgers from their own cows, and that tasted amazing, too.

Also amazing was this local kid in the Ford Escape above. He wasn’t even 10 years old, and he drove that Escape harder and with better skill than most of us adults at the event. He had that Escape sideways, getting tons of airtime, and even passing slow adults. I don’t know where that kid is going in life, but I hope it’s somewhere good.

Aside from popped tires, a common problem that we ran into on Saturday was running out of gas.

As it turns out, running a car for a whole day runs it out of gas! Toward the end of the day, every single vehicle was on empty, and often, we ran into issues of running out of gas partly through a lap. It sort of became a running joke. Either you de-beaded a tire or ran out of gas.

Once the clock struck 6 p.m., we shut the track down for the day and went to dinner at a Ruby Tuesday. It was during dinner that I really got to realize why I loved Oppo RallyX so much. Sure, drifting a Ford Expedition is awesome, but it was really about the camaraderie of being with a diverse cast of car nuts from all over the country.

Seriously, we had someone fly in from as far as California and drive in from Oklahoma. I would have done the same because it was just that fun and just that welcoming. Cars were merely the vehicle to bring people of different walks of life together.

Sunday was a weird one. The track was okay at first, and we got gas to feed the machines, but then the rain started coming down somewhat heavily. Within a short amount of time, the track became soupy and extremely rough on the cars. Even the Saturn, which survived all of Saturday without losing a tire, finally popped a tire when I tried drifting it through a sharp left-hander at a way too fast speed and got caught up in a muddy rut.

Eventually, track conditions became so bad that the only vehicles capable of traversing the track with any sort of alacrity were the 4x4s, which were out of gas, and the lifted sedans.

This wasn’t ideal because we planned on sending the scrap cars out with a bang on Sunday. We even had a huge jump set up that was almost guaranteed to kill half of the scrap cars. Instead, the conditions were too bad. We sent the Biberty off that jump, but by that time, it was running on maybe only three cylinders and wasn’t making enough power to exceed first gear.

Someone got bored and just started smashing the scrap cars into each other until each one ran out of gas. I had a knack for ramming the Weebxpedition into the pile, which resulted in the Sonoma inverting the Tracker. To be clear here, every car that we crashed and killed was already slated to go to the crusher. These vehicles were not safe for road use.

That was pretty much how the weekend ended. The surviving cars of the weekend were the best performers. The Saturn, Vibe, and Kia will be making a return for next year’s event, where they’ll run the gauntlet all over again. All of this was made even better by the fine folks of Opposite-Lock. So, if you’re looking for another car community of really awesome people, maybe pay us a visit.

I spent that weekend cold, wet, and a few hundred miles from home, and I’ll happily do it all over again next year. I haven’t had this much fun racing crappy cars in my entire life. Yet, all of these total piles proved to me on that weekend that the best rally cars might be the worst ones you find online.