We love it when the little car goes “nyoaaaawww”, don’t we, folks? If you take a piece of Soviet history and jam a modern-ish capitalist German engine between the fenders, do you get a car of, by, and for the people? By gosh, I think you might. Built in Hungary to run the Croatian Hillclimb Championship, Tamás Tomcsany’s Lada VAZ 2101 has been ripping around for years with a Hayabusa engine under the hood, but recently he tore the motorcycle heart out and installed a 370 horsepower BMW 1.9 liter turbocharged M44 engine.
This Lada goes way harder than a Lada rightfully should. It sounds incredible, and looks totally bonkers. The new engine came with a few dozen extra pounds of weight, but the stripped down car still tips the scales at just a smidge under 2,000 pounds. That’s the kind of power-to-weight ratio you need when you’re running fast in modern hillclimbs.
The Bimmer M44 engine in this car was built for a short time between 1996 and 2000, it’s basically an updated version of the DOHC four-cylinder engine that had been in E30s and E36s since 1989. In the U.S. it was available in the base Z3 1.9, or the E36 318 models, and it made a tepid 138 horsepower. Considering the 2101 would have used a 1.2-liter Fiat-based engine making 59 horses, that’s a pretty dramatic improvement over stock.
The M44 powering this Lada has clearly been built to the hilt to handle turbocharging, nearly tripling the output. Now that’s some impressive engineering! Tack on the motorsport aero and you’ve got yourself the kind of car that belongs on a Croatian mountainside ripping as fast as it possibly can.
This car may be driven by Tomcsany, but it is our car, comrade.