Suzuki Sidekick Dune Buggy Conversion Makes Surprisingly Good Daily Driver

One broken buggy body, one Suzuki Sidekick, modify to taste and BAM! The perfect car
 Murilee Martin 
The race organizers at Gingerman had the use of this fine machine for a weekend. 

When I headed to Gingerman Raceway in Michigan to help put on the Cure For Gingervitis 24 Hours of LeMons race a few weeks ago, I had a very quick Nissan to drive that weekend. However, when a LeMons racer offered me the use of his bright yellow daily driver — whatever the hell it was as our Judgemobile— I lost much of my interest in the Juke. It turns out that a handcrafted target="_blank">Suzuki Sidekick-based dune buggy makes one of the world's perfect motor vehicles.

 Murilee Martin
Sure, the Juke does a better job at keeping the elements out, and it has about four times the horsepower.

In one of those weird coincidences that always seem to follow around vehicles like this one, the Sidekick Dune Buggy was featured in Jalopnik's Nice Price Or Crack Pipe a few years back. I created the NCOCP series back when I wrote for Jalopnik, and so it's fitting that my successor was the first to publicize this fine machine.

 Murilee Martin
The current owner of the Sidekick Dune Buggy builds stuff like this in his spare time.

After knocking around for a while in the Midwest and popping up on various Craigslist ads, the Sidekick Dune Buggy ended up in the hands ofthe builder of a Toyota MR2 race car with a 1940-vintage radial aircraft engine swap, who has since gone on to a a helicopter turbine-powered race car project as well as a Mercedes-Benz 6.9-powered Toyota Land Cruiser race car project. A guy like that shouldn't be expected to drive an ordinary car on the street, right?

 Murilee Martin
It's strangely comfortable, with four brightly-colored "TUNER FX" faux-racing seats.

The builder of this project had an old fiberglass dune-buggy body that had broken in the middle, rendering it useless for installation on a flex-happy Volkswagen chassis pan. He also had a battered Sidekick handy, and that led to what must have been many hundreds of hours of painstaking fabrication.

The original Sidekick (also known as the Escudo, Vitara, Tracker, Sunrunner, Proceed Levante, and probably a bunch of names of Long March heroes slapped on pirated Chinese copies) was pitched as being cute and fun, but it was a stuffy, stodgy prison next to its dune-buggy descendent.

 Murilee Martin
The seats and interior hold up to the elements quite well.

It's parked outdoors in Indiana, fully exposed to the elements, but the seats remain in good shape and all the Sidekick electrical stuff works fine (except for the aftermarket cassette deck, which crapped out quickly).

 Murilee Martin
Snow, rain, sun... all seem to bounce right off the Sidekick Dune Buggy's cheerful interior.

Those "Tuner FX" seats and big fat rollbars make it easy for passengers to climb in and out of the Sidekick Dune Buggy. It's fairly competent off-road, it does fine on the highway, and it impresses the inhabitants of your typical 24 Hours of LeMons paddock.