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GREENSBORO- Buddy Matthews is used to being the butt of jokes for his fondness for Yugos, and even makes a few cracks himself about the Eastern European import.

"These cars had A/C," he says. "Which was good for cooling your ankles."

But the funny looks he received from race car drivers when he pulled up to the starting line at the track in his humble automobile were priceless.

And even better were the trophies he walked away with at the end of a few of those races.

"Guys that I had been racing with for years would look at it and say, 'Why?' A lot of people laughed at me, friends questioned my sanity," said Matthews, who used to race the cars in the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA). "But the 1,100 cc engine moved the car pretty decently and keeping it legal, I could move it up from 42 horsepower to 61 horsepower. If you were really lucky you could get it up to 120 (mph) ... That was a white-knuckle drive, though."

Today, much of his Yugo stock sits nestled among weeds and overgrown grass at an auto yard on the edge of town, their windows busted up, door hinges rusted, tires deflated. A white Yugo with a red racing stripe in his driveway in Greensboro now looks like it's used more for storage than anything else.

Though the car, which hasn't been sold in North America since 1991, isn't likely to make a comeback, it did feature prominently in the film "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," in which the main character, an indie rocker played by Michael Cera, drives around New York in a yellow Yugo trying to find his favorite band. His love interest eventually ends up wrecking it.

The car, a regular occupant on lists of worst automobiles ever made, still maintains a few fans. But defenders concede the car had many faults. And even Matthews said the main attraction for him was its price tag.

"In the '80s, you could get one new for $3,900," he said. "But when you buy the cheapest car out there, it's probably going to give you the cheapest service. They weren't overly delicate, but they would break."

Still, dollar for dollar, he said, driving the Yugos was the most fun he ever had racing. He never paid more than $200 for one and could get parts cars for as low as $40.

Known in its native country as the Zastava, the Yugo GV (the most well-known model) was based on designs from Italian auto manufacturer Fiat. A subcompact, it came with either an 1,100 cc or 1,300 cc motor, manual transmission, two doors and hatchback. According to an old joke, the car had heated rear windows to keep their owners' hands warm while they were pushing. In reality, however, it was probably a good idea to wear gloves should your Yugo break down.

In 1984, businessman Malcolm Bricklin ventured to Yugoslavia to explore the country's economic possibilities. In the 1960s, he helped introduce Subaru to the North American market, and in the 1970s, had even briefly produced his own car, the gull-winged Bricklin SV-1.

While in Yugoslavia, he came to believe the Zastava had potential for North America. He entered into negotiations to import the car, and was joined in his efforts by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and diplomat Larry Eagleburger (who became secretary of state under the first Bush administration).

"I thought that a car which sold for under $4,000 with a good warranty would be better than a used car," Bricklin said in a telephone interview. "And initially the car was so popular that dealers were getting $3,000 over list price for them. We were given an allotment of 50,000 cars a year, and we actually delivered 163,000 in the first three years."

But from the beginning, there were difficulties, Bricklin recalled.

"The problem with Yugoslavia was that they did not have a good quality environment, they had no discipline" he said. "We had to introduce things like putting on goggles when you welded so you didn't burn your eyes out. We had to tell them not to smoke on the line, become you might get holes (in the upholstery). We had to clean the rust off the train cars that carried them to the port so they didn't rust up the cars. And we had to pave the port and bring in unleaded gas, because there was no unleaded gas in Yugoslavia at the time, and if you used leaded gas it would ruin the emissions."

Before long, many other technical problems surfaced.
"Keep in mind, it was designed in a Soviet Bloc country where manufacturing standards were far lower than prevailed in Western countries," said Eric Peters, author of "Automotive Atrocities: The Cars We Love to Hate," in an e-mail interview. "It suffered from, among other things, premature rust, electrical problems, controls that broke easily or malfunctioned frequently."

With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, Yugoslavia descended into civil war. The United Nations placed sanctions on the country, the Zastava plant was bombed, and the Yugo disappeared from dealerships.
Matthews said he believes the car was never really a good fit for American drivers anyway.

"People here in the U.S. don't want to do anything but put gas in the car and buzz on down the road," he said. "And the way those little motors were built, they did require some looking-after to keep them going. Most people would run it until it developed some little problem and then abandon it."

The 65-year-old Matthews, who works for a coin-operated game operator, raced on and off for about 35 years and in his heyday drove a number of small cars in the SCCA. In 1995, he went to a city auction of abandoned vehicles and found his first Yugo, which he bought for $80 (he painted the No. 80 on the side to commemorate the purchase price.) His son Jason raced it. The car's division included such models as Le Car, the Renault Encore and the Toyota Starlet.

"It had a strong little engine," said Jason, an Air Force military policeman, in a telephone interview.

"I didn't have to shift gears until it got to 8,000 rpm. We redid the suspension a little bit, tweaked a few things, made it a little bit better. But it handled very well. It cornered very, very well. And thankfully, my dad can build a roll cage really strong, because I crashed the first car in South Carolina."

The first time they won in a race in a Yugo, however, race organizers misspelled the name, H-U-G-O, in the results.
"I said, wait, this is the first win by a Yugo in an SCCA race and I want it spelled right," Buddy said.

After a series of medical problems, including a stroke, Matthews retired from driving in 2000 (though he's still involved in the SCCA), and his six Yugos have been rusting away ever since. The 1986 Yugo in his driveway is the only one that looks like it might be able to start. It's now filled with junk.

Earlier this year when gas prices were skyrocketing, he thought about fixing it up so his wife could drive it to work in Martinsville, Va., but quickly gave up on the idea.

"The gas mileage really isn't that profound (about 30 miles to the gallon)," he said. "The motor, because of the way it was geared, had to work pretty hard to get you up the road. I don't know anyone who's still driving one ... and I don't know why anyone, other than someone trying to be cutesy, would even drive a Yugo anymore."

Bricklin, who said his son still has a Yugo, briefly toyed with the idea of resurrecting the car in North America and even traveled to the former Yugoslavia in 2002 to meet with Zastava officials, but he felt uneasy with the political situation and ultimately nothing came of his plans. Today his firm, Visionary Vehicles, is working to develop an electric plug-in hybrid similar to the Chevrolet Volt.

Though the Yugo had many shortcomings, Bricklin admits, it was far from the only subcompact in the 1980s to have quality control issues. And much of the bad publicity, he insists, was from the major auto manufacturers who sought to undermine the car.

"People were going into dealerships and asking if they had anything for $3,990, and of course nobody had anything (other than a Yugo) for that price," he said. "And so people were using it to negotiate for whatever car they wanted. So the car companies, they attacked it as a piece of junk from an Eastern European country, a Communist country, to try to get rid of the problem of the dealers saying, 'Hey, when are you going to give us a cheap car to compete with the Yugo?' And all the jokes, they were a good way to go after the product."

Contact Robert C. Lopez at 691-5091 or robert.lopez@news-record.com