Against All Oddities: A Guide to Yugo Hunting in the Carolinas

This may shock you: I have an obsession with Yugos. My condition was mentioned in this column quite a while ago, when I went Yugo hunting in the Balkans, but the itch persists. Why must I have thee, oh indomitable crapcan? Is it the crazy story of how you, a communist car, was marketed and sold in the capitalist United States? Is it because you are a perennial underdog? A Balkan folk hero? Do I require psychiatric evaluation? Unclear on that last bit. For now, I just want a Yugo.

Over the past few months, I’ve just been minding my own business, cruising Facebook Marketplace for Yugoslavian garbage with doors and an engine. Here and there I’d send a query in response to six-month-old ads for overpriced Yugos, usually getting nowhere with the sellers. I kinda just… gave up. One day, a Yugo would come to me.

Lo and behold, the universe delivered. About a week ago today, I was setting up my real-job workstation in the foundry. I’m a race engineer by trade, and my team was testing at Virginia International Raceway; but given my wife is on the verge of baby delivery, I was reviewing telemetry on my big screens from the comfort of my car-storage commune. At about 6:30 in the morning, one of our support crew riding as a passenger on the team’s drive to VIR reached out to me. He’s a close friend, and he mentioned that his new hire had something of potential interest: a 1989 Yugo GVX.

Hundreds of dollars would make it mine.

Reader, I did not hesitate. I told him to tell his guy that I’d take it. Pictures could come later.

Following the track test, I received those pictures. It was as faded, rusted, and incomplete as you’d expect any $300 Yugo to be. I could smell the mouse excrement all the way from Statesville.

That weekend, I paid the three Benjamins via Venmo and headed out to retrieve my price. Let me remind you, my wife, Dana, is extraordinarily pregnant at this stage. She’d normally come on these adventures of her own free will, but in this case, her joining me had some medical context. She had been showing some signs of our baby falling out at any moment, so we figured it was most wise to go together. In any case, the car was only a few minutes from the delivery hospital.

I rolled up to the pickup point and laid my eyes on the Zastava for the first time. I opened the door a crack to reveal a completely eroded door jamb and, as expected, an eye-watering aroma of mouse urine. Yes, this would be pure yard art—never a running car.

I came prepared, but there were a few items I left home in the interest of cargo capacity. After all, our overnight bags (in case of sudden birthing) took spatial priority. The tools, jack, and straps made it with us, but I couldn’t bring my entire standard kit. I hoisted the flat rear tires somewhat off the ground, by way of two broken furniture dollies. That rear would definitely have to be up for transit, leaving the cracked, incorrectly sized front tires on the ground.

Upon inspection, the remaining jack points were few and far between. I settled for the center of the transverse leaf, and with every whack of the jack handle on the plastic cladding, fistfuls of rust hit the concrete. With the car on the dolly, I locked the car’s steering column in position. It appeared that a Yugo—or at least this Yugo—has but one locking position per 360-degree crank of the steering wheel. So the wheels would be pointed where they may, which in this case was two very different directions. After getting a better look at the front structural members than I really wanted to, I managed to adjust the front right tie rod in by about an inch. At this point, the situation was as good as it was gonna be.

The square tires bounced down the road, which in turn oscillated my wife’s large belly. This brought on a small series of contractions. I briefly wondered if there where I might find trailer parking at Lake Norman Regional Medical. Alas, a pee break for Dana became immediately necessary. The pickup spot was not too far from the sparkling clean bathrooms of my workplace, so we rhythmically breathed our way there. After a brief detour to retrieve and eat my leftover pizza out of the breakroom fridge, we headed onward.

At least tried to, anyway. As we pulled away, the groaning carcass of a flat tire commanded my attention. I ran back inside and grabbed one of our trackside nitrogen tanks, blasting the sad front tire full of the most expensive air ever to enter a Yugo. With the tire hissing out its luxurious pressure, we booked it to Circle K, where I shot a can of Fix-a-Flat into the poor thing.

As the tire perked up, I intentionally ignored a small river of sealant dripping out of the split casing. We drove off. About one block later, my wife alerted me to an explosion behind us, which sent a hubcap and tire goo onto the sidewalk of downtown Mooresville, North Carolina. I regretted not packing anything in my kit could deal with flat tires.

Given the contractions, I was also glad that I had prioritized the birthing bags, in case the moment arrived. So here we were.

At this point, the only thing to do was abandon the car and trailer in situ. I chocked up the rig with a brick I found outside, and we headed back home to Statesville for tires. My buddy Conner, with whom I purchased the Simca, had just bought tires for that car in exchange for use of his ’89 Buick Century. My memory, still intact somehow, recalled that the Simca shared a 4x98mm pattern with the Yugo, thanks to very old Fiat-Simca relations. I asked my wife to kindly Google the hub bore diameters of the Yugo GV and Simca 1000, separately, which only sorta helped but gave me the confidence I needed to nab the wheels and tires and not bring a mounting spoon and lube.

Given the longer-than-planned circumstances of the day, I got Dana some gelato. While she was comfy in the truck slurping a cone, I dismounted the Simca’s wheels and hastily left the car on the jack.

And the internet was right! The magic number was 58.6mm, and the Bertone’s wheels popped right on. (You’re welcome, Mooresville, North Carolina, chamber of commerce.)

Finally, with all drama behind us, we made our way back to the foundry. I yanked the Yugo GVX off the trailer with Fuggles (the Dodge truck) and the newcomer settled in nicely in its chosen spot on the basketball court.

In that moment, the Yugo looked right at home. A dilapidated building, a basketball hoop with a frayed net, a pregnant lady, and a long-dead Yugo GVX. Everything I ever wanted.