This Ford Minivan Was So Rusty It Collapsed Under Its Own Weight, So Of Course I Launched It Off Jumps It Until It Died

The Rust Belt is unkind to our beloved automobiles. Rust never sleeps, and unless you have unlimited money, rust always wins. Countless cars are unceremoniously sold for scrap and are sent to the crusher every year. However, for a select few rustbuckets in Michigan, they get to live a very brief second life as a racecar before going to the junkyard in the sky. This 2006 Ford Freestar was one of those cars. It was so rusty that it was collapsing on itself. But for two days, that didn’t matter, because I drove the van so hard in a field in Michigan that it nuked itself.

On March 28, the third-annual Oppo Rallycross kicked off in rural Michigan with the firing of some pyrotechnics. This event was organized and hosted by the denizens of the best car forum on the Internet, Opposite-Lock.

Oppocross is a relatively new invention organized by Oppo and Autopian reader Shop-Teacher, hosted by Oppo 454SS, and made possible because of the whole community and a secret scrapper. The whole setup is pretty clever. We have access to a gigantic slice of privately-owned farmland. This land is apparently terrible for farming or much else. However, as Oppo found out, it’s a weirdly great place to race cars. With some work involving tractors and skid-steers, the old farm has been turned into a glorious dirt track.

This track has a little of everything from sweeping turns and washboards to technical sections and even a big air jump. The back straight of this track is long enough that some cars break past 60 mph on it, which makes you feel like you’re going warp speed from behind the wheel.

Then there’s the camaraderie. Oppocross isn’t just an unsanctioned motorsports event, but it’s a place to meet old friends that you haven’t seen in a while and to make new ones. I’ve now attended this event two years in a row, and I’ve now had the honor of meeting so many cool people I knew only online before. I also got to see some old faces again, which is always great.

This time, I’m going to write two stories about Oppocross. I absolutely sent the Autopian’s Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet to this event, and it was a total blast. Also, I may have directly or indirectly contributed to the demise of five other cars that weekend. But for this first story, I want to focus on one car that has lived rent-free (but not rust-free!) in my head since I first drove it. This is a minivan that might be the rustiest car I have ever seen that was still capable of forward motion. It’s the rustiest car I’ve ever seen that I’m told was, incredibly, only recently a daily driver.

How We Ended Up With Some Real Buckets

Something I have always loved about Oppocross is the “community cars” concept. Rallycross is hard on a car, and, understandably, there isn’t going to be a long line of people who want to send it in their daily drivers. I mean, you can if you want to, and some people do run some laps in cars they count on for transportation – but you don’t have to.

Every year, Oppos toss some money at buying some real clunkers. We have a contact who is a scrapper, and we buy cars from him that are already on their way to the junkyard. But instead of immediately meeting the crusher, these cars get to go out in a blaze of glory in motorsport. These cars usually aren’t safe enough to be on the road anymore due to catastrophic rust issues. If corrosion isn’t the reason why these cars ended up scrapped, it’s some fatal mechanical issue.

That’s to say that most of the community cars aren’t good cars. They were half-parked in the junkyard when we bought them. Now, instead of being crushed and forgotten, these cars get to bring joy one last time while also probably doing something they’ve never done before. They get to leave this mortal plane of existence with four tires in the air and a tachometer pegged at redline.

Four community cars were exceptions, and weren’t total piles of trash when they went into the event. One Oppo and Autopian reader, Dottie, donated their Saturn Astra to the Oppocross cause last year and it’s still kicking. We also picked up a first-generation Pontiac Vibe, and another Oppo donated a second-generation Kia Rio, both also making return appearances after making their OppoX debuts last year. A lifetime in Detroit had taken a toll on the Astra, and the Vibe was a high-mileage warrior, but the Kia was pretty much perfect. It didn’t even have any visible rust, and its interior looked like it was recently detailed. But the Oppo said that the Kia absolutely could not come with him under any circumstances.

The new addition is a ninth-generation Chevy Impala that’s mechanically great, just rusty. The prior three cars were the MVPs of last year’s OppoX and this year’s OppoX, surviving two weekends of nonstop abuse without failing in any major way. The Impala cruised through this year’s event, getting no more than a destroyed wheel, and that was because of a large boulder the size of a small boulder that was hidden under grass on the track.

This Van Was Impressively Rusty

The 2006 Ford Freestar, which was a new addition to the community fleet this year, was none of the above. The story that I got about the van was that it was someone’s daily driver until only a few months ago or so, even though the license plate expired more than two years ago. This van wasn’t a reliable car that just had high miles and was a little rusty. No, this van was so rusty that it looked like it had spent some considerable time parked onboard the Titanic.

Actually, describing this van as “rusty as the Titanic” is an understatement of how truly bad this van was. At least the Titanic still has robust chunks of metal left. The longer I inspected this van, the more I figured out that critical structural metal just didn’t exist anymore. Take a look at the rocker on the driver’s side:

At first, we thought most of the rust damage here was contained to the driver’s seat area. This wasn’t rust. The structure simply wasn’t there anymore. What structure that was left was getting ready to return to the Earth. The rust damage was so bad that the wiring harness going under the carpet was taut. It was supporting weight somewhere. Yes, it was basically a structural wiring harness!

The lack of structure continued to about where the driver’s seat was. Thankfully, the seat was still anchored down well because the metal there, as well as around the unibody rail up front, was still in mostly one piece.

Sadly, I have no before photos of this van to show you how the van got to this state. However, there were clues that I was able to speculate from. There were just pounds upon pounds of spray foam attached to what few pieces of the rocker remained. While I’m sure the spray foam provided a temporary aesthetic solution to the van’s rust woes, I can only imagine that it also trapped water and road salt, accelerating the rocker’s demise.

The rust up front was impressive, sure, but it was in the back that was truly shocking. At some point in this van’s past, the unibody rails behind the rear sliding doors rusted out and failed. But it didn’t stop there. The wheel wells rotted out, and the van’s floor itself simply disintegrated along its edges from the rust.

The result was that you could point a camera into a rear wheel well and see the van’s headliner, sky, or someone looking back at you. You could then move the camera to the floor just behind the doors and take a selfie inside the van through the rust. Honestly, I just haven’t ever seen so much corrosion on a vehicle that still ran.

What was particularly terrifying about this was that, due to the catastrophic rust, the rear of the van’s body was only barely still connected to the floor. The roof was doing a lot of the heavy lifting, as were the sliding doors and the ever-so-slightly less rusty front end.

As a result, the rear of the van was sunken down, sort of like what you’d get with a blown suspension or overloading. But, in a discovery that petrified most Oppos, the suspension was intact. The van’s body wasn’t sinking into the wheel wells because of a suspension failure, but because the van’s floor was bending upward while the body was falling down around it. To put it another way, the van was basically imploding on itself.

There was so much stress on what good metal that remained that the sliding doors could no longer open, and the roof was bowing. Yes, the doors were basically keeping the whole thing from going taco-shaped. Once again, I must stress that this van was a daily driver until only recently. We found that the van’s control arms, brake lines, and muffler were relatively new, as if someone had replaced them perhaps only a year or so ago.

Rust Was The Freestar’s Achilles Heel

Apparently, the Freestar had been recalled because of excessive rust before. Reportedly, the defect was so bad that the van’s third row seat or rear axle could suddenly detach due to rust. But I don’t think this van rusted out entirely because of Ford quality, or lack thereof. The rear axle was still attached! The rust belt is really just this bad on unsuspecting cars.

As the locals told me, this van is a sad, highly visible example of what people go through in rural Michigan. They don’t have the money to buy a safer car, so they fix their rusty pile of junk the best they can and quite literally drive them until the wheels fall off. There are no safety inspections, either. Likewise, cops aren’t going to stop you for driving something like this so long as you have mirrors, a windshield, and lights.

Yes, this means that the driver of this van probably drove it in the rain and snow like this. The staining of the interior would suggest that lots of water has gotten through the countless rust holes as the van drove through wet conditions. I cannot imagine how miserable this must have been, but you have to do what you have to do.

Honestly, I felt bad for this van and its previous owner. It was only 20 years old, and it had lived an astonishingly hard life. I imagined that, back in 2006, someone was really happy to bring this van home. They might have carried their kids in it, gone on dates with their spouse in it, or maybe even brought a baby home in it. I bet this minivan has so many stories to tell.

Over time, the van got one small rust spot, then two, and then a few. Those spots grew and festered. Eventually, one of those spots ate all the way through the metal. The van was no longer nice. Over the years, the van went from being someone’s pride to just being transportation.

I shouldn’t have felt so bad for this van. I was an inanimate pile of metal, plastic, glass, rubber, cloth, and rust. But, in a way, I felt like it was an underdog. Here it was, literally collapsing on itself, and it was mechanically fine. The van still wanted to live, even if its body couldn’t hold itself up anymore.

Pure Chaos

So, I took it upon myself to send the van out like the hero it was. There were faster, safer cars to drive at Oppocross, but I felt one with this van. It would become one of my favorite vehicles of the weekend.

Bringing the Freestar – which we nicknamed the ‘Van’t’ – to life required the handy jump pack that I brought along for the ride. Then, the V6 under the hood roared to life with the kind of sound that screams, “I haven’t had a proper exhaust system in years.” The Ford Freestar, which served as the third generation of the Windstar, shipped with your choice of the 3.9-liter V6 from the Ford Mustang with 193 HP on tap or a spicier 4.2-liter V6 with 201 thoroughbred horses. I’ll be completely honest when I say that I never paid attention to the engine under the hood. Besides, I’m fairly sure that roughly half of the horses had left the stable anyway.

This engine had an occasional skip from a misfire and generally felt like a great amount of its remaining power was spent just idling. This was perfect, as was the 4F50N four-speed automatic under the hood.

I put on my seatbelt, made sure there wasn’t any obvious rust that was going to test out the recent tetanus shot that I got, slammed the transmission into first gear, and then dropped the hammer.

I was surprised that the engine didn’t wheeze into action, but actually woke up and quickly raced up its tachometer. I rounded the first bend of the track with just enough of a flick of the wheel to get the tail to swing a little. I then giggled and attempted to bury the pedal through what was left of the floor. Maybe that was a foolish decision, considering that Swiss cheese had more structural integrity than the van had.

The van bounced and drifted through the sand, with basically everything behind the sliding doors plowing through terra firma like a dog dragging its butt. When I say I never lifted, I mean it. The engine sometimes bounced off the rev limiter and the rear of the van, which, weirdly, was full of Kirby vacuum parts, kicked out on command, delivering delicious drifts.

But that wasn’t all. Since the van was about as well-sealed as a colander, the interior was full of dust and sand that whipped all over. The drama was intense, and all of it was happening at what, 40 mph or below? The only time I ever allowed an upshift was on the back straight, which was mostly another washboard that emptied into a soft dirt section.

It was here that I first stopped punishing the gas pedal and transitioned into the soft dirt with an epic drift. Then I rode the curve through until about the apex before welding the throttle again.

The greatest challenge of the course came immediately after this turn. This year’s Oppocross course was largely the same as last year’s, but run in reverse. A lesson that we learned early on was that last year’s jump was practically death-defying this year when run in reverse. Few vehicles landed the jump well, and the jump was such a major killer of the community car field and drivers’ backsides this year that many people simply bypassed it. I’m equal parts stupid and fearless, so I didn’t.

The van took flight readily and quickly. My view from the driver’s seat was similar to that of rotation in a Cessna 172. But unlike the Cessna, the van wasn’t going to continue gaining altitude. Instead, it landed largely flat, with the rear section of the van in total chaos, with rust jiggling all over the place and vacuum hoses ejecting into the dirt. This van was quite a litterbug throughout the weekend, thanks to its inability to really hold anything inside.

The Van Disintegrates Further

The body wasn’t the only part of the van that was unable to keep itself contained. As I neared the pits at the end of my first lap, I suddenly lost power steering. This added a new and fantastically dramatic way to drive the van.

Losing power steering in a vehicle that wasn’t meant to have manual steering is an adventure, especially if the front wheels are driven and doubly so if the loose nut behind the wheel has a death wish. I used all of my strength to wrestle the van through the big drift corner next to the pits with my foot firmly planted. I vaguely remember banging off redline, seeing a huge wave of dirt getting kicked up, and giggling as I entered the opening straight again.

I went even faster on the second lap despite the lack of power steering, but it required getting clever. The steering wheel rocked from side to side rather violently on the washboards. At first, I tried to hold the wheel, but there was a real risk of breaking my thumbs. So, my counter was to keep my foot welded to the gas pedal while taking my hands off the steering wheel. The wheel would do its violent dance, but the van would actually stay in the direction I originally pointed it in. When the drama was over, I grabbed the wheel and reined in my white missile of house-cleaning parts.

I also couldn’t remain pinned on the throttle full-time anymore as the steering wheel became too heavy for my strength to overcome. My new strategy involved lifting, turning the wheel in my desired direction, punching the gas, and letting torque steer help pull me through. This was an inexact science and led to even more hilarious drifts and a truly chaotic racing line. There were times when the van was all over the place and was only just barely keeping within the vaguely defined margins of the track.

It was on the back straight as I slammed the van into second gear when a new and exciting feature developed. Suddenly, the dust clouds kicked up from the van were joined by a sort of gray smoke emanating from the hood. Now, I was moving so fast that I never really looked at the gauges. I decided to finish my second lap by bypassing the jump, skidding through the final curves, and rolling into the pits in a cloud of James Bond-like smoke.

At first, I assumed I had blown a head gasket, which might have actually been true. But the immediately visible issue was the rupture of a rubber coolant line that was in a hard-to-reach place. From this point forward, we’d pretty much treat the van as if it were air-cooled. It would run two laps, come back into the pits smoking something fierce, and then we’d let it cool for an hour before sending it out again.

The more concerning – and hilarious – thing was that the van returned from each and every lap with its rear end a little lower than the last run. At first, we assumed that the rear suspension was failing. It was only later when we figured out that, with every impact, the body itself dropped down lower and lower under the floor. Then there was the fact that the floor itself was so compromised that it was folding up. Basically, if there were a third row in this van, I’m pretty sure it would have lost a full foot or two of headroom.

At first, the van collapsing on itself didn’t impact its operations very much. But with each lap and each jump, a little bit less of the van returned to the pits. Over time, it would lose its rear bumper cover, rear crash bar, and even its trailer hitch. I watched the rear of the van disappear in real time. It pretty much got to the point where the spare tire dragged the ground throughout a complete lap, and the rear tires rubbed on the body and wheel wells because there just wasn’t anywhere for them to fit. Yet, because everything was made out of rust, the tires created their own clearance, anyway.

Safety Third

By Sunday, it was becoming readily clear that the van’s life was nearing its end. Nobody was particularly interested in patching the cooling system together, so it ran without coolant for more or less a day and a half. The engine still ran, but being constantly heat-soaked was wearing it down.

When we decided to send the van to Valhalla, there wasn’t exactly a line of people willing to give it a go. Even the locals, a bunch who are much crazier than most people on Oppo, stopped driving the van. But I couldn’t resist the call.

We deposited a gallon of gas into the van’s tank, which somehow still held fuel, and I forced the engine back to life with my jump pack. We also kicked off what rust we could – for safety, of course!

Since this was the van’s end, I didn’t show it any mercy. I buried the throttle and left it there through the laps, using brute force to wrestle the whale of rust through the corners. I didn’t bypass the jump, either.

Amusingly, each jump ended with the engine cutting out. Apparently, the van had degraded to the point where, upon landing from the jump, the van detected a crash and cut fuel from the engine. We had to bypass the inertia switch to force the van to keep living.

Because I’m a madwoman, I took a breaker bar and pried one of the sliding doors open. I about lost what was left of my sanity here because that’s how I learned that the door was held on by two failing brackets and a wiring harness. There was no metal at all on the bottom. The van also instantly sagged a little more with the door dislodged. Perfect. Oh, but I wasn’t done yet.

On my final lap with the van, I got enough airtime to cause a triple-bounce on landing. Then, I drifted a corner and … that was it. I heard a pop, and the van quickly came to a stop from the drag of the spare tire scrubbing the ground. What happened? I broke the right constant velocity axle. The van’s inertia switch couldn’t stop me, but breaking an axle definitely did the job. By the end, the van’s structure was so compromised that the front doors were jammed shut.

That 2006 Ford Freestar got to die like a legend. Instead of going straight to the crusher, it got to bring immense joy doing amateurish motorsport. This van got to perform countless drifts, jumps, and stunts in its final days and hours. It brought so many laughs and so many smiles. This forgotten and abused Ford Freestar got to go out as a champion.

‘Van’t’ Lives Rent-Free In My Head

The rest of the field got battered quickly. But you’ll have to wait to read about those vehicles, as well as my time sending it in the CrossCab, in my second entry.

Honestly, the part of this that has stayed with me the longest is just how rusty that van was. I know about the ‘Detroit Diplomat‘ and the ‘Chicago Cutlass‘, but this van hit differently. Maybe it’s because when I saw images of the Chicago Cutlass’s underbody, it had far fewer holes than this van had. The Van’t was bad from the top down, and, apparently, the windows were broken before our scrapper friend even picked it up. This van was being driven on the road in an impossibly bad state. In a sad way, this van is also a symbol of struggle.

I never actively seek to kill cars. I am not a car sadist! But I will say that I was happy to send this van out like the hero it was. Rest easy, my rusty friend, you did well. If you’re interested in joining the madness, join Opposite-Lock today! Our next Oppocross is in October 2027, so you have a lot of time. Also, call your friends and family. Let them know that you care. Lend a hand if you can.

Top graphic images: Mercedes Streeter