Did some work for a friend and he lamented about how under engineered the cooling system on his A3 was compared to his 70's pickup truck. His reasoning was that when they designed the P/U, they had the foresight to have addition cooling system capacity in the event the cooling system developed a leak.
Same guy had a vintage wonderfully bizarre Rover 3500 V8 that some imbecile had thrown away the the original twin carburetors and and put a 4 barrel manifold and mismatched for the engine displacement Rochester carburetor on it with a cobbed in very poorly implemented linkage. I don't think I ever got the automatic transmission throttle valve to work correctly .
I did find an original carb set up and he thought a little
"American ingenuity" was just so much better than what those Brits had done from the factory. The only change he thought was necessary was to replace the stock electric fuel pump with one that had about 4 or 5 times the capacity and IIRC, a really huge ignition coil.
The most wonderfully bazaar thing on the car I can think of is the remote hydraulically actuated master cylinder/brake booster over by the alternator. If Monty Python had ever designed a car, this would have been it.