OK, so I kinda accidentally bought the second ever...
...To explain:
A little over a year ago I entered Wakefield Drift Matsuri in my old . Whilst it was a good all-round package, it really didn't have enough power to link up Wakefield in the dry. . Then I got to drive MaxHag's , the difference in power was amazing and I fell in love with the Gready Type S suspension. After that day I had to have a real hard think about where I wanted to go from there.
I had built that AE86 to use as a daily as I was intending to take my old z32 off the road for some preventive maintenance and to freshen it up a little. This had become unnecessary though, as I had instead traded it in on an EVO VII. With the Evo now fulfilling the role of daily, I had two reliable 'daily drivers' (that I couldn't drive at the same time) and an itch for a dedicated drift car. Most people would have simply bought a turbo etc and further modified their car. But, as what I had built was a great street package, I really didn't want to take it apart. Furthermore, I didn't want to waste a clean JDM sunroof shell as a track car. I decided the best way forward was to sell up and start fresh with a granny spec ADM body. The plan became to buy a JDM S15 SR20DET, stick it in an ADM shell, in front of an SR to RB box into an F series diff. That meant I would have a reasonably fresh motor that already had injectors and a ball-bearing turbo into a quite sturdy drivetrain. IE reliable bake.
After selling my car back in August I was on the hunt for a new shell. The problem I found was that everyone who owned a stock ADM ae86 seemed to think that it was worth the same as one with a 4age conversion (and sometimes even more). I went and looked at about 6 cars (and looked over loads of photos of others), and sure enough, despite being listed as 'rust free', most of them had some serious '' and/or ''. . To top it off, some of these cars were as far away as Perth and FNQ, and yet there was a listing in Castle Hill (about 30 minutes from where I work) that I had been intentionally ignoring...
...After some serious price reduction I decided I had to at least go and have a look.
It was ugly.
Really ugly.
But then I crawled around on my hands and knees and saw this:
I also found that when I was lying there under the car I could pretend it didn't look so bad...
Then I looked in the engine bay...
Actually a very tidy conversion. The engine literally sat lower than 4ages tend to sit. And some really high quality parts (turbo, wastegate, coil packs, BOV)... A lot of potential...
Then I got into it:
Someone had obviously put a lot of time an effort into an interior that didn't appeal to me at all...
Anyway, long story short: It all worked! The car had plenty of pick-up, stopped pretty well but was far too pimp spec to be my cup of tea.
So I went home and did some math. If I was willing to strip out the parts in this car I could get a decent straight shell for a quite decent price. It was pretty much at this point that Project Ugly Duckling was born.
The deal was done, the car taken home and then work decided it was a great time to send me away for a few weeks. The good news is that now I am back and the car's transformation into a Black Swan has begun!
Cheers,
-Robbo