A bit of history (part 2) – Arise from the ashes…

Fortunately Patrick at Rogue agreed to cover the costs of a full replacement build, which saved a lot of potential grief…although he did initially offer to simply allow me to recoup my total costs to date (which in hindsight may have been a good idea!), but I hadn’t driven the new engine in anger yet, and after 8 – 9 months of waiting since I first decided I wanted this car I was itching to see what she could do.

So the plan was to find a replacement shell, then move everything (and I mean everything) across from the wrecked car…

Sounds simple, right? Oh no…factor in how difficult it is to find a truly rot free 1990 shell in the UK in with good bodywork, along with a customer (me) with rose tinted spectacles on about how mint the original car was, and yes…it took us a long time to find a suitable replacement.

Many many trips around the country to visit “mint” cars wasted when arriving to find crash repaired cars, or just plain sheds…taking the cash was starting to look like a good idea. I even went back to Jurgen to see if he could find one in Japan, but of course the exchange rate had tanked making it uneconomically viable to import a new one.

Finally we found a likely candidate which I went to see with Patrick, and in the main it was a solid car on a 1995 plate. It wasn’t perfect, and needed some touching up- it had seen some paint before, but it was solid…so I just swallowed hard and agreed it was the one. I remember sitting in her in the vendors driveway and having a quiet word with her, I think I was trying to make friends and appease her for what we were going to do…funny the little things that stay with us!

The car was trailered back to Rogue for its transformation to begin…I was pleased it was a G-limited edition (the naturally aspirated version) as it meant it had the NA badge on the back of the boot (my original car came with an NA boot for some reason, despite being a GTS model- a fact I quietly enjoyed as it didn’t shout turbo to anyone who knew their cars).

She was completely stripped down, cleaned up and then undercoated before the parts from my other car were transplanted across, the damaged wheels were replaced along with the exhaust and numerous other parts that history has now forgotten. The interior was swapped over, and we took the opportunity to fully remove the remnants of the air conditioning system from the body.

The body work was expertly touched up, and the whole car professionally mopped and detailed…I even had my older 1994 registration plate transferred across from the scrapped shell…to all extents and purposes, this was now the same car.

I made a few minor tweaks, adding adjustable front tie rods and anti roll bars, as well as an electronic boost controller as the Apexi ECU was doing a pretty feeble job of delivering stable boost pressures. Then it was off to Surrey Rolling Road in their original location, with a young man by the name of Ryan Griffith (2bar tuning) tweaking the map for me.

Let’s just say the car was a handful to drive after this, a real slam you in the back kick of torque as the boost came on…nothing evenly remotely subtle about it, and I loved it! It felt insanely fast, albeit far too much to attempt driving with positive manifold pressure in anything other than a straight line.

I was finally in a good position with the car, and was enjoying it…happy days, but how long was it to last…?