After initial ownership of the car, I switched up wheels, some aspects of the body kit (I think I tried 3 different styles of side skirts) and attempted to drive it and enjoy it as much as I could, it spent some time off the road.

I exploded a gearbox in it, which resulted in me refreshing a bit of stuff and performing a decent chunk of maintenance to it, then not long after took it off the road again completely for a full restoration, which is what this post will be covering.

The car was hiding some demons; it had rust in the sills, and poor repairs showing around the sunroof area of the car.

The sunroof drains go straight to the bottom corners of the sills, which in turn were completely rotted. As mentioned in the first post, the bodywork was rough; it had dents throughout, very bad paintwork and needed a lot of love.

I dropped the car off to Jack Roberts to fix the rust, which also snowballed into him fixing a majority of the bodywork, which could fit within my budget, I didn’t want it to be a “show car”....

Over the course of about 6 months, he updated me with progress on the car and fixed things properly, uncovering at times sometimes more issues, but always being transparent and fixing what he could.

I picked up the car when it was done and drove it home in primer with a dust cloud following me on the M3. It only sat for a couple of weeks before I kicked it into gear again with my friend Brad Footman and we got to final prep, buying the paint and booking a booth.

Brad was going to help me paint it, he isn’t a painter by trade but had painted a couple cars when he was younger and was willing to give it a shot and help me out.

We rented a booth in Springvale and had 2 very long days there, I still can’t thank Brad enough for the time he put into my car, it was probably some of the most memorable 2 days of “car” stuff for me, seeing my dream car in the flesh rolling out of the booth for the first time was something thats almost impossible to explain to someone who has never been in that position.

I let the paint cure and didn’t touch it until I was confident it wasn’t soft, before piecing it together, my first drive of the car all in one piece was on my birthday and finally felt like I was getting the car to a point I was very happy with.