The car I bought is not a good car. It has 180,000 kilometres, a driver’s seat bolster worn through to the foam, and a respray in the original red that was done by someone who had clearly never resprayed anything before. It also has every part it left Toyota City with, and that is the entire point.
I spent eight months looking. In that time I turned down two cars that were faster, cheaper and considerably more presentable than this one, because both had been modified by people whose taste I did not share and whose workmanship I could not verify.
The problem with a sorted car
An A80 with a single turbo conversion, coilovers, a big brake kit and an aftermarket ECU is a car that already contains a hundred decisions. Somebody else made all of them. Some are probably good. Some are certainly not, and you will find out which is which on a wet roundabout eighteen months from now.
The market prices these cars as though the modifications are additive — as though a converted car is the sum of a stock car plus the parts. In practice you are buying a used stock car plus somebody’s used homework, and the homework is very difficult to mark from a listing photograph.
An unmolested tired car has one owner’s worth of unknowns. A modified one has as many as it has had enthusiasts.
What “honest” actually meant here
The car had a full book of Japanese service stamps up to 2019 and nothing after, which is common for an export and tells you the last six years are a blank. But the important things checked out:
- The VIN plate, engine number and chassis stamp all agree, and agree with the auction sheet.
- The turbos are the original CT20s, in the original sequential arrangement, with the original plumbing intact and no evidence of the classic “just delete the sequential system” hack job.
- The gearbox is the V161 Getrag it left with, not a swapped-in replacement of uncertain provenance.
- The rust is where rust is meant to be on an A80 — the rear arch lips, lightly — and nowhere it should not be.
The auction sheet graded it 3.5, which is the grade that gets you an honest car with a lived-in interior. Grade 4 doubles the price for paint you would spend a weekend fixing anyway.
The plan, such as it is
The temptation with a 2JZ is immediate and well-documented. The engine is famously capable of absurd figures and the internet will happily tell you, within minutes of purchase, that you have wasted the block by leaving it standard.
I am going to leave it standard.
The first year is cooling, bushings, the fuel system, and a set of tyres that are not eleven years old. None of that is interesting to photograph. All of it is the difference between a car that works and a car that is a project in the pejorative sense — permanently almost finished, permanently on a trolley jack.
Part two will be the suspension refresh, and an argument about wheel sizing that I expect to lose.
