We were just in Torrance for the Street Neo Classic on October 18th. What I didn’t tell anyone was that I was also doing some car shopping while I was there.
The AE86 chassis is obviously on every Toyota fans radar, and I was no different. Growing up in the midwest though these cars didn’t really exist. Maybe it was that rear wheel drive isn’t hugely popular in the snow belt, or maybe that most of these rusted to pieces long before I even had a license. Either way I didn’t really have a chance to pick them up when they were in the cheap phase of their life cycle. Now that they were getting more expensive and parts were becoming more rare it would require a lot more investment in both time and money if I wanted one. With several projects already it was something I didn’t really have the time for. Unless of course most of the work was already done.
When Janet mentioned on Instagram that she needed to make some room and was thinking of letting a couple of cars go, it got my attention. I was already rather familiar with her coupe. I didn’t know the car in any great details, but I had seen it at a few Toyotafest and Japanese Classic Car Shows of years past. I gave it a closer look at the Neo Classic event, and now here we were to trade some money for some metal.
I gave the car a quick drive down the block and back and noticed a few down sides. There was no AC. Not like id didn’t work, but the car wasn’t originally equipped with it. The clutch was starting to let go. I wasn’t worried about it making the drive home, but it certainly wasn’t working properly. Shifting under any amount of power caused it to slip. These were pretty minor things in the grand scheme of things though so I went through with the deal.
We hung out for a minute waiting on a gentleman that was picking up an MR2 transmission from me. Shortly after we were on the 101 and headed home.
I quickly figured out the rebuilt OEM radio had one good channel in the rear and 3 other channels that worked at about a 1/4 of the volume. The cassette didn’t seem to function at all, but to be fair I didn’t have a real cassette with me, just a cheap adapter to plug in my phone. Not that it really mattered. With the windows down, and the Corolla’s combination of gearing and APEXi exhaust I wasn’t going to hear much anyway.
Everything was going well until we decided to exit for fuel and I got on it a bit in the right hand sweeping turn of the exit. I heard quit a bit of rubbing and found the front left tire pretty shredded when I got to the gas station. Obviously fast corners weren’t in the cards for the rest of the drive home.
We attempted to take the car out together, but the rough San Jose roads coupled with the cars current combination of suspension, alignment, and wheel offset meant there was no way it was happening with out tearing up both front tires, and risking possible fender damage.
I ended up just running it over to the car wash to give it a rinse and get the salt water film off of it from driving up the coast. Not quite what I would have liked for my first drive home, but at least we didn’t need a trailer.
