I spied this car sitting in a field in Penryn, Ca one day among a bunch of other cars. I stopped in and knocked on the door of the house attached to the field. I eventually made a deal for the car- $300 and I towed it out of there. It needed a clutch. Well, it also needed some interior work and general cosmetics.
Mis-matched paint and general scruffy appearance, but if you look past all that, it's got great lines and a pretty tough aggressive look to it.
I put a new clutch in. I added the used turbine wheels and fake knock off's. I converted the interior from blue to black and buffed out the several shades of pale yellow paint. I polished the valve cover and detailed the old engine bay the best I could. This was back in about 1995. I was 20 years old and just beginning to figure out how to really work on cars.
I worked the occasional graveyard shift at an old Union 76 service station in Auburn, Ca, and that quiet solo shift afforded me the opportunity to hoist the car and tinker on it for hours on end, undisturbed. By the morning, when my shift was over I was always eager to hot lap the car to see about the improvements I'd made. On one fateful morning, I was speeding east on Interstate 80. The car was running and handling superbly. I exited at 49 towards Grass Valley. I was planning on making a left at the off ramp light. The light was red and I was approaching at a high rate of speed and braking hard. Then the light turned green.... You know sometimes when you've been driving really fast, like over 100 MPH, then you slow down to, say, 55 MPH and it feels like a crawl? Yeah, that's what I was doing in the Celica.... When the light turned green, I immediately got off the brake and ripped through the intersection, making the hard left.
Normally, I think the car may have been able to handle the turn, however on this particular morning, the road was damp from a passing light rain shower. I hunkered down for the hard left, the car began to follow my inputs, then in an instant, about 1/4 way through the turn the front tires washed out and she plowed straight...right into the curb on the outside of the turn.
It was a bit of an impact. The car was lowered, and I smashed my right front tow hook into the curb. That impact rebounded the car to the left and back on track down the road, but the car abruptly ground to a halt. I hopped out to see a trail of green coolant bleeding out from the front. Around the passenger side, I discovered that the front wheel was jammed and the fender was pushed back into the door. The hood was a little buckled. She wasn't going to move on her own anymore.
In short- I collapsed the frame of the car, which pulled the radiator into the fan and jammed the right body panels into each other.I also compromised the suspension points. Not having access to frame straightening equipment or any money to pay to have it fixed, I searched in vain for a cheap replacement body. I found none. A month or two later I sold the little car for what I bought it for- $300 (I kept the turbine wheels though). That was a bummer. I always felt bad about that because I was able to resurrect her to a point, then I damaged her beyond my abilities.
The upshot is that a guy who worked a body and frame shop bought her and was going to fix her back up. I hope he did.
