It's 11 days from the Challenge, and I'm WAY behind, of course. But I'm taking a break to add to the backgroud of this build story...
Surveying the cars, I found some upgrades on the black XR that came with a title: Cossie 4 piston front disc brakes and front sway bar, aluminum radiator with dual fans, LA series Turbocoupe ECU & VAM, Merkmeter, Cossie steering wheel, upgraded diff and trans mounts, and lowering springs and Koni yellows. The parts haul was a mixed bunch of stuff, including a lot of interior and exterior trim parts, some mechanical parts and hardware, a bunch of wiring, a Cossie rear sway bar, and of course that pair of Cossie spec 16x8 Compomotive MO5 wheels. Curious and having the previous owner’s name, I was able to track him down (he was local again after having moved away for a long while) and make contact. He had no hard feelings about having lost the cars or that I was able to get them so cheaply; his loss, my gain. He relayed details about the cars, and said the black car had been his daily and that the front springs were a special set of Ledas with Eibachs in the rear, and that the automatic trans had lost reverse and wasn't shifting right, which is when he parked it with the intent to build the red shell into a Cossie clone using parts he imported from his native Spain. But as life often goes, circumstances prompted him to bail on them and leave the area. I was heartbroken when I realized the storage lot had sold many of the parts he imported, like Cossie hoods, intakes, heads, manifolds, turbos, etc., just for scrap. I was also seriously bummed to find out the matching pair of Compomotive MO wheels had gone MIA while being stored with a friend of his many years previous. But the good news was that he had a title for the red shell and keys for both cars, and he was interested in getting whatever dj gear I had, so we made a deal. I ended up with the title, keys, a 75mm throttlebody, and some cash, all for the dj gear I didn't even know I was getting when I bought the cars, successfully recouping $250 of my $350 purchase price along with scoring some valuable extras too.
September 2017... while I'd always wanted to participate in the GRM $2xxx Challenge since it'd started, I'd always found it was a bit beyond me for whatever reason (real and imaginary). But having a properly cheap starter package with some potential finally made the Challenge seem like a reasonable thing to attempt. I started planning and recruited help from my buddy Nick to make it happen. We started by stripping the weather-ruined interior and successfully got it running for the first time in 5+ years. It sounded off, like the head gasket had failed between cylinders (as these engines do), so that got replaced. Then there was a hurricane with a bit of house damage. And then an unrelated kitchen flood. And then we thrashed for like a week installing an intercooler and Jetta bumper before finding the replacement trans I'd secured wasn't the correct C3, but a C4. And as much as we fancied ourselves "Roadkill" enough to pull it off, without the right stuff to make it happen and one too many snags in the mix, we just had to bail on taking the XR. But that didn't stop us from going anyway, except in a completely untested '98 Saab 9000 CSE "Aero-spec" I bought 3 days before the event. We went, we auto-x'd, we scattered the trans across the dragway, and we got it towed 150 miles home (thanks AAA). But that's a story for another time.
We did make a half-hearted attempt to take the XR again to the 2018 Challenge, which of course started with unearthing the cars, building a fence to hide the shell from code enforcement. But then we started a T5 swap, even getting as far as installing the flywheel and clutch. Alas, distractions and other responsibilities undermined our ability to commit the necessary time to get it done. And that was that. We pushed it outside and left to sit again, until just a few weeks ago.
