First inspection
Visually, it was rough.
Not in a structural sense, but in a way that shows years of neglect, changes, and different hands working on it.
The kind of car where you don’t start with admiration, but with assessment.
Inside, it was actually better than expected. The interior was mostly original, apart from a few details like red gauge faces. The exterior paint wasn’t original either, even though the original color had been silver as well.
There were aftermarket body elements from Strosek, including different fenders, bumpers, and lighting. More aggressive, more modified, but not without some interesting design ideas.
What mattered and what didn’t
At that point, I wasn’t overly concerned with cosmetics.
What mattered more was what was underneath.
The car was not running, but that didn’t change the decision. I already knew it had a 3.0 SC engine, and that was enough to understand what kind of mechanical base I was working with.
Transmission was SC as well, and it even had a factory limited slip differential, which made it more interesting than expected.
So even though the car looked rough on the outside, the core was actually quite solid.
And that changed everything.
Before the build starts
What I saw at that point wasn’t a finished project yet. It was a base.
Something that already had modifications, history, and layers of use, but still enough originality to shape it into something else.
My ideas for it were already forming at that stage, but none of that mattered yet. First, I needed to understand exactly what I had bought. And that meant one thing. Taking it apart.
