kutteke

The story:

My name is Ken and I waited for 5 years for this moment. A recent change (only last month) in belgian laws made it possible to register a 25 year old car as an oldtimer with the only limitation of not using it to drive to work (used to be only during daytime and not further than 25km from your home). This means 1/10th of the insurance and taxes and a 25 year old can drive a +150hp car without paying a small fortune in insurance.

So i went looking for one and i stumbeled upon the fugliest fc3s i ever layed eyes upon. they put on silver race stripes wich were crooked, sprayed lots of things in silver to match the stripes, and put on a shoppingcart escort cosworth style spoiler.

It was priced around 3000euro's (wich is very cheap for a sportscar over here, even an old one). had 625000 miles (100.000km) and i was told it still had the original paint and had been standing in the garage for multiple years with occasional cruises.

However this car was in berlin (about 800km's from where i live in Belgium). Luckily i have the best friends any one can have because 2 of them said **** YES lets go this weekend i have a tow-truck! So we left for Berlin on the national holiday over here, wich is also the day we got a new king (memorable, but i couldn't care less would be an understatement when i was focussing on the FC ^^)

After 8 hours of driving we finally arrived in berlin. We where greeted by Dirk, a very friendly German guy. We inspected te car and were astounded that we could not find a single spot of rust on this car. All the panels were in good shape except for little dents, we didn't expect it to still be in this shape. It had stock everything (even radio) except for the above mentioned styling. It also had an aftermarket front spoiler to make it resemble to the s5 and also kouki style rear-lights (wich i wanted anyway.).
Also he still had the s4 lights for me and the original shift ****.

The downside of the car was that the exhaust was rusted trough, it had muffler tips welded to them to make it look more flashy, and worst of all... the engine would not start/keep idling. We expected the worst... so eventually after pushing it to a start and some throttle he was idling (took about 15 minutes). I noticed the fuel gauge was on dead empty and i can imagine after 5 years of not driving it the gas must have been the reason.

So after consideration and looking at the fairly low mileage and body condition we decided to take it with us. After some negotiation we managed to take 500 off the askingprice, loaded it up and headed home.
Upon arriving (after an 11hour ride back without stopping)we loaded it up with premium gas, slapped in a fresh battery and turned the key.

It didn't take a second to turn on, sputtered a bit but then went into warmup mode and steadily dropped to the 750rpm it should idle on. After giving it some time to idle, we got in the car and took it for a spin. the steering was spot on, i was already happy even if the engine would turn out to be a dud. we turned on a straight open road and i hit the throttle...the boost meter flyed up to the max of the meter and I was thrown back in my seat. revved smoothly all the way to the redline and sounded really good (even with the rusty-*** exhaust). the brakes felt a little spongey but they probably just needed some bleeding. I was extremely happy to say the least.

Right now i'm waiting for my friend to come by with his compression tester so we can verify the compression. but so far i am feeling pretty confident about the engine.

anyway here you can find the pics after some torough cleaning and pulling off some crap.

I'm just ecstatic about owning one =)

RX7Club.com - kutteke's Album: My Fc3s S4 turbo2