Having laid two coats of Meguiar’s Gold Class wax on the car, washed it every day this week and finally, today having finished off the fog light setup, today was the day to break out the Galant for a photoshoot to show you all how the car has come together.

 

With most of the good locations I know in this town already appearing on this site, I decided to head to one I’ve had up my sleeve for a little while – the now abandoned former Mitsubishi dealership. It seemed like the perfect location to shoot the car Mitsubishi Australia should have given us, but never did.

 

Here’s the latest little addition to the car – yellow fog light tint. I seem to do a lot of “love it or hate it” things to my cars, and I think this will be another one. I guess that’s the way things go when you have a specific vision and  go for exactly what you want without concern over how it will be received being the major motivator. For the record, I love the lights. They give it just a little bit more of a Japanese flavour and help it stand out a little more IMO. And for $5, you can’t go wrong!

 

I don’t want to blow my own trumpet (I’m the first to admit that I’m just the one who designed the car – the craftsmanship that brought it to fruition wasn’t mine), I honestly think the car has come up amazing. Remember that this is still every inch a budget build. Everything’s been bought second hand, often damaged, as cheaply as possible. I don’t think it shows though. Visually it is the most complete car I have ever done, and I think everything hangs together and looks planned. Simply put, I love it.

 

I decided I would set the car a little further apart by changing up the positioning of the badges. I think this makes it look a little more modern than the old setup. The VR-4 badge is down low in the bottom corner of the bootlid below the camera (not visible here), and the little silver one you can see in the  opposite corner is a Bride badge. It all looks factory, but better.

 

It’s a heck of a location, with the water tower soaring over our own little piece of slowly decaying industrial wasteland. Add that to the perfect day with the sun showing off the new colour brilliantly and things were going  pretty well. Were.

 

Despite the fact that there are no gates, no signs and a public road drives right up into it, turns out it’s private property, owned by an investor who doesn’t seem to take kindly to, well, people. An alarm was set off, either by me or another couple who were around back photographing the building (probably them, TBH, as I went nowhere near the actual building) and before 5 minutes of shooting had gone by I had two over-excited security guards to deal with. The “larger” one was visibly disappointed when I responded to his aggressively shouted “what are you up to here, hey?” with a calm “just taking photos of my car mate” and then went back to snapping shots. I think he felt like the 4 steps he had just run were totally wasted. I felt like he could use a few more.

So anyway, not having done anything wrong, I kept about my business while the security guards justified their wages. One of them called the owner, told him nothing much was going on and suggested that they cancel the Police call out. A few minutes later two Police cars arrived on the scene, party lights ablaze. I guess Mr Investor declined their offer to cancel the Police. Frightfully good use of Police resources, that.

The cops chatted to the other couple for a while, took their details (for the crime of trying to make something artistic from a soulless place, I guess) and then sauntered over to me. The wonderfully polite officer checked with me to confirm that all I was doing was shooting my car, then told me that me being on this “private property” was burglary (not sure exactly what I stole, but hey, why not? Sounds cool), and suggested that I should look for another location. I was just happy that they didn’t decide to be total dicks, so I left without a fuss. I had more shooting to do, but it could wait.

 

So that’s the story of the photoshoot, but I think the story of the car is far more interesting.

In the next few weeks I am going to get working on making the performance match the looks. A new hard piping kit is being made, along with new front pipes, and I’ll be fitting a 3 inch cat, a Walbro fuel pump and hopefully an ARC BOV from the old CA18 Silvia. Then it is off to RTR in Dandenong to be tuned by a nationally renowned VR-4 tuner who is flying in from Sydney to tune a small handful of cars for OzVR4.com members. I don’t want to publicly predict numbers, but I’m optimistic that the car will be great to drive once it’s done.

I’ll keep you updated.

 

With this being kind of the “debut” of the car on the site, I want to thank a few people who made the transformation happen. Stewart from 3P Automotive is amazing – the quality of the work he did and the price he charged made my ultimate VR-4 possible on a budget. I also want to thank Dave & Nathan from Autoparts Professionals for always being the best dudes, Matt from Mr Brakes for looking after my car like it was his own during the brake and clutch upgrades, and the duders from OzVR4 for selling me parts, answering my dumb questions, saying nice words about the car and generally being encouraging.

Thanks y’alls.