A few weeks ago, my father called me as he was leaving his car club meeting and announced 'I bought us a race car!'......
This is definitely not something I was expecting. (I'm laughing as I'm typing this).
He then begins to tell me the story - a former club member had passed away some time earlier. His son had come to the club meeting with a listing of all of the cars that were left in his warehouse and pics of many of them. Several of Dad's friends had immediately called dib's on one or another car on the list, and Dad gravitated to a little Spitfire. The price was right, and from the pics he forwarded me, there was a lot of work already done to the car that made it worth a lot more than the Challenge worthy price that we ultimately paid for it. (Won't have it in hand, nor the time to make the Challenge this year... :( )
Over the next few days, we went back and forth about the car and a few issues. I've got no garage space. Really Dad doesn't have any either. We also live about 6 or so hours away from each other. My better half has said she's ok with my buying it if we keep it at my Dad's....
Next issue was what would we do with it. A full restoration really is not in the cards. However, we've always wanted to go vintage racing. Dad had his license at one point, but has let it lapse and has basically said he won't be going at that again. I definitely would do it, but my shortest drive to any track is something on the order of 8-10 hours. On top of that, busy kids makes long trips to a track for the weekend an unlikely thing for a while - Vintage racing is out.... I'm autocrossing my TR6, but would love to have something I'm not terribly attached to for autocrossing. This car would be perfect for that.
She comes with an extra engine or two, as well as an extra transmission, boxes of new and original parts and a hardtop.
I'm used to extremely fast progress projects, but this will be an extremely slow project.
We're hoping to pick it up in the next couple of weekends.