In your late-20s you will find a questionably modified econobox. You should buy it, assuming you’re a glutton for punishment and don’t realize it’s going to take over your personality. As the honeymoon dissipates, you will discover that the previous owners generally quarter-assed their way through the build before your bumbling bird brain came on the scene. Yes, you have been down this road before, but it’s been months since you made your last fun car purchase, and Craigslist is just staring you down with another one of those boxes you’ve always wanted to check. After all, this is what dreams are raged from.
Reaching driving age in the early 2000s and growing up in the Bay Area meant I was used to cheap, plentiful import cars of all stripes. In my early-20s I grew to love Miatas thanks to their ease of modification and the local forum community, but my heart was really attached to E30s thanks to one my family owned while I was in middle school. What all this meant was, in following the one-in-one-out rule that apartment living restricted me to, and having easy access to newer, “better” cars from BMW, Honda, or Mazda, acquiring an AE86 was always on the back burner. They were always around and always $1,500, max. Why would I buy some old, slow, stick-axle novelty when I could enjoy the god’s chariot that is an E30 for the same money or less?
Well, whether you blame Cash for Clunkers or the drifting community or just Father Time, all the AE86s essentially disappeared. Open up any online auction you want and today you’re spoilt for choice with BMW E30s, Mazda RX-7s, and even surprisingly preserved Honda CRXs. A decent USDM AE88 Corolla GT-S is now a rare thing. As already mentioned, they were cheap as chips for a long time and were beloved by those who might have had a bootleg Hot Version DVD, or followed the likes of Taka Aono in Formula Drift or, of course, had heard of Initial D. One day I realized that having been through several Miatas, E30s, an S2000, and a glut of other cars I still hadn’t found a car with real staying power in my life. And, resembling all others who appreciated the last rear-wheel-drive Corolla, I decided that one would need to be my very next car.
For better or worse, the first one to come up local to me was this thing. We have all had this experience. Driveway empty, pocket full of cash, third beer empty, head full of fantasy. And what a fantasy the sale ad for this car produced; not because of the quality of photos, but from what was visible in them. The body was straight, the bumpers were JDM kouki, and the engine was the mythical 20V “Blacktop.”
The only other time I had interacted with this engine was a few years prior in my buddy Joe’s swapped AW11 MR2. The character of it and especially the intake noise had haunted my dreams ever since. Hearing the ITBs snort as I hopped on the freeway during the test drive turned off all my mental car buying safeties. There was no way I wasn’t driving away in this thing.
Of course, once you’ve handed over your poorly negotiated offer and driven off, there’s no way to avoid the cold, hard reality of what you’ve purchased. Slowly you realize that the audible clunk from the back is the exhaust having snapped a hanger, that there seems to be zero bump travel in the rear suspension and, shit, your shoe may be melting to the carpetless floor.
And by you I mean me. Over the next few weeks, away from the billiard-smooth neighborhood the test drive took place in and even further away from the cash that had once occupied my checking account, I took stock of what a slapped-together mutt of an 86 I had purchased. The water pump was leaking, the dash lights did not come on with the headlights, and the exhaust header was resting up against the driver’s side floor. The previous owner had lowered the car by compressing the hell out of the coilover springs and shortening the damper bodies as far as they could go, and without removing the chassis-mounted hard rubber bump stops, meaning the car was literally riding on them and freeway expansion joints may as well have been speed bumps. And, the pièce de résistance, someone had fitted a manual rack in place of the stock power-steering unit. If you know your 86s, you know that the offside rack-mount bracket is a different size and you need an adapter to take up the extra space when converting to manual. The previous owner of my car elected to use a shop rag wrapped around the rack in order to take up that space. It’s a wonder the other bracket didn’t just snap with the extra force being put through it.
But my god, dear reader, if I didn’t try to tackle each and every obstacle with heart and optimism. The correct adapter bushing was purchased from Techno Toy Tuning, I addressed the chassis-mounted bump stops and The Shop in San Bruno set the coilover preload correctly, a friend of mine added pie cuts to the stupid OBX header and got it to clear the chassis, and a bunch of other small things were put right.
The seemingly final headache was a limp mode issue that plagued me for a couple months. Initial startup was fine, but one pull past ~4,000RPM and the car would cut ignition and go into limp mode. It wasn’t the frayed (custom because of the distributor relocation) ignition leads I discovered while diagnosing, and for a while I feared the ECU had taken a dump and was going to require a four-figure hit to my bank account to replace with a standalone. Luckily my buddy Joe came to the rescue. With his experience and stash of spares he deduced that the knock sensor had gone to the parts bin in the sky. Replacing it correctly would have been a nightmare, since the coolant reroute kit a previous owner used crossed the water line too close to the sensor to remove it without gratuitous disassembly. We found a random bracket with a bolt hole the same thread as the sensor, affixed it in the engine bay with a spare bolt and nut, and crowned it King Interim Solution. Pulls to the 8,400RPM redline had been unlocked once again, and the angels rejoiced.
I got exactly one good day in post-fix before the car came in with a reality uppercut. I took it up to Marin, along some stretches you may have seen in my recent videos. The whole time I babied it; half listening to make sure things had been fixed, half not wanting to provoke the devil. It was a mild drive, but a beautiful one. The CD player didn’t skip, the suspension was free of all the sketchy niggles that pre-dated my purchase, and the ECU didn’t complain once.
I was nearly home when a childhood friend of mine hit me up about going bowling. As is likely familiar to a lot of you, my long-suffering and understanding partner has always been the one with our reliable car under her name. Had it been a few months earlier, I might have stopped at home and switched cars on the way to the bowling alley. Optimism and the day’s successful shakedown however got the best of me.
After getting my ass handed to me over a few rounds we took the car for a quick nighttime rip around ye olde neighborhood. This particular friend isn’t really a car guy, but like any other friend he’s down for a hit of adrenaline, and what he lacked in interest in 86s he made up for with enthusiasm the first time I visited the redline. And the second, and the third, and so on. To modify someone else’s work: If the song of open ITBs doesn’t fire up something inside you, check your pulse, because you might be dead.
It was just about the end of a successful day. A trip up north for lunch, and catching up with a friend and showing off my new-ish toy; the only thing left was to cruise home. So you can imagine the fall off in vibes when, while downshifting to make the last turn toward the highway, the car made a noise like a Snap-On tool cabinet terminating a three-story fall.
After pulling into a strip mall to make sure the driveshaft hadn’t fallen out, that the exhaust was still attached, and that I wasn’t just having a stroke that manifested as loud noises, it became clear: the transmission had grenaded. We still had power transfer in all forward gears plus reverse, but second and fourth gears made noise like a playing card slapping against the spokes of a bicycle wheel, assuming the card was a 2×4 plank of wood and the spokes were endless copies of my face.
In two words: F*** Me. Or in two family-friendly words: Last Straw. This, mind you, was maybe month six of my ownership. Untold dollars in random parts, countless hours of labor both mine and paid for, and enough forehead slaps at previous owner gaffes that if played in realtime they might sound like a continuous tone. With the soft underbelly I had developed owning cars like E30s and Miatas, this #rollalife experience was one too many. Add to that the reality that the one guy in the Bay Area willing to rebuild the transmission had an infinite backlog (because these transmission are apparently made of snowflakes and Pocky sticks) and I lost the will to go on. This car was dead to me.
It sat on the street in one of the least safe (for cars) areas to park. Cars were regularly stolen; one particular late-model Accord was relieved of its wheels three times in four months. I left the 86 unlocked with the quick release steering wheel attached, and nothing happened. Even thieves know better than me. The silver lining manifested in the guy who bought it. A homie with magnificent long hair, his girlfriend, and a buddy rolled up in a ridiculously low and rusty AE86 notchback. They seemed stoked about all the parts on my car and 1,000% unbothered about the issues I listed.
We agreed on a price. I was fire saleing it and they knew it. Long-haired homie insisted I take a deposit, but with the 100 other texts blowing up my phone about the underpriced Initial Dream I had on Craigslist, I refused. Either they show up with the cash in a couple days or we never see each other again and no one suffers for it.
If you think I’m being disparaging you can chill. Homie and co. showed up with the cash, took the car, and we didn’t see each other again. Until a few years later that is. Turns out me and homie knew a lot of the same people, and through social media and other unpredictable chances we became good friends. I got to see what my (now former) Corolla looked like when someone with real mechanical aptitude and driving ability started drifting it in local events. What’s more, my (as of writing) current Corolla is on the road thanks to him, that mechanical aptitude coming in handy when I needed that last push to finish a timing belt job and a clutch replacement in my garage.
But as I mentioned at the beginning of the article, this is what dreams are made of. There are some truly punishing cars out there, but if you’re both stupid and lucky enough to buy a couple of them, you might find the silver linings that are included. The learning experiences, for one, and the friends you make along the way.
If you read this whole thing: Tag, you’re it. Go buy that shitbox.