Wow - Blast from the past here! I remember these pictures being taken (Seems like yesterday) - Q522 VMF was my old car & is definitely now living in Vauxhall heaven i'm afraid :-(
For the record, the paintwork was Ford Mondeo Citrine Yellow, although, before it was sold, I had it fully resprayed in the same colour, but it wasn't as flat as the previous paint job so in daylight it was pupil blistering to say the least!
If I may - i'd like to tell the life story of our fallen comrade.. as it's one from time to time I like to share!
I bought the car in it's first incarnation as per the Fast Car magazine around 1998, when I bought it, the car was tired & had a hard life but what I saw was an unprecedented amount of potential here. Andy Windsor the original builder/owner had sold it on to a guy local to the area I lived in, this guy had done his best to run it into the ground, but the LET engine was a tough cookie to break!! When I inherited it, the rear arches had gone, paint was faded, alloys all kerbed, but when I drove it away for the first time, by god did I ****e myself under the power this thing put down, now, we're get to more about this later, but arriving home, the rear 256mm Astra rear brake conversion locked the brakes & again, another touching cloth moment was had here!
Over the course of the next five years, considerable £ investment was put in, the aesthetics remained mostly intact - Added a renault laguna lower splitter (Free of charge of course!) & changed the meshed grill back to the original GSI one with the plastic grooves as the chargecooler radiator was protruding & generally through the mesh it looked a tad nasty. I added a set of the M3 mirrors as captured in the Max Power photo shoot, but was generally unhappy with the fitment of these so went back to the original items. The other thing I changed several times were the wheels, the evolutions were as follows:-
15" Renault 19 wheels
16" Irmscher Soft soft stars
16" Speedline Alessio's
17" Kosei Seneka's
17" Five spokes with polished/studded rims - Sorry, can't remember the name of these but absolutely loved them as there was only one other set on a Nova as far as I knew!
Then we come to the engine, the guise of the engine when I bought the car was 250bhp, addition power came from a better free flowing exhaust & a superchip of some kind - don't ask me which one!? I had it serviced yearly & generally ran faultless barring the clutch cable snapping every 6 months & having to change the HT leads, for the first three years the only thing added was a dump valve & the upper calibra turbo black cover & a polished lower turbo cover.
After the 3 years - I generally started to earn more money so in true modding style, spent all of my hard earned cash back into my car! This is when things got alot more serious - As other posts/sites have mentioned, £6k engne rebuild courtesy of Courtenays, overhauling everything, high yield pistons, lumpy as fook cams, enlarged pipework, bigger turbo, headwork... pretty much everything Courtenay had on ther website at the time - As well as adding the carbon fibre plenum cover & sparkplug cover just for good measure. Once I picked this up, it was off for the running in period, whilst during this I added the 330mm front & 310mm brakes at another £2.5k, took the F28 gearbox to Quaiffe who fitted a LSD, added a final longer drive in top gear & reworked the linkage to be somewhat more friendly at a cost fo £1.5k & lastly added some tasty Leda suspension @ another £1k, once the car had been run in, it went back to Courtenays to be tuned/set up etc... Again, the dreaded rear brakes shat the life out of one of Courtenays staff whilst road testing the car! - There's still more to come with the brakes but will get back to that!
So with all the above done, running in & the car going like stink - it was a case of whats next, so, this was where the paintwork now came in, this was off to a coach works to have a complete respray barring taking the engine out, all seals/shuts etc, fully undersealed & finally, pretty much everything that could be polished/plated under the engine bay was, complementing this was Bret Warburton polished rear cage, front strut brace & a double rear strut brace & added a set of Corbeau seats - This time setting me back to the tune of another £2.5k - Not so easy come but very easy go!
From here on was where I drew a line in the sand with the spending on this car, my final plans before I wanted to pass the car onto a new owner was a leather/alcantara grey/citrine yellow interior with flocked dash with stack dash etc, pricing this up came to £4.5k but at this point my heart had moved on to another car. So i stuck Q522 VMF up for sale.
Whilst the car was up for sale at £9k.. Yes £9k, was I being greedy.. no, optimistic yes, given the money that had been pumped, after a couple of months I sold it to a mate for £7k who enjoyed the car as it was & thrashed the life out of it - & stood up to it all! He then lost his job & sold it on to another chap, he then stripped the interior out, tinted the windows & resprayed the engine. This is where it was sold to a youngster who had the car a couple of hours, by all accounts giving it some welly & hitting the brakes hard & locking the rears, sending it straight into the side of a bus & down a ditch!
Now - When I sold it to my mate, I warned him about the brakes, I had become accustomed to driving the car & advised that Hi Spec would have the car back & fit a brake biaise, he chose to ignore this advice, when he sold it on, he shared the same advice (Getting the picture here!) & again the new recipient chose to ignore said advice - Something the last owner did not heed to the perils of the brakes.
So that's the story of Q522VMF - My only regrets are that I have hardly any pics of when it was nearing completion, if anyone has any pictures of it from Trax (Way back when) as the car was sold a month after, i'd be especially gratefull if they could share them on this thread.
Since owning Q522VMF - mates named it Vicious Mother F**ker I owned a Impreza P1 - tuned to 400bhp, Evo 6 Tommi Mak tuned to 520bhp+ & recently a BMW M3 latest model, & not one of them could rival the sense of speed & thrills that I got from a Turbo'd Nova, so much so, once i've a bigger garage sorted that I may revert to owning one once again & sporadically check pistonheads to see if one of the originals (Jon Shields A16VTB etc) comes up as I maybe tempted onnce again! - Anyway, thats enough from me, as you've gathered I can talk for hours about these cars, Q522VMF... lost to vauxhall heaven but never forgotten.
Mike
