AE86 pt1: Acquiring

I’m sure almost everyone at one point in their life has said to themselves “damn, I’d love to own an AE86 one day”.

I find it’s one of those cars that not a lot of people end up going through with and I don’t blame them as there are other cars for the money that are faster/less rusty/air conditioned/etc. 

That said, they’re awesome cars. I’ve owned quite a variety of cars over the years of differing power/drivetrain and this is hands down one of my favourites.

One of the reasons why I enjoy this car so much is that I can take it out for a fun drive fairly easily without worrying about much. It doesn’t seem to draw much negative attention and flies under the radar seemingly. 

Another reason I enjoy it is purely the driving experience. The sound of the ITB’s dorting, the scream of the 4age attempting to overtake a Prius, the connection you feel to the road and rawness that hopefully will never get old. 

So there’s actually been a few times in the past decade where I’ve almost bought an AE86, but it never ended up panning out for whatever reason at the time. 

I have some photos saved of this 7age levin notchback I was looking to purchase back in 2015, but wasn’t able to sell my DC2R for enough to cover the difference. 

This was going to replace the DC2R that I was dailying at the time which seems like a crazy idea these days. I miss how much more affordable and care free it was back then to play cars. 

I wish I took more photos of it when I inspected as it was a pretty cool car. Not a spot of rust, only thing I wasn’t a fan of were the fenders but the car was overall cheap enough back then for me to look past that. 

Anyways time goes on, I overbuild my S14 making it too easy to drive and end up doing the same thing to the JZX. I decided there was no point having two cars so similar in power/setup to drift and wanted something completely different, so I kept bugging Perry to sell me his AE86 until he finally agreed to. I listed the JZX and surprisingly sold it. There was no backing out now. 

The car itself is an ADM shell that had been resprayed black and was thankfully rust free. 

The car came with a lot of goodies but the only problem was that it had a suspected spun bearing. I’ve always wanted to try rebuild an engine myself so this sort of allowed me to tick off both owning an AE86 and rebuild an engine off my list.

Definitely a fan visually of how the 16v looks > a 20v

Photos you can smell


Wifey all smiles until she had to try wind the window back up. 

After checking it out again and agreeing to a deal, I counted down the days till I could pick it up. 

Excited is an understatement of how I was feeling loading it onto the trailer. 

Smoothly sailed across town and the Westgate. 

At least in photos it didn’t look broken giving me some motivation. 

The car sort of still ran so we managed to limp it down the street, up the driveway and into the garage. 

Not without the ae86 taking a wee on the driveway though. Not sure if this counts as initiation into leaky 4age life. 

That’s it for this post. I’ll hopefully have some time soon to continue writing up the rest of the journey so far.