Fuzz may own clothes that are older than this Toyota MR2 but they don’t come with corrosion, accident damage or dicky fuel pumps…
Every day is a school day, or so it’s said, but never was that truer in my experience than when the Car SOS team took on former mechanic Kevin’s 1988 Toyota MR2.
In my mind 1988 is but a hop, step and a jump back to the recent past but the reality is rather different. There are very few clothes from that era that I would still wear although I do still have a jumper that was in regular use back then.
But I digress – what I am grasping for here is the MR2’s seeming modernity, with its innovative five bulkhead design (if you count the extremities), centre tunnel-mounted fuel tank and the design engineers’ efforts to bring the car in perfectly balanced by use of such details as mirror-positioned brake calipers fore and aft.
I was given a crash course on the type by the ace team at Rogue Motorsport, Southam, who swept me through the MR2’s finest aspects with the enthusiasm of true expert aficionados, which was just as well because it was at that location that the car’s restoration was being undertaken. It was in great hands, though, given Rogue’s experience in race class creation and support for MR2s.
Thirty-five years is a long time for a car to remain on the planet and this tiny Toyota’s condition naturally revealed itself to be progressively worse the further we delved into the project.
A lost sharp-edged swage line, just below waist level on the nearside rear quarter turned out to emanate from an ancient welded repair patch at the leading edge of the corresponding rear wheel arch.
Clearly, blending the repair in to the panel’s contours had presented a problem, resulting in a thick slather of polyester paste being applied up to and beyond said swage, with the resultant loss of its pin-sharpness.
Localised corrosion plagued much of the car’s lower areas but the most interesting problem area revealed itself in a very different manner.
