After years of tough decisions and hard work, Chris
Abela has finally found the sweet spot of what’s considered acceptable when it
comes to modifying classic cars with his sleeper ’76 Corolla.
Gauging whether it’s frowned upon to tamper with a
particular car or not often appears to have very little logic to back it up.
Add a set of big, dished rims to an Austin Healey and dump it on air
suspension, for example, and you’ll probably end up with a gang of angry men with
flats caps putting a bounty on your head. But at the other end of the scale,
finding an uber-cool and equally as rare Datsun 240Z that hasn’t had at least a
few contemporary visual enhancements applied to it nowadays is harder than
spotting a standard Citroen Saxo back in 2004. We’ve all heard the word
‘sacrilege’ being bandied about at shows and on internet forums, but who really
determines what falls into this dreaded chasm and what makes it out alive when
it comes to modifying classic cars?
Chris Abela was
hit with this precise thought process the moment he decided his KE35 1976
Toyota Corolla SR needed a new lease of life a few years ago.
Chris Abela was hit with this precise thought process the
moment he decided his KE35 1976 Toyota Corolla SR needed a new lease of life a
few years ago. The car has been in the family as long as he can remember,
eventually being passed into his ownership from his father at the tender age of
18. Up until recently, the virtually standard little white car served Jap obsessive
Chris well, acting as the ideal runabout on his native Maltese roads.
With the thought
of selling, or even worse, scrapping the car well and truly ruled out, combined
with the fact that he had now started accumulating a rather impressive fleet of
classic Japanese cars, he knew the time was right to give the old girl the once
over it well and truly deserved.
Things were sweet for over a decade, until Chris could no
longer ignore the fact that his beloved Corolla was starting to look and feel
slightly sorry for itself. With the thought of selling, or even worse,
scrapping the car well and truly ruled out, combined with the fact that he had
now started accumulating a rather impressive fleet of classic Japanese cars, he
knew the time was right to give the old girl the once over it well and truly
deserved. But a tough decision lay ahead:
was he to restore the car meticulously to standard spec,
which would certainly impress the die-hard Toyota fanatics at shows, or could
he afford to drop in a few tweaks here and there to bring it into the modern
age?
Let’s not forget that this little two-door is the direct
grandfather of the legendary AE86, a car that has been chopped about and booted
around race tracks more than perhaps any other Corolla model in recent years.
And as the ‘SR’ badges on Chris’ third-gen denote that this particular Corolla
is the pick of the bunch - a hard-top coupé (the sportiest offering at the
time), it certainly shows potential to supply similar dosages of fun, with its
winning combination of RWD and very little weight, especially when presented
with suitable modifications.
The dilemma swam
around his head until a late night internet browsing session resulted in Chris
stumbling upon a very reasonably priced 18R-G engine; the ‘hot’ Toyota
powerplant of the ’70s, appearing in 2000GT variants of the Celica and a few
others from the era.
The dilemma swam around his head until a late night internet
browsing session resulted in Chris stumbling upon a very reasonably priced
18R-G engine; the ‘hot’ Toyota powerplant of the ’70s, appearing in 2000GT
variants of the Celica and a few others from the era. With the thought of
wedging this engine in his bay a very appealing one indeed, a clear plan was
formulated in his head: he’d modify the car, but only using parts that were
available in the Corolla’s heyday where possible, and largely focusing on
engine tuning rather than overwhelming visual modifications. Because what was
tucked away under the bonnet couldn’t offend the sacrilege police, right?
