William set up a time to pick up the car so Andrew and I will be driving down on Friday evening. On a side note, I stopped by HMS Motorsport today and the Sparco EVO3 seat has been released. It lists for $599 and they have some in stock to try out. Fat drivers unite!

My insurance company informed me this afternoon that I can simply pick up the new car, toss on my old plates and immediately start driving it. I have seven days to actually do the title transfer, registration transfer and migrate my current insurance policy over to the new VIN. Much easier than I thought it would be!

I drove down to CT this afternoon to inspect the Impreza and give William his deposit. It turns out that the car needs quite a bit of work for me to consider it as a daily driver, much less a rally car. The clutch is severely worn, or completely out of adjustment, because it doesn’t engage until the clutch pedal is almost completely released. There are also signs of motor oil covering most of the bottom of the engine and headers. I could actually push in a gasket that caused oil to drip out onto my finger. Luckily, gaskets are cheap and the clutch is getting replaced with a race spec one anyway.

The body, on the other hand, is 100% worthy of a rally car. Every single panel has taken damage of some sort and that eases my and my navigator’s mind because we won’t be destroying a car with a good looking shell. Minimal shell repair is required but quite a bit of Bondo will be used, along with Krylon, to fill in the scrapes and dents and give us a nice blank canvas for sponsorship regalia.

William Ryan listed his Subaru Impreza L for sale on nasioc.com and I immediately made an offer, set up a dialog and scheduled a time to inspect the vehicle. The car is an MY96 AWD Subaru Impreza L sedan with manual transmission and EJ22 NA boxer motor. Unbelievably, this is the exact platform I was looking for to start the project.