Yes, she still has the black wheels. They are factory satin black finished TSW evos (rare as hens teeth - i'm still trying to find a spare).

Both cars were privately owned, they just put the fake plates on for the articles to designate the tuning company and horsepower.

My friend Rob had purchased the car new in October of '89 as a birthday present to himself. He spent the next eleven years developing the car with various tuners and being ripped off by most of them.

He wanted big power and a linear/aspirated feel if at all possible.

He sort of achieved this by visiting SVM after he had just been extremely dissapointed by a well known South London race engine builder who had kept the car for six months and (among other scandalous things) had fitted a distorted crank from a blown up race engine in it. The engine was so bad that it barely made the drive to SVM and he kept having to stop and refill it with oil.

SVM salvaged the block (everything else had been ruined by the previous tuner or was just wrong for the engine), and set about creating a monster.

Kevan Kemp did this because he liked Rob so much and was so impressed by the look/condition of the car and wanted to use it as a business promotion. The net result was that Rob got a very very expensive engine at a good discount just for taking the car to a few photo shoots with some silly stickers on it.

The engine build was carried out by SVMs engine specialist, an ex Formula 1 engine builder called Ron Jones, and Kevan did the mapping and setting up as far as I am aware.

The Max Power article features the car shortly before the last of the big upgrades were made, so the Performance Ford one would probably be more up to date.

I think the other article (not sure whether Fast Car or Fast Ford) might actually have been from when the old girl had a Slater Motorsport 180ish BHP conversion and was featured with a red Slater car owned by a chap called Miguel (now sadly written off).
The Slater conversion was a lovely little package, easy on the transmission and very reliable and driveable. The car had RSi ratios at the time so made realy good use of the relatively low power.

The best treatment Rob ever had was by a nice chap called Russel Clark who used to race a Turbo in the Vecta Fast Ford series about 12 years ago and did various bits and pieces to the car in it's infancy.
I only ever met Russel once or twice and I think he is now a professional race instructor.

Hope i've clarified a few points and sorry about the longwinded reply.