Thought I would post up a topic with some pictures of my winter project which has now finished and is ready for the 2008 season!

For a few years now I'd been wanting to try out racing in Fiesta XR2's here in Scotland. There is a good healthy championship on the go so it was quite appealing. It took me till 2007 however to finally sit my ARDS test which you need to pass to get a racing licence.

It then took me to September 2007 to find a suitable car to buy. My first run was during a Speed Sunday event at Knockhill at the start of October. It was quite an experience as you can imagine an XR2 on one of these days is outpaced by a variety of other cars that are taking part.

This is what the car looked like after I bought it.



I had my first races at the end of October and they didn't go as planned. I had an off on the second lap which put me well down the order and I began to be lapped. Thats when I spun off and was collected by another car causing damage to the rear passengers wing.

I got the car home shortly after and started to work on it:



After a few hours I had all the stickers off it:



Then I stripped all the bumpers, lights etc from the car and started to my bent panels and using more filler than I'd have liked to get them straight again.





After all the filler was smooth I primered it all and rubbed the car down in preparation for spraying:





Next day I masked up the car:





Out came the spray gun!



After the respray I also had to spray my doors, bonnet and XR2 bodykit the same colour. It was my first ever time re-spraying a car so the finish wasn't perfect. However a bit of flatting with 1200 wet and dry then buffing up with Farecla G3 and there was soon a shine on the car.

I started putting the bodykit back on us Sikaflex which does it's job great. Most of the original bolt on points for the kit were no longer there or snapped off so that's what I had to resort to.



Also painted the bumpers gloss black to give them a nice finish. The standard plastic looked old and dated.



Then it was to put all the remaining items back on, some stickers and she is ready to go!

 

cool as................................

looks much better orange fella!

 

am luving it