What to buy
When Shelley and I moved in together part of the reason was so that I could save up to buy the car of my dreams, a 1996 twin turbo Supra. Now we have lived together for nearly a year and my financial situation is greatly improved. My current car is also feeling pretty sorry for itself so I’ve been looking around at possible replacements.
Of course I started looking at the Supra’s and they are very appealing cars but they are quite expensive to buy and very expensive to run. So then I considered a newer Celica, the 7th Gen VVTL-i. These should be more cost effective to run as they are 1.8’s compared to the 3.0 in the Supra and the 2.0 in my current Celica GT. They are also supposed to be more powerful than my current car and they look pretty cool too.
Then I briefly considered an Accord Type-R as it was perhaps a more practical car and still fairly powerful. Shelley put me off this though as she thinks Hondas are all driven by Grandads and to be fair my Grandfather always drove Hondas.
After reading various opinions in forums and owners club sites it seems that the best choice would be the Celica GT4. Now you may notice that the GT4 was not mentioned above and you would be right. In all honesty I love my Celica but as it’s about to require a lot of work I thought I might as well upgrade to a more powerful car. The GT4 is the perfect choice, internally it is identical to my current car, externally it is very similar but mechanically it is quite different. It’s 2.0 turbo engine generates nearly 100bhp more than my GT, and it’s 4WD transfers that to the road more efficiently. With a few “sensible” modifications I can easily get it to produce over 300bhp.
Yesterday Shelley and I ventured to a garage in East Grinstead to test drive a GT4 and a 7th Gen Celica. The GT4 was everything I expected it to be, it felt a little more grounded than my car but the acceleration was something else entirely. The newer Celica was lovely inside, the ride was smooth and comfortable but the engine was seriously lacking. I am willing to assume that this may have been partly down to the automatic gearbox of the model I was test driving but I was still left wanting the GT4.