Is it just me, or does this look like a Jaguar, not a Ferrari?  Especially the front.

Counterpoint: The hardtop XK looks better.

I’ve always wondered why people like the styling of these cars. I remember the Top Gear episode where they reviewed it and I was thinking they did a great job of sarcastically praising it the whole show, I couldn’t believe anyone would actually like the thing.

I can’t confirm this, but I believe gas stations had the same problems at first too.  Eventually someone realized having twenty different grades of gasoline and thirty nozzles wasn’t a good idea.

If you live in a big enough city, your options are likely: Rent at ~$1000 a month, or buy a house with a longer commute outside of town for north of $500k.

New, yes, you’re not going to make money. Used is a different story.

For FDs and the RX-8, absolutely. A new crate engine from Mazda is about $3k (plus a core charge and installation if you don’t do so yourself). Engines are disposable, interior and exterior pieces are unobtanium.

Exceptionally poor timing here. I sold my ‘79 RX-7 last weekend.

Funny enough, it’s not the apex seals that fail in RX-8s. The ignition coils only last about 20k, when they fail, the engine starts to misfire, which kills the catalytic converter, which then (very quickly) kills the engine.

I’m not a fan of the looks either, but it’s the turbocharger that kills it for me, not the looks.

$10k could have been the paint alone if he went for top quality. I’d hazard a guess that paint was still fully half of the budget and the rest went to parts and rust repair, since it sounds like he did most of the mechanical work himself.

Maybe that’s exactly what was done and it was cheap paint that flaked off shortly afterward.

Rarely restored cars like this are just about the only cars it actually makes any sense to restore yourself.

Is anyone really bothered by the difference between a 200 and 240 mile range? They’re both still well below a distance easily covered in a day’s drive, so the car is limited to commuting anyway. And nobody should be pushing the limits of their range on a daily commute.

If you knew traffic was that bad, and it was just five miles, why didn’t you just walk or take a bicycle? A few hour walk or like 30 minutes on a bike vs six hours of driving seems like a pretty simple choice.

Depends on the type of carb. For anything with a single carb, you do pretty much always disassemble the whole thing, the whole purpose of a rebuild is to replace all the gaskets and clean all the metal parts.

$6k for an 12A FB (not an SA) would buy you a concourse-level car. The few that have sold on BaT recently were way over market value.

Looked it up and I guess I was wrong.  The GX was the canada-only trim I was thinking of, and it’s for FCs.  This is probably a GSL.

I’m pretty sure the GSX was a canada-only trim, basically the equivalent of a GSL.

For what it’s worth, the factory paint on even a brand-new car is still a $10k paintjob. The owner just didn’t pay for it directly (and of course it doesn’t cost the factory that much to do it in bulk before the car is assembled.)