How To: Buy A Mid-Engined Exotic For Almost Nothing

If you're shopping for a car under $4000, there's one of two ways it'll go. You can either get something undesirable or boring in good condition with a lot of miles - or you can get something that was the bee's knees a few decades ago, with a few issues, for about the same price.  This was the decision a friend of mine was facing when shopping for a vehicle.  His brother was sick and tired of him borrowing his car, he had the money saved up, he just didn't know what to get.  This is where I stepped in.

"James, what's the coolest thing you can get for under $4 grand?  Or preferably under three grand, leaving a little room for repairs?"

I paused, looked at him.  "That's probably not what you should be looking for as your only car.  Don't you need this to get to work?"

"I know.  But I don't mind something that needs work more frequently.  I've been saving up this money forever, I want something I like."

This is the kind of thinking I can get behind.  I mean, 4 grand will get you a mid to late 90's Civic four door with a single-cam D-series, a 5-speed, and a gazillion miles.  Or a Corolla, or a Cavalier, or something else dreadful like that.  But he wanted something more interesting than that.  Something that splits the $4,000 balance somewhere between a totally stock Civic, and a Maserati Biturbo with blown head gaskets.  (And yes, you can pick up Biturbos in the US for under 4 grand - there's been at least one that ran in the LeMons $500 endurance car series).  So off to the mighty craigslist.org we went, in search of something good.

We went through the usual options - E30 3-series, Honda CRX's, Fox-body 5.0 Mustangs, 1st generation turbo DSM's, Preludes, etc.  We actually drove about 50 miles outside of Raleigh to look at what seemed like a peach at the time- an '88 Mazda MX6 LX with a full engine and wiring swap from a Probe Turbo GT, 30,000 miles on a professional engine rebuild with a mild (0.020") overbore, fresh upgraded clutch, lots of aftermarket components.

It turned out to be a total turd.  The side-exit exhaust with a glass-pack sounded lovely, but this MX6 had more issues than a New York news stand.  The interior was half disassembled (according to the owner, earlier that day - he'd been planning to swap in the nicer interior from his GT parts car, but, and I quote, "got side tracked."  Sigh.)  The rear drum brakes were making a dragging noise similar to nails on a chalk board.  The valve stem on the passenger front tire was being held in with a goo plug(!)  And most alarmingly, the half-assed engine management hacks made the car basically undriveable.  A normal MX6 GT/Probe Turbo makes 7.3 pounds of boost from it's tiny IHI RHB5 turbo, good for 145bhp and 190lb-ft torque.  This one retained the stock injectors, fuel pump, and ignition system but was "chipped" for 12psi of boost, with a shiny aftermarket manual boost controller installed to fool the wastegate for even more boost.  Result?  Break-up and misfire in gears 1-3, and alarming acceleration in 4th gear.  We moved on, saddened by the fact that Craigslist ads can almost always  be relied upon to be full of crap.

We looked at more ads, mostly a lot of early and mid 90's Preludes and CRX's, and out of the blue one day he calls me.

"What's an MR2 Turbo?"

...pause.

"It's a Toyota, mid engined, looks sort of like a Ferrari.  Why?"

"Well, there's one on Craigslist in running condition for $2500.  The seller says he's had 10 calls on it in the last 2 days.  Do you want to go look at it?"

Why yes, yes I do!

So we cranked up the JTA (Japanese Transportation Appliance) and headed out to Fuquay-Varina, about 40 minutes south-west of Raleigh.  After negotiating a neighborhood seemingly built on the side of a mountain, we found the house address from the ad, and rang the doorbell.

A man greeted us at the door and showed us to the back yard.  Amidst the deep, guttural barking of 4 absolutely enormous (and thankfully caged) Mastiffs, the red MR2 sat in the back corner of the yard, under a tree, looking forlorn.  The paint was awful- probably about 20% of the clearcoat it left the factory with was still there.  Still, a quick inspection showed all the body panels were aligned properly, a good sign it hadn't been slid backwards into a tree and fixed on the cheap (as is the case with many MR2 Turbos these days.)

A quick look around the car showed some stuff was in good shape, some stuff was missing - like the turbo heat shield, the engine bay prop rod, the spare tire - and some stuff was worn out.  The seats have lots of tiny tears, the result of hard leather stretched tight over the seats.

Now, with any car that started life as a turbocharged, mid-engine, rear wheel drive exotic, there are some issues.  The good news: the 3S-GTE motor which is notorious for blowing headgaskets, doesn't overheat, happy to sit in 100° traffic with the temp gauge comfortably in the middle.  The turbo holds boost just fine, it idles just fine, but anything in between there it isn't happy with, leaping in and out of the throttle even when you're holding the gas in the same place.  Probably a throttle position sensor on the fritz, hopefully nothing more complicated.

The seller said the clutch was weak, which I didn't find to be the case - the clutch holds boosting from low speed in 4th gear, so I assume it's fine.  There's an occasional grind going into second gear, likely related to a weak synchro (or potentially-hopefully - a busted transmission mount.)  The EGR (exhaust gas recirculation) pipe going into the plate mounted to the cylinder head is cracked and blowing out exhaust gas, but that's nothing some JB weld can't fix.

The car made the 40 mile or so drive back to Raleigh without issue or explosions - the bucking and jerking made city driving a "challenge," and the clunking from the front suspension over bumps was disconcerting, but the rush of power from the 200hp turbo engine in 2nd and 3rd gear was intoxicating, and with the T-bar roof out, it really felt like driving a miniature exotic - which really is what the MR2 Turbo is.

So it's got a laundry list of small problems, virtually no service history, and will likely be a money pit.  But you know what?  It's still an MR2 Turbo, one of the coolest cars ever made (in my admittedly stinted opinion).  It's mid-engined, rear wheel drive, fast as hell (even stock), it's got T-tops, and it looks like a 7/10th's scale Ferrari F355.  I've professed my love for the SW20 chassis MR2 Turbo in a pretty detailed buyer's guide back in 2009, and to be honest this (along with the Corrado SLC) was the car that got me into cars more than a decade ago.

So while it's probably going to be a headache par excellence, you can bet I'll be getting elbows deep in this rare, exotic Toyota, helping my friend bring it up to spec.  It's not perfect, but where else can you buy a mid-engine rear wheel drive two turbocharged two seater for $2500?  Exactly.  More updates as they come on this coolest of cool project cars!