The new Daily Trueno GT-APEX hatch

[ae8zn6]

Hey guys,

I have been holding all info about this very tight to the chest, but I took delivery of what will become my new daily on the Tuesday just gone.

I brought it in through Prestige Motorsports, very smooth process really, and super happy with the car. I had been looking at branching out a bit and buying an FD3S, R34GTT or S15 as a new daily, I figured something like that would be fun but not completely unachievable budget wise. Then I saw the ad for Slipp's JDM Levin notch and all that went out the window, I remembered how much fun it was to bash around with a stock bigport and the hunt for a new sprinter was on. Here is a link to Slipp's ad: Slipp seemed to fall off the planet or something and wouldn't return PMs or SMS so that never ended up eventuating... Shame for him I guess, I clearly had money ready

So I had a look around locally, focusing the search on JDM cars. I did that for a couple of reasons: Firstly, I have to move around fairly often for work, and I already had to sell one of my previous cars because the couple of grand I spent on engineering was suddenly meaningless in the state I was moving to. Also, just so much more equipment from stock, including a bunch of things that are really hard to add aftermarket.

So with the car I wanted in mind I started trawling the Japanese auction sites. At first I didn't sign up with an importer, I figured I would do that when I saw a car I liked and the search was a bit more serious. I decided that if I was going to the trouble of importing I should get a Trueno hatch. I came to this decision for a couple of reasons too. Firstly, hatches are more flexible for daily life, you can move heaps of stuff in them (I have literally moved around 4AGE's in the back in my old white daily) and I had never had a Trueno, so novelty factor. Also, I figured that a Trueno hatch will likely hold its value best particularly if if was panda (Takumi tax lives on!).

I soon realised that stock Trueno hatches came at a premium and was pretty worried that I wouldn't be able to afford a decent one. Then my car came up, obviously being an auction website you couldn't tell what it was going to sell for, but I decided I'd really like it. At this point I approached Prestige and signed up. Unfortunately, and I kind of knew this before I approached them, but the forecast time of auction in Japan is very short because they process so many cars. Over there you literally get about 2 days notice. I didn't see this car until the day of it's auction and by the time I had signed up I was realistically too late to get the car inspected in person (which is part of the service) and then bid at auction. Luckily for me, the car didn't make reserve the first time around. It was put back up for auction a week later and I managed to secure it.

Here are the auction photos/sheet for the car:







It looked very sexy, so I had it inspected and got back a number of much higher res photos, here are a couple of them:













So I guess the big development since the auction was taking delivery. It was delivered to my house on Tuesday, I will be doing most of the work for the compliance myself and then getting it inspected by a compliance engineer and then DoT for rego. Here is a quick picture I took of it on my driveway on Tuesday afternoon:



As for specs:

1987 Trueno Sprinter GT-APEX
Power steering
Power windows
Power mirrors
Power sunroof
Automatic climate control
Genuine Uras 'Monkey Magic' bodykit
Hatch spoiler
Custom brown metallic interior respray
Colour change to white exterior spray including door jams etc (really good job by Japanese standards)
2 1/4" custom over the diff exhaust including headers and de-cat pipe
Front custom coilovers using stock struts with unknown dampeners and swift springs
Rear unknown springs and TRD blue shocks
Rose jointed adjustable panard bar
Stock swaybars front and rear
Strut braces front and rear
It currently has a Bride fixed back with genuine bride super low sidemount rails (will be swapped out for rego)
Rear interior plastics missing
LED look tail lights
Cracked dash (even happens to JDM cars eventually )
Super clean black interior
Super dark tint (will be removed for rego)
tint over indicators (again will have to be removed for rego)
Motor is believed to be stock bigport and stock clutch
Engine earthing kit
SUPER clean looking JDM T50
Stock JDM T series disk diff
Other stuff I will discover along the way.

I have had a good crawl around under the car and am super happy with the condition of the car. A bit of work to do for rego, typical old car things like ball joints need doing, plus some things for compliance (currently no rear seatbelts fitted for example).

Many fun times to be had in the future.


PS, does anyone have any idea what this is?

[Matt]

looks nice man, I got a msg the other day asking for that sales add to be deleted by some random who bought the car. So safe to say it was sold to someone else.

As for the weird thingy, it looks to have fuel wires going to it, check to see if it takes a SIM card cos it could very well be a gps tracker of sorts.

[Jimmee1990]

Car looks awesome, would be heaps of fun. Bringing it over to Melbourne with you?

[ae8zn6]

Yeah right, I had definitely not considered that as a possibility... Seems weird to have a switch to disable it if it was something like that though...

Thanks mang, will definitely be making the trip with me. Part of the reason I definitely wanted a JDM car as I don't need to worry about engineering in different states because its all factory

[johl]

does it have aircon? get some central locking and you have yourself a fun 'modern' car

[ae8zn6]

Hey Johl, that was basically the plan. The aircon got ripped out in Japan because they couldn't prove it didn't have the old CFC gas. But the system is still there I just need to get a new canister and top it up. On top of that I got a relatively cheap bluetooth headunit and the alarm I bought has passive keyless entry etc. So it will more or less be a proper 'modern' car... just one built in the late 80's

[ash86]

I love this so much, hopefully you get it registered and on the road before you move away. I really want to check it out.

[scotty]

Mint, I love it!

Looks like it would be quite fun to drive Robbo.

[ae8zn6]

Work towards the compliance is pretty well done, just a couple more things, then re-assemble and off for my inspections...

...The view in my garage tonight...

[dove grey 64]

Nice score.