So I haven’t made any car related ill advised impulse buys recently, and after turning 40 last year I was due for some sillyness. A mate of mine has been hassling me to get my butt into gear and buy a Nugget to run in Nugget Nationals with him, and I kept putting it off by saying I would finally get the MX5 going etc.
During all this period my dad was passing away with terminal cancer (which is another thing in and of itself) and I wanted to make sure that I had enough time to spend doing stuff with the kids. Well, after watching Chasing Midnight with my kids at Christmas it kind of sealed the deal as my eldest and middle wanted to start to play with cars, and the eldest can start to do Junior Motorkhana in a year or so. Plus with the quite restrictive regs for Nugget Nats there shouldn’t be too much scope creep on this thing. Less scope creep == more driving time.The spark was lit.
After that the only questions were what to get, and how to get nopics to sign on. Settling on a car was actually the easy part. Because of the regulations for Nugget Nationals the base price of the car has to be under $3000, basically stock (i.e. no non-factory engines), and maximum 1.5L engine capacity. The engine capacity limit and no non-factory swap meant that a lot of older cars were instantly out of contention, such as Corollas or Civics. Some of the newer cars are rather more spritely (my dad’s 2016 Mazda 2 manual would have been good) but too expensive. The sweet spot was about early 2000s, and being a Toyota guy the option of an Echo Sportivo was a no brainer. The only question was whether to buy an off the shelf Sportivo, or get a base model Echo and swap in the 1.5L 1NZ from the sedan. Getting nopics to sign on was a bit harder, but with dad’s cancer we had become accustomed to having two cars for a lot of the running around, and combined with a summer of multiple kids birthday parties on the same day as well as weekday sports in different locations having a second car was becoming a must. Nopics signoff came with a condition though, it had to be running and kept running 99% of the time… i.e. no engine swaps. Fine, Sportivo it is.
With that it was off to find a car. I had a look at a couple of different ones, as well as the usual Marketplace and Scumtree searches. Quite a few were from dreamers who were wanting $7-8k for a clean but basically stock vehicle, or a few people who were misrepresenting their 1.3L “swap” as a Sportivo (one still had the 1.3L 2NZ in it). In the end I found this nugget, and managed to work out a deal.
Its a 2001 Toyota Echo Sportivo, 220k km on the clock, but with a supposed 110k km engine swapped in late last year. The guy had been running it in Nugget Nationals over the last couple of years, but gave up to go camping instead.
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Has the prerequisite clearcoat and paint fade on every upper surface that all non-white Toyotas have, along with a bunch of dings and scrapes which the guy hadn’t bothered to do anything about.
This photo with my mate’s PH2 shows a bit more of the paint fade “patina” along with the dents
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Driver’s side foglight was found in the glovebox…
Engine bay is stock as a rock:
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Currently it has some CSA wheels on it which foul on the guards a bit at full compression, and has a GC8 seat in it, which I’m undecided about keeping or taking out.
First thing to do though is to return it to mostly stock and put it through RWC so it can fulfil its other function as a runabout. Then the (super limited) modding can begin.