First of all, may I apologise for the lack of updates on the Celica. Since I wrote my first article I think it is fair to say I have had a bit of an eventful time with the car, as you will see.

It all started with an oil change, what should have been a simple job turned into a nightmare as the threads for the sump plug bolt gave up the ghost. A quick botch repair at a local garage temporarily sorted the problem, but further rectification was going to be required in the near future. In the meantime, I was off to the Goodwood Festival of Speed – my first time: what a fabulous event! The car behaved itself on the trip down, losing hardly any oil and I spent a day in automotive heaven. My particular highlights were seeing Bjorn Waldegard driving a genuine rally ST165 (giving the current WRC guys a run for their money); standing 2 feet from the exhaust of an Aston DBRS9 as it fired up and sitting in the driver's seat of an ST185 (MK2 Celica GT-Four) rally car that had been driven by Carlos Sainz himself.

The return trip was a gentle cruise (apart from a brief moment to show a TVR how to drive quickly through the twisties), but when I parked up at home to let the car cool, a large puddle of oil formed under the car. When the car was cool, closer inspection showed that I now had a second oil leak from somewhere deep in the engine bay and black dust on the underside of the turbo heat shield meant that the original turbo was not long for this world. Combined with the fact that the clutch was on its last legs meant that any repair bill was going to be expensive. For a few days I agonised over my next course of action and in the end decided to get the car fixed by Ian Smith at the Toyauto centre in Nottingham as any fix of the car's problems was beyond my mechanical capabilities. This meant that Ian would be taking the engine out, so it would have been rude not to take advantage of this fact and have a few goodies fitted at the same time. As luck would have it, I had purchased a second hand hybrid turbo a few months earlier which had only been run for a few hundred miles and was capable of delivering up to 400bhp! Unfortunately, the rest of the engine wasn’t capable of running this sort of power and a full forged rebuild was out of my price range, so I decided to compromise and just have a TTE (Toyota Team Europe – the guys who ran the rally car) metal head gasket fitted to allow the engine to cope with the new turbo at reasonably low boost pressures. This was complemented by a new exhaust down pipe to reduce turbo lag.

Ian did a cracking job rebuilding the engine, especially considering that I was due to participate in my first track day two weeks later. The trouble with having a 17 year old car is that many of the bits that have been quite happily doing their jobs for years take an extreme dislike to being disturbed. A few last minute wobbles, including being in Ian’s garage at 9pm the night before the track day (thanks Ian!) and I was off to Elvington for the GT-Four owners club track day. The track-day was huge fun and, even though I was taking it easy with the newly rebuilt engine and new clutch, it really opened my eyes as to what the car can do. Towards the end of the day the car developed an odd hissing noise, so I didn’t really try too hard on the timed run competition that the organisers held, but even so, I still walked away with the trophy for fastest ST165 (by default as the only other ST165 had a misfire, but hey – a win's a win). The hissing noise turned out to be just a split injector seal, so all is now well and I am hooked on track days!

Since the first track day I have had an up-rated rear anti-roll bar fitted to tighten up the handling, had a bit of a tidy up of the bodywork and had the car properly set up on a rolling road. Even given the limitations of the stock ECU I am delighted to report the car is now running at 273bhp with 276ft·lbs of torque – not bad for an old car that was 182bhp stock!

I got a chance to try out this new power on a second track day at Abingdon airfield recently. Coupled with 20 minutes of excellent instruction and I was cornering harder and faster than I ever had before – in the wet! I was even overtaking souped up Elise’s. The track dried out later and the tables were obviously turned, but I loved ever minute of it.

So what’s next? Well I have just got a new job which involves a fair amount of travelling, so I needed something new-ish, reliable and diesel. However, the petrol head part of me couldn’t buy anything too boring, so I have a deposit down on a Skoda Fabia VRS. This means that the Celica is being retired from daily use. Instead it will be my weekend toy and I am hoping to get to as many events and track days as I can in it this summer. It also means that a new plan is being hatched to completely rebuild the car over the next winter into a fast road / track day / hillclimb/ sprint monster. Project 300bhp? – nah, more like project 400bhp!