Part Two of Reggie’s mission to catch the perfect Roadster…

After agreeing on a price for the Roadster my parents and I, over the course of a weekend fishing trip, then negotiated for me to purchase their family soft roader for a very reasonable price. They wanted to downsize and this arrangement allowed them to do so while keeping the X-Trail close by to carry the fishing gear. It seemed as if everything was falling into place, almost too easily. However, as some of you who know me would attest, I naturally made things somewhat harder for myself…

As SAKE was such a well known car, I wanted to keep my purchase of it a secret in order to surprise my group of friends. Of course trying to drive home a car that you’ve just purchased without any wheels interstate is a little hard to keep a secret. I consulted a close group and we planned a road trip weekend, buying new wheels and bringing them with us, and driving the new car home. As a nice surprise, a recently ordered (and rather significant) shirt from Import Bible arrived at my office - the car that is printed on the shirt is SAKE. It’s really her. 

New Dilemma: Shoes for SAKE
Upon deciding to pursue this car, I had already made the decision to change the wheels on the car to something of my own taste. During my negotiation with the seller I suggested deducting the cost of the wheels from the purchase price as I had something else in mind. As a stop gap, I was going to borrow a set of ultra-rare JDM wheels that a friend was importing. These wheels would be arriving in Melbourne and all I would have to do is pick them up on route to picking up SAKE. It was the perfect plan… until I found out they came with bald tyres… and were still sitting in a container ship somewhere between Japan and Australia.  

After further discussion with the friends in the loop, the “Dirty Little Secret” party if you may, the option to buy a set of Enkei 14x7 +19 RPF1 seemed like the best solution. They were apparently in stock, and while shipping from the US would most likely arrive in time, I had the feeling that they wouldn’t and the problem of having no wheels when we collected SAKE would still exist.

So, the final and most sensible option was to borrow a friend’s stock NA8 wheels in the interim, put some new tyres on them for the drive back and then swap the new tyres over when the Enkei’s arrived.

So now that the wheel Dilemma was solved, our next dilemma was, “Who wants to go for a roadtrip?”

Originally we were a party of 5 (how appropriate!) however we only had one car organised to get us there. The issue with this being that if we took the IS, we couldn’t use the back seat on the way home due to the amount of spare parts that were being sold with the car. This meant that one passenger had no seat for the return journey. So then there were four.

Part one of the Dirty Little Secret can be found here

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