GTO Muurica Adventures: Why the clown car look?

If you've followed or been following my saga, since I first purchased my beloved 05' GTO back in winter of 2011. You know it was once pristine-ish condition and came in a very rare beautiful Impulse Blue color with a dealer installed sun roof.

Time and mostly my wallet priorities have not been kind to her appearance. I think I spoke about it briefly in previous post,but not in very full detail. A few months before I left Italy I got into a fender bender with an old Fiat 500.

Don't worry, no classic 60's car was damaged. In this case it was a beatup 80's/early 90's square body. The incident creased my old hood, crimped the corners of the fenders, mangled the bumper mounting brackets, moved the headlight buckets,etc.

I got a hood from my late friend John who was stationed at Rammstien airbase at the time. It was a VFN 4.5 Cowl hood fresh in the box. John had bought it for his car during a deployment and never used it. Being a matte black hood and slightly longer than I needed (that's what she said). It hid a lot of imperfections and gave the car a really mean look.

With such a massive manly hood and a very short G/F (now wife) unable to see over it, you can imagine this caused some issues. I ended up trading the hood for the silver RK Sport you see on it now. The fender and hood came off a white car in LA somewhere. So in an effort to fix the car the right way. I acquiredall the parts and just never got it painted.

To repaint old girl to her original color in a nice paintfor the whole body is nearly $5k. This is about average cost and I'm willing to pay. However, between the LS3 swap, transmission rebuild, suspension parts, clutch rebuild,etc. The cosmetics just haven't been jn the cards.

On the flip side it runs good and sounds great ! It'll get painted and be pretty pnce again, it's all just a matter of time.