Hey guys,

One of things I did during my little absence a couple of weeks ago was to buy a new car... kind of.

It is a 1990 Toyota Celica GT-Four. It is the road-going version of the car that Toyota used to Rally in the early 1990's, and is a 2.0 turbo with 4WD (Basically the Toyota equivalent of Subaru making a WRX version of their Impreza, or Mitsubishi making an Evo version of their Lancer).

Apart from the car not being even remotely "new" (it is 15 years old), the thing that makes this particular car interesting is the fact I've owned it before! Yes, you heard right... Not just the same model, but I have actually owned this very car previously, selling it reluctantly about three years ago when I needed the money to help build my house.
The guy I sold it to only kept it for about 6 months and then sold it to another guy who is a "friend of a friend", who looked after it very well for the next two and a half years. I found out the new owner was putting it up for sale for a good price, and within 24 hours it was back in my garage! woohoo! It was like being reunited with an old family member After my kombi, this is the 2nd most memorable car I've ever owned. Now its home again!

Now I just have to sell my other car (a 1992 Toyota Supra 2.5 twin-turbo) to pay for it! I should be able to sell the Supra for about what the GT-Four cost me, so the plan is to simply break even.

Enough rambling, here is a photo I took of it yesterday. While it certainly doesn't look like a new car, its hard to believe it is 15 years old!

Hello Mr. Kombisauras have you had your eyes checked recently? That car looks mint! I'd pass that for new if you didn't just tell me it was 15 years old, congrats on the re-purchasing of your, what looks fast, car... Btw my family owned a kombi for a long time up intil about 10 year ago.

Nice looking Ride. Great shot too.

Nice car, and it sure looks new to me.

Great photo aswell.

/P.L

Nice Ride Kombi, haven't owned one myself but a couple of my friends have had them in the past.

Very nice, shiny, new look
Contrasted with the not-so-new road and dirty puddle! nice

That thing looks like a tonne of fun!!

Thanks guys,

Dewy - your family owned a kombi!!!! <sigh>

Craig.. woohoo! You know some Alltrac owners??
Are they active on the 'net? I used to run a GT-Four/Alltrac website (www.gtfour.com) back when I owned the car the first time around, and there is quite an active internet community for them (mainly due to the complete lack of support in the real world). Everyone seems to know everyone, so if they've been around for a few years and are active on the 'net then I might have heard of them.

And yeah Jeri, they *are* a heap of fun.. especially in the wet or on loose surfaces where they totally come into their own. It puts out about 285hp at the moment - not earth-shattering by today's standards but enough to have some fun with (and should be enough to crack high 13's in a 1/4 mile). But I didn't buy it to be the fastest car in the world. Like the kombi (but for very different reasons), it simply brings a smile to my face when I get behind the wheel.

And thanks for the comments on the photo - that one actually took a bit of work to get looking like that thanks to a very dull sky when I took it. Although most of the tweaks are quite subtle, it has about 8 layers to it with seperate exposure values for the top surfaces of the car, the side, the puddle, the wheels, the windows and the background. I converted from RAW to 48-bit colour and have kept everything in that mode to reduce the chance of posterisation with so many tweaks, and I think the resulting file (in Corel format) is over 160mb!

Below are two earlier versions of the above shot. The first is exactly how it came out of the camera as an unedited RAW file, the 2nd is how it appeared after tweaking the RAW values (ie when I started photoshopping it). Just my effort to keep this post at least partially photography-related.

What a beautiful machine! Great photo too, mate!

I doubt they were on the net... neither owned computers back then, doubt they do now LOL. They were both just complete pettrol heads and built both cars to look like Rally replicas.

Styled after the 1994 Rally cars of the type used in teh Network Q rally series driven by Colin McCrae.

Looks like you have been having a bit of rain over your way too. Like the treatment on the #2 shot.