I could get away with this sort of thing on the Stanza, at one stage it looked like this:
I could have continued this look by applying red oxide all over the place, black stonechip on the door bottoms and crashed it into a few walls, but I just won't - it'll just be an old heap. I'm not a concours car person, I'm not patient/rich enough and I like to use my cars properly. However, I can finish off the paint to an acceptable standard, get the rubbing strips back on (must be the only car I can think of which
needs them to break up the slabby sides!), correct the bumper as it's not hanging straight and maybe at the end it'll look half-decent. Often I wonder why I bother, but the fact I'm essentially "restoring" a Stanza T11 amuses the hell out of me. And who knows, if it looks alright maybe it'll probably have a better chance of survival.
The thing I don't like about fashionable "rat-look" cars is the people who see it done and think "hey I should do that" and mess up a decent car trying to gain the look. For example, I drive past a VW Polo most days, was always a nice enough thing, shiny paint, looked like a good example. Then one day it had been entirely resprayed (badly) in red oxide and it went from there with zany stickers, rusty steel wheels etc. The problem I have with it is that after he gets bored of it, no one will want to buy it so it'll have to get scrapped ("normal" owners will think it looks awful, ratlook fans would surely not want a car that has already been done). Not exactly a rare/expensive car but it would have been an alright runaround for someone, now its destiny is to be neatly compressed into a cuboid.
Yeah try arguing that when a cop is giving you a defect notice.
