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Owned this car for a short period in 2022. I wanted a small manual run around and this felt like it needed rescuing at the time off its owner. Definitely not a fan of the black wheels it’s currently wearing! From memory it had lived most of its life in Wellington and was dealer serviced. I sold it because I didn’t really have the garage space and didn’t enjoy leaving a soft top outside - the car had been garaged its whole life up until I owned it.

Car has been running great for the last couple months. Everything more or less finished off. Oil coolers and lines are done, made a custom catch can set up using aeroflow catchcans, essentially a fully external pcv system. Used Rob Beck fittings as well as some custom machined adapters to adabt oem fittings to -10AN flares for the high side. Also made a blanking plate for the dash where i removed the radio. In other news, car will be getting a major change in the next few months thats been planned for a long time...

Have been chipping away at this for a while now and finally got it completed The Zf8hp is amazing coupled with the CANformance tcu Have another dyno session booked so it will be interesting to see the difference in peak power but I already know that the car is so much faster and such fun to drive I never thought I would even consider an Auto swap but it has transformed the car !!! Would recommend the CANformance tcu E Throttle conversion for torque management and auto blips Hope to post a dyno run next week

That's an epic first car! Should be easy enough to work on and maintain, and heaps of fun to drive. If anything, your first car should be memorable, not some run-of-the-mill banged up Corolla. All power to him. Had a Saab 93 convertible as the first car I ever bought and paid for myself. Absolute money pit but damn was it awesome cruising down the motorway at night with the top down and the Milky Way stretching out across the sky above you. Still remember it fondly despite the financial disaster it turned out to be.

First car? Get an E46 with the M43 engine. Seriously. It'll handle well enough as stock, and the handling can be improved. That's a big plus. The engine, gearbox and drivetrain are reliable, and easy to work on. Parts are readily available. Parts are cheap. No - it is not the glamour that a Z3 might be, but it's a better, more practical and more suitable car for a first car.

Always looking tidy @Sammo

Neil is onto it, Schmeidmann is definitely a good option, if you can get me part numbers or a photo of what you're after I get trade pricing there, and their shipping isn't too bad. There's two other companies I can check with too and will get their names when I'm at my computer next. One is out of Germany that has a lot of NOS and repo parts, that are great to deal with. And the second I think is in Denmark that I got put onto while searching for E3 parts.

Was a while ago now, but I'm pretty sure SD had a NIB pattern panel in stock. They might have a supplier? Vink Motorsport and Schmeidmann have it for reasonable monies, but shipping is the killer I imagine.

File photo

A twin cam E30 vert with a slightly shorter wheel base... What could go wrong! Seriously though, my first car was an E36 318iS which quickly got chopped for an E30 and they were great to fang around without getting into too much trouble in the early 2000's. I think rather than the handling or power aspects of any first car, more thought should be put into skill set building. I remember that at 16 we were lucky enough to have driver training offered around the old Manukau Super Stage with properly setup cars, on adjustable dollies to mimic differing driving scenarios. Having that knowledge of how cars react in certain situations and how to recover from them saved my bacon many a time as a teen - because teens do dumb sh*t, and it's a bit late to work things out when there's unexpected rotation at the point of diminishing talent. The bonus of buying a manual 6 cylinder Z3 is that he'll definitely not lose money on it!

In a Z3, there’s only one other person to say “Watch this!” to.

Update Been driving around having fun but the gearbox is very 80s so decided to go for a a zf8 conversion so have started the process