The back story is fairly simple. I currently run a warehouse for a 3PL company, and my site is in Worcester. I live in South Leicestershire, so it's a bit of a trek across the M6/M42/M5.....70ish miles each way, 4 days a week. It's not great. I've got a company car, a Golf GTD, which has been great but racking up the miles at a rate of knots (73k in two and a bit years). I've been luck enough to get a job much, much closer to home. 17 miles each way
With only going to be doing circa 10k a year at most, I decided not to take the company car option, get something fairly simple and cheap and easy to run, something I was familiar with and run that for a year whilst saving a pile of cash for something nicer. A 306!
So pretty much the minute I'd decided that, a rather nice GTi6 pops up in Coventry!
A Ph3, late 2000, X plate GTi6. A fairly well known car amongst the 306 community, it appeared fairly standard, or so I thought. Couldn't figure out why I kept stalling it until I out something on the Facebook page and it turns out the car is a little more modified than I was told. Turns out it had a decent period of being maintained by Mr Grimsley and during that time, it had some fairly tasty suspension and brake mods, along with a lightened flywheel. That mostly got removed when it was sold to the guy I bought it from but it still has lowered suspension, roller bearing wishbone bushes, uprated rear beam, upper and lower strut braces, braided rear brake lines and the flywheel is still in there! That lot aside, there is a bulging history file, 124k on the clocks and generally, it's a very clean example.
Pics from.the Facebook advert:
Needed a couple of bits doing immediately. The tyres, whilst still with lots of tread, were fitted in 2011 and it had done very little other than stand really since that point. The seller told me the side walls on the front had perished. The driver's side was awful. Not seen a tyre perish like this. I wasn't prepared to drive it home on this tyre so took one of my spare Rallye rims and swapped it over to bring it home.
Id ordered a set of Pilot Sport 3's in a 195/50/15 size from that seller on eBay to replace them.
So the car has sat at home not doing much really awaiting arrival of the new tyres. Been out for the odd drive (god those Firestone's are awful tyres but they are very old, hard etc) but nothing much.
Yesterday, it went to Carl's to have the tyres fitted and it MOT'd. Had the chance to have a good look underneath it too and generally, it's pretty clean underneath, stiffener panels have avoided the curse of the trolley jack etc. It drives so much better with the PS3's on, correctly balanced, and passed the MOT!
Other bits I've done so far are to replace the broken piece of trim on the filler cap...
A replacement from a breaker for £10 and....needs a bit of trim stuff to make it look better again but it's better than not having it!
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Cherry Red Rallye .... On going OEM spec restoChina Blue GTi6 .... Weekend toy
Black 208 GTi .... Wife's car now
Silver BMW 550i.... The executive missile