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After wrecking my first E21, I made the determination that even if the damage was repairable, I didn't want to try it for fear the chassis would never be straight again. I started the search for a doner body for all my hotrod parts. The goal was to find a southern car with a clean, straight body, but with little regard to the condition of the interior or motor. I found a polaris '81 the next spring in Oklahoma on ebay for $900, but it had lots of spare parts so I thought it was a decent deal. We drove 1000 miles from Toledo, OH to Oklahoma City and back to pick the car up in one weekend and the car was considerably rougher than I had anticipated. I guess that's what you get when buying a 20 year old car on ebay.
It had over 200,000 miles on it and burnt oil like it was going out of style, every panel was dented or dinged, the drivers side rear floor was pushed up and torn, it had a thread bare tire and the factory springs had been heated to lower the car (the wrong way to do it). The previous owner had a sweet custom zebra skin center console, huge tach mounted on the dash, fire extinguisher on the A pillar, hood pins, and crappy graphics all over including bullet holes, stripes, and fake BMW tuner stickers that read "Speed Lab Motersports: Extreme Performance". Extreme Performance indeed.
On the 1000 mile trip home, I had to add 2 quarts of oil every 2 hours on the highway. There was an oil fog on the back of the car, but in the spirit of the rest of the car my buddy Tom wrote "820 HP" in the oil with his finger. Here's a few shots of the car on the trip home, complete with Jeremy trying to compete with the level of awesome emanating from the graphics.
Even as bad as the car was I was very excited to be in an e21 again and drove it for the rest of my spring semester until I could tear into for the summer. I started removing the graphics as soon as I pulled in the driveway after a 1000 mile drive.
I cleaned the car it up as much as it would clean up, giving the paint, bondo and primer a good coat of wax and degreasing the tired engine.
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