So I’ve owned the car for nearly 10 years now, through that time its been 4 different colours, had at least 3 different style of aero on it and more sets of wheels than I can remember.

I’ve always loved the R32, both for its presence in Group-A racing and its popularity as a drift car. Everything from the noise maker RB20 to its body lines and aggressive stance on the road tick boxes for me.

The car was originally silver from factory, and an RB25de Automatic, before it was imported it was swapped to an RB20det Manual with some basic mods. I don’t know much of its history prior to me owning it in Australia but it was green when I bought it with a gross fibreglass bodykit, quarter panels filled with rust and bog but otherwise a pretty clean solid car.

Not long after purchasing it I wanted to paint it, so I replaced a lot of the aero, put over fenders on it to cover the original rusty quarters and resprayed it in the driveway in a makeshift booth with my friends, at that time I was running a set of 18” equip 05s. Over time I got bored of the cars look, changed the wheels, decided to wrap it, gave up on wrapping it halfway through then peeled it off which peeled off my driveway respray as well. I wont go into too much detail about this period of owning the car but it basically stayed as is for a while until I decided to really clean the car up.

I’d changed from 18s to 17s and then eventually to 16s getting the car even lower and even wider with each set of wheels going from a set of 18x9.5 +20 to the set of 16x10.5 -32 TE37V’s it current sits on. By this point these were no longer 5k cars, parts were getting more expensive and destroying aero and breaking things by driving/drifting a low car didn’t seem as appealing as it once was. This thing needed a major overhaul and clean up.

I decided I wanted to paint the car again, however this time do it properly. So I searched for ages for a set of genuine R32 GTR quarter panels to replace the overfenders, replaced the whole front end with genuine GTR panels to get the car as wide as possible. Through the process of preparing the car for paint we rolled and pulled both the front and rear fenders, tubbed the rear and bodyworked everything to be as smooth and as seamless as it could be. I knew I wanted the car to be black again so went with the factory GTR colour 723 black pearl metallic.
 

I feel like once the car was painted, I’d really done it justice. It went from being a somewhat clapped out 5k car to something really special, and have continued to keep that same perspective in mind as I’ve modified the car from there. Making sure that anything I did on it was done to the best of my ability and remained true to the vision I have for the car, from sourcing uncommon aero like the side skirts and bonnet lip directly from the company in Japan who produces them to searching for months and months for an original windscreen to make sure all the glass colour matches.

For me, those small details are what sets my car apart from the others, and are probably details majority of people might miss if they don’t know what their looking at.