This month we find ourselves with a nice fleet of well sorted-cars. We’d love to get them out into the world where they can bring people joy, so please take a look at our inventory if you want a fun car for your August, and for the great car shows coming this September and beyond.

Crane is our nicest Bugeye, immaculate

Pal is our Blue five speed car, with wire wheels, disk brakes and a 1275 engine

Luigi is a very sharp leaf green car

Yuri is quite shiny and a great red driver

Mitchell is another excellent shiny red 1960 driver that has been very well-maintained. We have an automatic Bugeye and other cars for sale too!

Give a call if you would like to have us ship one of these cars to your door!

Gumby is now complete, and ready for the Lime Rock Concours coming on Sunday September 3. I hope to see you at that great event!

Now that we have have ironed-out the rough edges, I had a delightful driving afternoon yesterday running errands. I made a short video (below) so you can perhaps feel the way this fuel injected custom Sprite pulls through the gears. The car has perhaps 85 horsepower which feels like plenty. The car wants to rev, and rewards the driver with a seductive increase in power as the RPMs rise and the cross flow head and roller rockers start to sing. This is not a stock 1275.

And after dinner on this particular warm night, I was reminded of the many night time drives I have enjoyed in this car. Each summer since 1979, this car has been there for me, a partner as we cut through the night air.

This car is the product of hundreds of hours of restoration work. Once it was done, then the fine tuning began, and with a new (and untested for us) cross-flow four-port injected head, a lot of computer-based fine tuning on the laptop was required.

This is a major paradigm shift for all of us who grew up around (worn) SU carbs. We are of the club that is accustomed to richening or leaning a flat after a drive. We know how to hold a piece of rubber hose next to our ear to synchronize our carbs. And we know all about which particular extra virgin olive oil works best in our carburetor dashpots.

Here is a car that has none of that, no dashpot tops to tighten, no carburetors to leak, no rotor to crack and arc, an electronic box tells the injectors what to do. For those into modern cars, this is a so painfully obvious and normal, but having lived with this car through High School with the most-mismatched-wrong jet-leaking throttle shaft SUs on the planet, it is a bit odd to have my old friend powered by such a power plant high tech.

To get this configuration to work, you best need find someone who grew up with a cell phone, not a Unisyn in his pocket… someone who thinks Suburu WRX when he hears the word “Bugeye,” someone who can operate a video game controller while simultanteously posting pictures on Instagram and commenting on a friend’s facebook post. We were lucky enough to find this person and add him to our team. He’s about 30 year younger than the rest of us, but we like him just the same, particularly since he was quite adept at massaging the fuel map for Gumby and making this car purr.

With laptop plugged into the ECU, Doug and I spent a few hours driving around town, me finding the stumbly spots and holding it there, with Doug keying in the adjustments to the fuel flow for that particular throttle setting and RPM. Gradually, we ironed out the kinks. Not one fingernail was dirtied. Our biggest challenge was keeping the laptop battery from running out.

There is something distinctly un-old british car about this process. It flies in the face of everything we do on a routine basis, we didn’t even have to open the bonnet during our two-hour tuning session! The plug for the laptop lives in the passenger footwell… that’s all we needed.

There is also something spectualar about this process. It’s clean! It lasts! It works! It’s infinitely adjustable! And it represents one more way we can power and further develop the cars that we love so much.

A few years ago we built a Concours Gold Bugeye, with all the right parts and pieces to satisfy four judges during a two-hour judging marathon. That was one kind of extreme Bugeye, extremely accurate and authentic. This Bugeye is equally extreme, and completely different. It has been a privilege to have an opportunity to build both. We look forward to continuing to apply what we have learned to the next car. Whether stock or modified, maybe the next one will be yours!

We have changed a lot of rubber parts on Sprites over the years, and it seems that all the same pieces are prone to cracking, on almost every car. A client called recently looking for one of everything for a Bugeye he recently had painted, so we made a kit of the 34 most common pieces that Bugeye owners need. When you replace all the pieces in this kit, your car takes a giant step up in quality and finish.

This video below describes where everything goes and why it matters. We sell the kit in our catalog and you can find it by clicking here.

We love big Healeys too!

We have had many of them, and I have a bj8 and bn2 in my small personal collection. So it is only natural for us to help out a customer with a 1960 BT7 that needs sprucing up in the interior. We’ll polish the cockpit trim, replace a bunch of the vinyl around the interior and put in a new aluminum radiator in preparation for the trip to Florida. We’ll also fit new wire wheels and tires.

Stay tuned to see pictures of this transformation! You can see the “before” condition in the video below:

I get many inquires each week, from shoppers waiting on the side lines, hoping to find the perfect moment to dive in. But what are you waiting for? We are not getting any younger. Join the now 205 people who have blazed the trail. We have awesome cars in stock right now… we would like to send you one so you can enjoy it this summer.

And remember, we are always happy to buy back the cars we prepare, so even if you decide next summer that you want to try something new, we are happy to support you to enjoy this summer, your Bugeye summer, right now.

This beautiful 1960 Bugeye has received a ground-up restoration, performed for a client in Virginia. This week, I took the car for its very first test drive and now it’s ready for final assembly.

But the real work happened months ago, long before the shiny paint went on and new mechanicals were bolted together. Check out this new video below to see what matters most for any classic car restoration.