Well I’ve just bought a new all singing, all dancing, 3 in 1 printer so I thought I’d spend a rather rainy Saturday afternoon scanning in some pics of my old Nova, some of you may remember it from the first issue of TV.
Things started in 1998 when I bought a nice, straight 1.3SR for about £3000 at the time…
Shortly after I bought it I fitted the Vauxhall i-line wheels and fitted lowered suspension, I also fitted twin 40 DCOE’s…
The Weber’s ran like sh1t, despite spending loads of money at Redline in Berkshire on the rollers, so I ditched them and fitted a 32/34 DTML and a high lift cam, power was a usable 85Bhp or so…
After contemplating a 2.0l 16v transplant (and following advice by Lee Hearsey and Ian Searle at the time!) I decided to fit a c16xe. Novatech carried out the conversion, and did a fine job too!! They also fitted poly bushes and a bigger rad…
Tarted it up a bit…
Joe Ellis at BTB made a lovely exhaust for the car (2.25”) I had to spend the day hanging around his workshop having it fitted, the result was worth it though… an awesome piece of kit…
Nice 3” tailpipe, this exhaust was seriously loud!!!
Next step was a bit of interior fettling…
Binned the Mk1 dash…
And went Mk2, with Digidash and TVR wiper stalks, OMEX rev counter sat in centre console…
I had some serious ICE in the car initially; this was also binned to make room for… err… nothing… I didn’t even run a head unit in the end, mind you I wouldn’t have been able to hear it
Fearless cage and strut, I was always a massive fan of Brett Warburtons Nova…
Essex Racing door cards and custom handles…
New bonnet, cool louvers (done by Novatech) and a gen Subaru bonnet scoop…
Again, influenced by Brett’s Nova I decided to paint the rims grey to match the newly painted bumpers and grill…
Now onto the serious stuff. The standard inlet on the c16xe is sh1t, so I threw it away…
To make way for this…
Which were fitted as so…
The exposed cam cover always looks lame, so I deburred it and painted it red…
mmm… new bits…
ITG air filter…
The engine was standard apart from the TB’s and exhaust, I fitted new rollers and ARP’s, but that was about it…
On the roller she made around 160bhp IIRC…
…which was good enough to beat a certain person at the POD (at the time!) LOL…
Revs done a shoot of the car in 1999, which TBH was pretty ****, they didn’t even show a pic of the engine bay!!!
At the PV show in Y2K (I think) a chap approached me and asked me if I fancied having the car featured in a new Vauxhall magazine, I was hesitant at first but when he phoned me and said the concours Corsa they had booked into do a Studio shot on had had a crash or something I thought what the hell… proved to be the Nova’s crowning moment…
All work on the car was carried out by me and my dad.
This was the last time I seen the car…
Unfortuantly the new owner broke it for bits, but it is now with a new owner who has managed to salvage some of the orginal parts and get her back on the road, well done that man
Hope you’ve enjoyed, you’re comments are welcome.
Dec
many excuses come to mind obviously
...so I suppose you could blame that... but you could not blame weight, as you had NO HAIR BACK THEN 
