Currently up for auction here in the Great Frozen North is this beautiful Austin Healey Sprite, spotted by our beloved MaryWithAnM. It has already been converted to a race car, so there is absolutely no need for you to go through the agonizingly painful process of converting it. Let’s face it, any time you’re dealing with an old English sports car, it’s going to be tough to do any modifications at all without feeling some pain. This little Healey solves that problem. Let’s face it, it just doesn’t get much cooler than the possibility of taking a gorgeous old sports coupé around a racetrack. From the look of it, it’s already equipped for duty in a vintage race series, so all you need to do is give the little four-pot motor a good tune-up and head for the track. The 998cc engine is well-sorted for the old <1L Displacement category, and would give you a whole lot of fun while looking good doing it. The estimated selling price is between $50,000 and $75,000. That might seem like a lot, but if you wanted to restore or build a vintage racer, you would be looking at substantially more than that cost. Since most vintage race cars of this sort start out as barely-surviving barn finds, there can be an easy $50k invested just in bringing the car back from the dead, and then another $50k is required just to get it up to race spec. And that’s a pretty conservative estimate. This could be a reasonably cheap way to get your foot in the door of a very exclusive series. Of course, by “reasonably cheap”, I still mean “about 20 times more than the average Hoon will spend on a vehicle, and still well over 100x too much to be eligible for a LeMons race”. Unless you’re really good at cheating or can sweet-talk one of the judges. I hear Lieberman is a pushover if you buy him flowers and a box of chocolates, and tell him how pretty he looks in his robes.
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