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Hi Michael, all I know is that it was purchased in London by someone and stayed in the UK until the late 70’s and was then imported to the US. They were in Columbus, Ohio area. They kept it until, I think 81 or 82, when the wife made him sell during a divorce. That is what the previous owner told me. He bought it and moved it to Bloomington, Indiana and drove it over the next 10 or so years. He kept a journal of everything he did to it, including gas tank fill ups, mileage, spark plugs, etc…. It then decide to overheat and blow a head gasket in the mid 90’s. So he parked it in his garage. It stayed there collecting dust.
I come into the picture in 2001. I had just finished going to the Midwest 02 fest at the tire rack and was driving my tii home and had a blast driving it. Got home, watched a thunderstorm storm come and go and was relaxing with my now ex-wife in the living room and we hear what we thought was some more thunder. But then some neighbors knocked on our door and asked us for help checking on our direct neighbor’s house because their tree landed on their house and crushed the roof of my tii. Nobody was hurt but the neighbor’s house needed a complete redo and my tii was totaled. So I bought it back from the insurance company and went trying to source a body for it and called a friend of mine from Bloomington whom I had purchased the tii from if he knew of any for sale and he said he thought the water guy (he worked for the local water company) had one. So I contacted him and he said yes he did have one and would love to sell it so I went down and while I was looking at the 2002, I saw the coupe and made a package deal for both and they said yes and my wife said something has got to go so I sold the tii and the body off to a guy from the Chicago area and I really miss that car.
I got it knowing the head was probably toast but I took the head to Taylor Davis or Davis Taylor auto shop. He found 17 cracks that he repaired and then I went searching for cam lobes and springs and had it running by the following year and that was twenty years ago. Some days it seems like yesterday, but got divorced and got to keep the coupe. After the divorce didn’t drive it very often. I did drive it to new buffalo, Michigan on a weekend with two kayaks on top. That was me trying to figure out the dating world. One does stupid things at times. She didn’t work out. I think probably because in some ways I wasn’t ready yet so we parted on decent terms. Then the divorce caused some difficulties with life because my ex moved across the country with our kiddo and so working and trying to be a dad require a lot of travel and very little free time. I worked Night Shift for 25 years until this summer when I switched to weekend day shift. So it took many years to meet someone finally and so I packed up everything in my house and moved it to Danville where I got married and she lived and with a HOA that was very restrictive so I had to sell off a lot of my things. I really do A LOT of things! But I managed to keep the coupe. She couldn’t nor does she want to understand it why I want or need to have so much stuff. So, we started tandem bike riding together. She did that with her previous husband and I was a mountain biker. Then we tandemed for a year and then we were hit by a car on the tandem and are here only because of the grace of God. We then slowly switched to tandem mountain biking because of PTSD of cars and last summer we rode at DuPont in NC and loved it. So when the Vintage came up I thought it would be a way to combine something I like with something we both like and she said yes to going. But she keep threatening to drive separately LOL. But because of our love of tandem mountain biking we decided to take a plunge and sold her house and my house and put it toward building a airBnB bed and breakfast and so we bought property next to Brown County State Park in Nashville. We built a pole barn to store everything we had and live in while building our house. We had a 8’ x 16’ living space with no water and no electricity for the first 4 months of the year long building process. But the coupe was happily tucked away in the barn and is becoming more and more visible every day. I just found this photo and it was taken just prior to moving from Danville to Nashvill
So now it is sort of back home. Only 20 miles away from where I originally purchased it.
Now I have been waiting on Mr Musk to get his satellite internet to our area for a year now, because this would be way easier on computer.
