When I received Jeff’s submission I almost didn’t believe that a 21 year-old kid could produce a submission video this professionally made. It turned out that one of his friend’s was a film major and that they had spent 2 days working on filming and editing it together for FINE TUNED. Throughout the entire submission, Jeff repeated over again that all he wanted was to turn his aging 1997 BMW M3 into a performance car so that he could beat his best-friend Tom (who has a similar car) just once in a race. I think most car people all have a friend who continually beats them ever time they race, so much so that most of us have become obsessed with shutting that friend up once and for all, no matter what it took. For that reason alone, along with the fact that anyone who has gone through this much trouble to make such an extraordinary submission should get the opportunity to get their car Fine Tuned. As our first European Fine Tuned car, I knew we had to go above and beyond in making Jeff’s M3 into not only a high-performance car while also taking the aesthetics to a different level in terms of paint, suspension, interior and audio. Jeff’s couldn’t stop screaming his head off, and Tom, well Tom was heart-broken.
Thor, yes that’s his real name, is typical of many guys and girls within the ‘Tuner’ world (and for that matter, the automotive world) in that he owned an amazing car with aspirations of making it into a one-of-a-kind performance car, the one problem, the car was up on blocks in his drive way and he was simply out of money…a universal theme within the restoration community. Thor’s 1995 MX-7 was mean and lean, but had been sitting on blocks for just over 2 years; his parents would grate at his nerves asking him repeatedly, “when are you going to get that out of our driveway?” For years Thor had no answer for them since the job he had was just enough to pay his own bills. Like many within this age group, Thor had only one place to turn, FINE TUNED. He wrote to us letting us know that he didn’t even have enough money for a video submission so all he could do was email pictures begging us to help him before his Dad sold his car to a junkyard. The day we surprised Thor, we had arrived at his house but learned that he had left for work early; not to be defeated we decided to simply kidnap him from work (with his Boss’s approval of course). After stealing him from work we got a chance to look at the RX-7 up close and personal and realized that it wasn’t running, this was a first for Fine Tuned. Again, not to be discouraged we flat-bedded the RX-7 and brought it back to Fine Tuned headquarters and tuned it into what to date has been our favorite car. The RX-7 is truly a one of kind car with probably one of the most creative and possibly expensive paint jobs one will ever see.
