Why this car
Going into my third year of college I gave my 2016 Hyundai Veloster Turbo to my younger brother, which left me without a car. The income from my Roblox development work had built up enough to cover a replacement, so I started looking for my third car, and this time I wanted a manual.
The auction
I found a 2019 WRX listed on an auction in Colorado. The catch was the condition: the interior had been completely stripped out. For most buyers that's a dealbreaker. For me it was the reason the price made sense, because I already knew I was willing to put the work in.
The other catch was access. That auction was dealer-only, so I couldn't just bid on it myself. I called around local dealerships until I found one willing to place the bid on my behalf under their license for a flat fee, and worked out the paperwork with them so the title would come straight to me. Once that was sorted I bid, won, and booked a flight to Colorado for the next day. Start to finish, the whole thing happened in about a two-day span.
Learning manual in a parking lot
There was one thing I'd overlooked: I had never driven a manual transmission in my life.
So I picked the car up, found an empty school parking lot nearby, and spent a couple of hours teaching myself the clutch. Stall, restart, stall, restart. Eventually I could get it moving reliably enough to convince myself I was ready.
Driving it home
I pulled out of that lot at roughly the worst possible time, straight into rush hour traffic. Stop-and-go is the single hardest thing to do in a manual when you've had two hours of practice, and I stalled it more times than I'd like to admit. At one point another driver leaned over to tell me my car was a piece of garbage. Not exactly the welcome I was hoping for on day one of ownership.
But I made the entire drive back to Illinois. By the time I got home, I could drive stick.
Trip 1Pickup day, Colorado
Trip 2The drive home
Rebuilding the interior
First priority once it was home was catching up every service item, since I had no history on the car:
- Oil and filter
- Spark plugs
- Serpentine belt
- Transmission fluid
Then the actual project started. I worked through junkyards and parts listings piece by piece, tracking down seats, trim, panels, carpet, and all the small hardware that never comes with anything. It took a while. Matching the right year and trim level matters more than people expect, and one wrong bracket means the whole panel doesn't sit right.
Bit by bit the interior went back to stock. I also swapped the wheels while I was working through the rest of it.
Interior, beforeAs bought
Interior, beforeAs bought
What I actually picked up. No seats, no carpet, no trim, and a wiring harness left hanging where the console used to be.
Interior, duringParts going in
Interior, afterBack to stock
The wiring
The wiring was the hard part. When an interior gets pulled, harnesses get disconnected, tucked, cut, or left hanging, and nothing is labeled. I had to work out where every connector belonged and what it fed before anything would come back online properly.
It's slow, methodical work: trace a run, confirm what's on the other end, connect it, verify it actually functions, move to the next. Eventually the whole map made sense.
Where it is now
It's my daily driver. It came to me with about 100,000 miles on it, and the plan has always been simple: drive it until the engine lets go.
When that happens, it becomes the next project, a built engine with forged internals, bigger brakes, and proper suspension. That's tied to a longer-term goal of getting into rally, which I've written about separately.
Further out, if the finances make sense, I'd like a Supra MK5 or an Evo X as a daily. Then this car comes off the road and the real build starts.