1985 Toyota Celica Supra P-Type

[f6fhellcat13]

So, I've finally gotten my first real car! A few weeks ago my dad and uncle went out to the high desert to look at and buy this car. It is virtually rust-free and runs pretty nicely. There are a few shakes and rattles, but it cruises fairly quietly at 75mph with the undersquare 2.8l straight six purring away under the hood.

Being the intelligent man that I am, I went home over the weekend with the optimistic notion that I would be able to cleanly transfer the title, make sure it mostly worked, and drive cross-country back to school. Unfortunately, the California DMV intervened and made me hop through a number of hoops because the car had previously been registered in a low-population area (the desert) whereas now the address on the title was in LA, a "highly-sensitive" pollution area. Once that was done, it was merely a matter of driving across country in 60 hours.

I haven't been able to drive it properly hard because I was more interested in straight roads and ending the trip quickly, but it did cruise at 95-100mph with ease and quite a lot of noise. This part of the country was great for that sort of thing though it did reveal a few of the Supra's flaws: rattles, a whining now-limitless LSD, wind noise, and low gearing (4.10 rear end) that put the car at 4,000rpm in fifth at those speeds and resulted in about 22 mpg (10l/100km). My dad accompanied me for the first thousand miles to Boulder, CO (just outside Denver) because he had a business meeting there. I stayed in a hotel there and that was my last real bed for a while. The scenery on the way there (Utah & Colorado) is probably my second favorite part of the country that I've been to, after the Pacific coast, and the pictures below are from there.

The next leg from Denver to Indianapolis was largely flat, uninteresting, or at night. Though I did see a beautiful sunrise in Kansas City crossing the Kansas and Missouri Rivers. The final thousand-mile leg was also uninteresting except for Pennsylvania, which was pretty and where my credit card got frozen, because apparently traveling far-too quickly across the country set off the klaxons at credit car HQ. For these last two thousand miles, I slept in the car and found that if you are tired, you can in fact sleep in a 1985 Celica Supra, which is helpful buying advice, I'm sure. I also hit a snowstorm in Pennsylvania (prompting a quick washdown when I got back to school) and the car's fully-independent suspension handled it well despite its summer tires. I did have to get off the road eventually because I was tired and felt no need to risk it while tired, in low-visibility, and on summer tires.

All in all, when not driving over 85mph, the car returned a poor-by-modern-standards, but almost acceptable, 25-28mpg (9.5-8.5 l/100km). Despite this it didn't miss a beat for the whole trip despite not liking the 10-12,000ft elevation in Colorado and having a very tired clutch and synchroes.

...oh, and the headlights go up automatically, but not down.