Pound Stretcher

How do you make your money go further when modifying your car? If you’re chris thomas you wield your own spanners and source most of your parts secondhand. 

- Dan Sherwood

For most folk, modifying and tuning a car can be expensive. Even if you’ve bagged a bargain base car,paying professionals to upgrade it for you quickly chews through any savings you might have made. But there is another more frugal way to get your four-wheeled fix, you just have to get your hands dirty…

‘I’ve always been into cars, but I’m not in a position to go spending thousands of pounds paying someone else to do all the work. Plus I get a kick out of doing things myself, not to mention it saves me a stack of cash!’ laughs Chris Thomas when we meet him at a Japanese car event at Rockingham Raceway. Chris’s much-modified mk1 is gracing the Adrian Flux insurance stand, highlighting the fact that the Norfolk-based outfit doesn’t shy away from covering tuned cars.‘I have my insurance with Flux,’ says Chris,‘and they do me a great deal, even with all the mods declared, which some brokers baulk at.’

While the outlandish, track-based looks of Chris’s car won’t be to everyone’s taste, there’s no denying that he’s created something with huge visual impact for comparatively little outlay.‘In total the project has set me back just over £3k, and that includes buying the car: I think that’s pretty good going,’ smiles the Mancunian Mazda fan.

‘When I bought the car it was pretty stock except for a set of HSD coilovers,which, along with the fact that it was summer and I really fancied a convertible, is what made me buy it,’ recalls Chris.

The car cost just £800, but as is so often the way with such things, it was cheap for a reason… ‘It was a little rough around the edges, but I thought I’d take a punt on it,’ Chris says.‘All my mates told me to stay well clear of it and that it was a dog, but I thought, for that money,what was the worst that could happen?’