My Triumph Spitfire 1965 Mk4 2 years

… on Lakeside and went into a wild 360 in his 1965 Triumph Spitfire Mk4 2.

The British sports car crashed into the wall under the bridge and ended Ezzy's club sprint day.

“I hit 101.01 mph (162.6 km/h) but pulled away and hit the wall.

"But I can still take him home."

Gold Coater, 57, bought the car for just $50 at a local junkyard in 1978 for his sister.

“She was going to get her license and we needed a car so she could drive, so I bought it for her,” he says.

“Then she got married and didn’t want to, so I kept going all these years, building, building, building, spending and improving.

“I once made a custom Harley show bike and always wanted to make a car.”

When Ezzy got it, the Spitfire was a rusty wreck, so he bought another body in Melbourne and started stripping away the rust and replacing panels until he had a complete car.

He eventually launched and registered it in 1982 and has been riding it ever since.

The original Spitfire was painted white with red trim, had a four-speed gearbox and a 1147cc four-cylinder engine with about 47 kW and a top speed of 96 mph (155 km/h).

Ezzy painted the Spitfire his favorite blue, bored the engine out to nearly 1300cc. gearbox after the original packed it during the '13 Speed ​​on Tweed sprint competition.

“I do all my work myself,” he says.

“It runs at 4000 rpm, but I just want to drop the diff from 4.875 to 4.1.”

The coloring is good, the badges are not all original, and he does not have all the Jaeger instruments.

But, as Ezzy says, "all the money is at the bottom."

Open up that massive one-piece front and you'll find the engine in gleaming chrome.

“All the chrome looks good, but it keeps the heat in, so I need to set up the cooling properly. In the future, I will use more polished stainless steel than chrome,” he says.

"Chrome takes a lot of effort to keep it clean."

There is also a massive air plate underneath that runs from front to back.

“It's good for a show where they put it on a lift because you don't see the gearbox and other mechanisms,” he says. "Looks much cleaner."

That wild ride on Lakeside led to two other modifications after he fixed a dented panel; fire extinguisher on the front floor and roll bar.

“About 99 percent of what I want,” he says. “I ride it as much as I can, weather permitting.”

When the weather really gets bad, he can use either a material trunk lid or a fiberglass hardtop.

“Several times I have been tempted to sell it, but what should I do next?” he asked. “I was offered $22,000, but I had already stopped keeping checks for $30,0000.”

“It's a hobby and part of my life. I'm not married, I don't have children, so this is my child."