It took me 2 months, to the day, to get through my grieving phase, and now that i was able finally put the incident behind me, it was time to start the process of bringing REsuper7 back to life.
The reason I'm calling this a revival as opposed to a rebuild is because I'm not rebuilding the same car I crashed. That car, the original REsuper7, is dead. Rather, I'm bringing him back to life in spirit by transferring as much of the usable parts over to another car, but once I'm done with everything, REsuper7 will have been revived in a new body.
Before I came to the realization that I would need a new shell, I started by removing some parts like the wheels and hood. Immediately visible were the tweaked front frame rail, a few kinks in the firewall, and the damaged rear quarter panel.
Rear quarter panel damage
At first, I thought, "hey, it's not so bad, I think I could find someone to fix this." The glimmer of hope that REsuper7 could be resuscitated was soon quashed when I contacted a local frame specialist and sent over a few pictures of the damage. The guy responded immediately saying it wasn't even worth taking a closer look at to see if it could be repaired and he said I'd be better off finding another shell and transferring whatever parts I could over. It was a tough pill to swallow but I wasn't about to give up on the revival just yet. I eventually started looking for a roller, but I'll get into the details of that in another post. I'd like to focus on the initial damage assessment in this post.
Firewall damage
To add salt to the wound, I found out two of my four TE37 RT wheels were irreparable. From the surface it appears to be just a few dents to the lips of the two wheels. But after contacting a few shops, I found out the wheels had suffered lateral damage which rendered them irreparable. I was devastated. I couldn't believe even my precious TEs had succumbed to their wounds. I wasn't sure exactly what to do in terms of replacing them, whether I should buy a whole new set of four, or just buy two new RTs, or buy two TEs of any kind, not RTs, and have all four wheels refinished to look the same. The only thing I was sure of was that I would end up with another set of TEs.
My poor TE's
After coming to terms with the grim news from the frame specialist, the directive became clear; its time to tear the car down to the last bolt and dump the shell. I started the tear down in early January, and working primarily on the weekends, it took me roughly two months to strip it down completely. I started first with all the body work and plastidip. I salvaged and saved whatever I could along the way thinking I may be able to fix it and use it at some point in the future, but as far as my RE body kit was concerned, there was very little to be salvaged which means I will need to order all new parts from RE. 😭
My poor RE雨宮 body kit
Next I turned my attention towards the suspension. Like the TEs, my Ohlins suspension also suffered some heavy casualties. Two of the four corners remained intact, but the lower clevis mount on the rear driver side was damaged and needed to be replaced, and the front driver shock was damaged and needed to be replaced. Luckily, I contacted Ohlins and they were very accommodating with helping me get replacement parts. I gave them a list of parts that I would be needing, and they sent them over a few weeks later, not that I can do anything with them at this point anyway, but it doesn't hurt to have the parts ready to go. I was just glad I didn't have to order a whole new set of coilovers.
Damaged Ohlins coilovers
The one major upgrade that managed to escape unscathed were my Brembo monoblock calipers and brake rotors. That brought me a tiny bit of relief amidst the barrage of damaged parts I was uncovering. To boil it down to a high level list of parts I will need to get the car back into its pre-crash state would include:
Replacement Parts:
- FD roller
- two new TE37 wheels
- Drivers side Ohlins coilover replacement parts
- RE雨宮 N1 02 Bumper, undersweep, canards
- RE雨宮 AD-GT2 widebody kit
- RE雨宮 Sleek Light Kit
- Vmount Radiator
To minimize the amount of money I need to spend to get everything back to the way it was, there were quite a few parts that would need repairs, some more than others, but it'll definitely add to the amount of time required to get the car back on the road:
Parts to be Repaired:
- Vmount IC Kit - the intercooler itself is undamaged but all the supporting brackets were tweaked
- RE雨宮 Fender Diffusers, rear canards, rear diffuser, tail lights, AD9 hood. Basically not a single RE雨宮 part I had on the car walked away without some kind of damage 😡
The most surprising piece to have survived the crash was the RE雨宮 AD9 hood especially considering it was a front end crash and I had hood pins on...or perhaps it's because I had hood pins that the hood suffered minimal damage. But regardless, besides a few areas where you can see small cracks in the resin, there's no major damage anywhere else. Honestly, from a few feet away the hood would probably look brand new. The one thing that did break off was the metal latch for the stock hood lock which means I will need to secure the hood with hood pins which is fine since I had a set of Aerocatch hood pins waiting to be installed. The only reason they weren't already on the car was because I was hesitant about cutting into a pristine carbon hood. Now that it's longer pristine, time to cut away!
The road to recovery is a long one, and it's not going to be easy, or cheap, but at least I have some direction on what needs to be done. The process of assessing the damage helped remove a lot of the unknowns and and doubts about whether or not I would be able to revive REsuper7. Now I knew what needed to be done and it was only a matter of time. Time to put my head down and get my hands dirty.
Revival Phase 1 - Picking Up the Pieces 
