Bobby’s Granny
Words by:  Lloyd 
Photos by: Lloyd

Some times when you are visiting other town, state, or country; you tend to search for things that is not popular in your neck of the woods. Whether it is girls, clothes, and food or in my case cars we just want to see, touch, or feel something different from our regular every day things. Although Jamaica is my birth place and my first home away from my second and present home USA; it always feel strange whenever I revisit the little island in the sun. Everything looks three times smaller than here. The roads are very narrow and the sidewalks are small almost nonexistent .I’m not complaining because I love the place, especially in the country sides where there are more narrow and winding roads than you could find in the city. The things that excites me more than the beautiful weather and beaches, hot beautiful women with more curves than any country roads and more humps than the humps in a camel’s back; NOTHNG! Think I’m crazy? Yeah ok. The cars are hot but not even close to some of these women. Uh, eh well excuse me; I almost forget I was writing about a car and not the ultimate ride. This article is about granny. Nope! Not that sweet old lady that always shelter your ass from that ass kicking that mom gives whenever you didn’t do your house work. The granny in question is this handsome looking F/X16 Toyota corolla GTS.

I wasn’t looking to snap one like this; instead I was looking for the 4- doors and the 20v F/X, 20v Levin, turbo starlets ECT. Thanks to my friend Boyd because he was the one who insisted I see this F/X. He wouldn’t let me forget about it. He kept telling me about this wicked F/X that could give mine a run for the money in the looks department. “ No fucking way!” I said. I haven’t seen or heard of another F/X in the looks department; maybe speed but not looks; he insisted, so I gave him the job to find granny. After about 2 ½ weeks of trying to find this granny my friend was about to give up when he finally caught up to him literally. He had to chase him down in traffic; having the guy wondering who is this mad man? Because only a mad man would make a U turn on a crowded freeway, and drive on the soft shoulders at top speed in order to give him my # to the place I was staying. Bobby didn’t call me right away, but he did about two days before I leave the island. We chatted a little then I gave him the address to where I was staying. When he arrived I was like WOW! The car was slammed to the ground, it was clean, and the interior was custom black and red, and a nice system for his listening pleasure. It wasn’t Bobby who brought the car; it was his brother Sheldon. There wasn’t much done to the car, but what Bobby did was done in good taste and it had me curious.

The car is a 1987 F/X16 corolla US spec left hand drive. The US spec motor was yanked for a later spec small port, no TVIS, high CR producing a healthy 138hp unlike the anemic 112hp the US motor had. He replaced the yota coil with an MSD. An HKS power flow intake replaced the stock air box, a 20v extractor replaced the heavy restrictive cast iron exhaust manifold, a 2” custom mandrel bend pipe replace the restrictive one. The catalyst converter was replaced by a cherry bomb, which lead to an Ultra flow muffler out back, which gave it a distinctive sound. The radiator was also modified for better flow. The 3 ¼ to 4” slammed effect was made possible by using the stiffer shocks and springs from the sc Toyota Levin. The stock wing on the back was replaced by a set of custom set. The wings are replicas of the ones from the earlier ep71 turbo starlets; looks dam good why didn’t I think of that? One thing had me a little baffled was the sc hood scoop since the car wasn’t sc. Sheldon told me the car was sc but he got an offer he couldn’t refuse so he sold the sc motor, but that wasn’t the only reason. He told me the alternator was sitting too low and was scraping the road due to the drop. Why didn’t you just raise the car an inch or two? I asked” No way! “The car looked wicked like this and it handled good like this,” he said.  His brother Sheldon warned me not to sleep on this motor because it gives a lot of guy’s trouble out there. He told me he loves and cares for this car as much as his little brother Bobby and I can see why.

After I came back from my vacation I spoke with Bobby at length about the future mods on his ride and he told me he redid the interior and he is now looking for the ever so hard to get 165hp black top 20v Levin motor. Although there are a lot of silver top in Jamaica he refused to use those because he wants the best out of the two. He told me he upgraded the music as well and he would send me the new pics, I waited as long as I could; maybe they could be used for a pt2 feature when you get the new motor. We at DIV1 would like to thank Bobby for giving us this interview and the scoop on his granny. I would like to see more of this ride in the future and I’m sure our readers would too; so keep in touch and stay truyota until we meet again face to face on the pages of the Inside Scoop.


 
 

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