An electric blue, all-wheel drive, 6 speed manual, pocket rocket.
This is a project car that slipped through the shop while no one was watching. It came from a local shop where it had been relinquished by a college student that managed to severely overheat it, eventually causing head gasket failure.
Gary and I hauled it to the shop where it sat for a while as it turns out the motor for this thing is significantly more rare that I thought. After several weeks of looking I finally found a 60k mile motor for sale that was a known strong runner and complete. I paid more than I had hoped but ultimately wound up with a great donor motor.
The car had 140k miles on it but had been well kept by the previous owners. Minus the leaking lower radiator hose that ultimately spelled the motor’s demise. It’s not the best design, I’ll admit.
Interestingly, one day I got a call from someone asking about the car after seeing it parked on the lot. It turns out that this car was local, even though it was last registered in Illinois. The caller was in fact the second owner of the car, and the college student who overheated it was a family member. This guy had wanted to keep the car and rally cross it but ultimately decided to let it go to family.
A long time customer of Star Motors spotted the car with his wife one day while we were searching for the engine. After giving it a brief look over she was smitten with the color and 6 speed manual. They committed to buying it on the spot and proceeded to call us weekly to check on it’s progress.
After two weeks of juggling it in and out of the service schedule to remove and reinstall the motor the little blue S40 sprang back to life. I’ll tell you what, they literally cram the engine, transmission, turbo, and AWD system under the hood. Everything is very tight to work on and the swap took much longer than the larger Volvos.
After a thorough shaking down and a little extra fettling the S40 was ready for the new owner. They were super excited to take delivery earlier this month and we were super excited to return another worthy little Volvo to the road!
