As it was originally written, today’s post and last night’s were one and the same. As I looked through it though, I knew that they should be split up because today’s deserved to be on its own as I want to convey as best as possible the thanks that are due. To begin with however, I should get to that ‘important thing’ which I alluded to yesterday…

WE WON! We actually pulled it off – the awards ceremony at Sunday School started and the first names were called out; and then they called mine. Sunday School’s awards are dealt out in a slightly different manner to many other shows, in that instead of having multiple categories for vehicles to compete within, the entire field competes for one of the 15 Honour Roll awards which go to what the judges deem to be the top vehicles of the show.

Now while they did call my name as mentioned, it’s not fair to say that I won this award – WE won this award. I cannot express how grateful I am to everyone who helped make this conversion a reality, and to the guys for spending those long hours in the garage with me working non-stop to get it turned around so fast. This was absolutely the most ambitious project I had ever taken on (I had never swapped an engine before, I might add) and we had a very tight deadline for it since we were aiming to debut it at Sunday School. I wouldn’t call this jumping in the deep end; it was more like jumping into the ocean.

There were times I began to doubt that we’d get it up and running for the show but we kept working away at it, overcoming one obstacle at a time as they would appear, and being able to drive it in the morning of Sunday School was a huge reward by itself.

We took the collision that totaled Ketchup as the opportunity to do what we had talked about for so long, and built the country’s first and only ST-swapped Mk3 sedan. The stress of this was unreal and it was a huge amount of work, but we did it. Mario was sad to see his old ST get torn down but he is loving his new Fiesta and I know I can speak for all of us when I say we’re proud of what we accomplished – and the fact that it’s Ketchup’s drive train under the hood of my car now makes the swap that much more special.

All in all, I don’t think we can beat Sunday School 2016. Every year after the show we always talk about what we could possibly do to go bigger and better next time, with more cars in our group or more work carried out on them. This time around we have absolutely no idea how we could possibly top this year’s show, or for that matter, the entire weekend. Mustard hit the road as a boosted car, we got to properly meet and hang out with José, and it was all capped off with a win following all of our hard work.

Those you see in the photo above – and many more – are people I have met only because of cars. Our shared passion brought us together and has resulted in a large group of people that I count as my family – my car family, if you will. None of this would be nearly as fun without them and together we have made many memories and shared a lot of good times.

And speaking of good times, I’m calling it now – for me, the weekend of Sunday School will go down as the best weekend of 2016. Thank you to everyone who made it happen.

-Bill