Stage 2 - Details, Details.

  As you can see, all the stickers came off the car quite nicely. There was one minor hang-up however. I had a huge LaRocca's Performance banner which was located on the top portion of my hood by the windshield. When I removed the vinyl decal, it somehow burned itself into the paint. The paint on the hood had all faded to a different shade of black with the exception of what was underneath the decal. This left me with a few options. Option 1, get another decal and install it in the same place. Option 2, have the hood repainted. Option 3, aftermarket hood. Option 4 custom paint.

  After considering all of the above I came to a conclusion to what was best. On my limited budget and yet still wanting to conform to the original project goals I decided on repainting the stock hood, but taking it one step further by doing the upper portion of the front bumper as well to follow the lines of the car. I based my decision on the fact that I like the stock GT hood, and repainting it black would result in two different shades of black on the car, or I would need to have the entire car repainted. Neither of which seemed like something that I wanted to do. So that basically left me keeping the stock hood but repainting it another color. This idea I really liked as it would let my car stand out a little more from the million black sn95 body style mustang's around. So my decision was made, but I had another dilemma in which I would face down the road.

  I wanted a spoiler for the rear decklid. I've had a lot of different things on the car in the past from the Saleen SR wing, to the stock wing, to the wingless look, and a zillion variations in color combinations as well. While all of these did separate my car from the others, nothing ever seemed to really fit what I wanted from the car. The SR wing became a favorite with the ricer crowd, the wingless look became really popular with anyone wanting a sleeper type look, and repainting the stock wing a different color just looked pretty dumb. So I had to find something that was different, yet fit the cars lines nicely. The Saleen S281 wing is IMHO one of the best looking wings on a sn95 bodied car, but it's also one of the most popular options. This eliminated this from my choices as I have this serious desire to be different than the norm. I'm not one to follow trends, and I tend to shy away from things that seem to be the rage. Wow, that makes it really hard to find something that's strict budget friendly while at the same time not being absolutely horrid. I narrowed my choices down to two spoilers. The boss wing, and the xenon spoiler. I liked both of these as they both are on the decklid style wings and will not cause a lot of drag on the track. I ended up choosing the xenon spoiler for a few reasons. The first reason being that I've never seen it on an actual car and I've been to a lot of events, across the whole eastern seaboard. This made me want it even more, the second reason was because it followed the lines of the body really nicely and just seemed like it belonged on my car. Okay cool, now I've got the hood idea done, and the wing chosen. I just need to tie it all together right. Tying the whole thing together was the easy part. I didn't want to just slap the wing on the back and be done with it. So the logical choice was to figure out some way to blend it into the lines of the body, while keeping it simple.

  It was pretty obvious what I had to have done. The wing wraps around the rear quarter panels and if I had it painted the same color as the hood, while continuing the line around the car it would do exactly what I wanted it to do. It was simple, it stood out, and definitely separated my plain black GT from the rest of them. Choosing an alternate color was the only thing left. I wanted to keep it subtle so I immediately thought of silver, or charcoal. I got 6 different color plates from my neighbor who works at a local auto body shop. The decision then became a lot harder as everything goes good with black. I took the color plates to my work and discussed my options with my co-workers. This narrowed the choice down to like 6 or 7 colors ranging from a desert red, to a really dark emerald green, to a really cool midnight blue. I still couldn't decide between all of them so I took the color plates back home and had the wife take a look. She immediately picked out a color that no one at my work had even given a second glance to. I really hate making decisions sometimes, and this was one of them. I figured what the hell, and I just went with the color that my wife had picked out. It was called Graphite Nitemist and was made by Dupont. It changes color from a silvery blue, to a pinkish purple depending on how you look at it, and how the sun reflects off of it. So off to the body shop it went and the results came out like this.

Coming next... Stage 3. Comfort... Corbeau Targa RS Seat install.