Many thanks for positive comments Welshkiwi. Yes the heady days of Group B rallying - I just need to get round to fitting the turbo to mine now to make the same whooshing and pop/bangs sounds :-) That will certainly turn the heads!
I managed to get the car out of the garage this morning and inspect a bit more closely the paint I applied yesterday. There are definitely some areas on the passenger side which will need redoing because of runs. I did try lightly sanding these ares of the Plasti Dip with 800 grade wet and dry, using it wet, and a couple of areas smoothed down sufficient for another coat, but for the other areas I’ve at least proven that the paint does indeed peel off. Just waiting now for some extra supplies of Flex Blue paint to turn up and I’ll redo that side.
It was also a good time to give the car a good clean, and let it run for a while on the drive.
I also managed a couple of trips up and down the private road close to the house - happy to report nothing fell off!
This picture shows off well the matte look - as I’ve said before won’t be to everyone’s taste but will suffice while I run it around before getting it painted proper.
I think I’ve decided just to remove the intercooler piping for now given there’s no turbo yet to connect it to. Looks odd the way I’ve got it routed now (as you can see in the pic below) and I’ve tried a couple of other ways to get the pipes pointing further into the sides of the engine bay but no obvious points to tether the ends of the pipes to.
Decided I will also look at a more easily accessible battery isolator as it’s a bit of a pain having to remove 10 or so DZus fasteners to lift the rear screen. I decided to accelerate getting the car finished by bolting in the rear clam, leaving hinging it to later. So that meant the rear screen needs to be removable to get the engine bay. I’ve got an isolator on the positive terminal itself but as I said it means lifting the screen out each time. It’s unlikely the car will be used every day so I need to look for a place to mount a key operated isolator - the original Rally cars had these up front just under the windscreen scuttle but that’s going to involve quite a bit of routing high current 12v cable to/from the battery so I’ve been looking for an area low down in the engine bay that’s within reach from under the rear of the clam. Once I’ve found a suitable spot I will then switch the DZus D-ring fasteners for the rear screen to DZus hex head bolts as it won’t need to be removed so often.
Let me know if any other builders of the MRS200 kit or other kits reading this have done anything similar here. I did find a remote fob operated solenoid based isolator but on closer inspection the current drain from having the wireless receiver in standby pretty much negated the value as feedback from other users of it clearly showed that it drained the battery itself!