I agree with you that I will likely never find another mostly stock, 2-owner (I'm the 2nd, but owned it the longest at almost 16-years) Galant VR-4 in this condition, unless I pay a lot of money for the last one left or find a crap one and pay stupid money to completely rebuild it. And I likely won't get what I think it should be worth. But I'm already in the auction and set a reserve, so if it hits the reserve it's going to the next guy.
I've really enjoyed the journey and had my fun with the Galant, so I'm OK with that. Plus I've also let some other great cars go over the years that would be nice to own today ('65 Mustang GT 2+2, '72 Datsun 510, '88 Celica Alltrac), but I'm no Jay Leno and the choice to sell those cars at the time were good choices. I did other stuff with the money and opened up garage space. I'll do the same now, so that's cool.
But... in a perfect world, this would go out to my 200,000 square foot garage/storage facility on my 10,000 acre ranch (complete with hundreds of miles of gravel roads!) and I would have my permanent crew of mechanics get to work turning this into a 450-hp street sleeper. Oh yeah, I would have a few other VR-4s (plus various Lancia Delta Integrale's, an R5 Turbo II, a few 323 GTXs in various states of tune, mid-90s ex-WRC EVOs and Imprezas, a new Ariel Atom Nomad, and maybe a Jet pack, etc.) to play with on the ranch's back roads while I wait for my Galant build to be wrapped up. Then I would do a TV show called McG's Garage and you would all hate me. Or wish you were me. Or something.
Enough with the fantasies though... I've gone through withdrawals a couple of times thinking about selling this car, so I'm kind of over that. In fact I've considered selling it multiple times over the last 2 years, and each time I keep thinking the market on these will "pop" because - like you said - all the good ones will be gone and that's when I'll put it on the market. We could all be waiting years for the "pop", or maybe it's tomorrow. Me? I'm an eternal optimist, so I'm betting tomorrow will be a good day for 2-owner Galant VR-4 auctions.
And everyone here should be hoping I'm right! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif