Wait. mrgravel = J14 MRE? Holy sh*t.
Small world. I've been using a shot of your car in the banner on my website for more than a year now. @fastestcat on Twitter told me about you. Heard the car was in the shop recently after an off. Sorry to hear that.
Inspirational, sir. Now that I know where to find you, I'm sure I'll have some questions for you down the road. I'm just now getting started stripping the shell on my would-be rally Galant. Won't go so far as acid bath, but will have a first rate cage installed (by our own kcpaz), seam welded unibody, reinforced floor, and as many of the proper rally bits as I can get my hands on.
To the OP, with regards to doing a replica, why not just borrow styling queues from the WRC car? See about finding the non-USDM bumpers, get the same paint job, but save yourself the $40K+ that it would take to accurately duplicate that works car.
There's the rattle can impostor posted in this thread. There's also the OneLap car you can find pictures of elsewhere around here. Not to mention my friend Mustafa's open class GVR4, done in very similar fashion.
There's also some lesser known Galant rally liveries if you look hard enough. I think that Mirage site has a bunch of old JDM magazines which have pictures. There's the black and red Advan car, one that's similar to the above pics, but with orange and yellow, and I'm thinking about being different and painting mine up to look like a Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane.
It's hard enough to prep a car for rally. It takes countless hours and piles of cash. Would be a crying shame to see someone make the investment and then not actually rally.
Reminds me, is Larry Parker's Galant still for sale? Might be time to check the rally classifieds...