2005 Lexus IS300

IS300s are ugly from the factory. They're built like a 2000s Acura TL with the rake of a BMW, the build of a Front Wheel Drive car, and the A*s of a muscle car. They're a weird chassis, but done right, they can look* chef's kiss. This is my daily, drift car, and the car that has taken me back and forth from high school and now college. It has gone through two engines, technically three transmissions (my fault), two autocross events, three drift events, a flood, and over 220,000 miles of Toyota reliability, kind of. I have documented most of my journey and modifications of this car on my YouTube channel @Siraj_Meera and plan on going to another drift event this season. Not only do I want to keep my viewers up to date on the build and adventures through my socials, but also through the MartiniWorks Build Thread, for which I'd like to thank the team at MartiniWorks for all that they do! How I got my IS300 - My family has always been a Toyota family, with my first car being a 1998 Avalon with over 275k miles and rod knock, and my dad owning a 1986 and a half Supra Celica; the IS was always an option. I knew I wanted to drift, but all my friends at the time were into the stance scene. I remember when I was around 12 years old, my mom gave me a 3500 dollar budget, and I went on CarGurus and was looking at 240sx's and SC300s, but I was still too young to actually buy a car. As I turned 14, nearing the time when I got my permit, I started looking more into the IS chassis. At the time, I got into Initial D, where I found out that the same engineer who worked on the team developing the AE86, Nobuaki Katayama, was the same person who was the chief engineer for the first-generation IS. My dad wanted me to get something more modern, like an IS250 or an IS350, but my mom had a strict budget, which was increased to 4500 dollars at the time. As I turned 15, I got handed down my dad's 1998 Avalon with rod knock. I tried to break that car, honestly. I was allegedly going 100 mph on back roads, bouncing inside the car because of its blown struts. I would try and "slide" the car by kicking the foot e brake in gravel lots of my highschool *allegedly. I even threw it in a ditch that way once. Over time, with the brake lights failing while I was going to school, and then later the headlights going out, my parents decided that it was time I got a new car. So my dad and I started searching for an IS300 and an SC300, but in manual. After months of searching, we couldn't find an SC300 that was manual, so we came across this red IS300 that had gold RPF1s, a full sound system with subs in the trunk, a Modelista-style body kit, and, most importantly, was manual. We offered the guy 7k and he accepted but the weekend that we went to see it he canceled saying that he didn't want to sell it (he later sold it to someone else months later). My dad then found a guy who was selling a blue IS300 and who immediately took down the listing. We messaged him, and he agreed to meet coincidentally in the same town where my dad originally bought his Supra. Turns out the guy who was selling the car came to America around the same time my dad and his friends did. He was trying to sell the car for 5600 dollars, and he turned down our offer of 4,600 dollars. I went home devastated,d but one of my dad's friends who knew him when they came to America told him off on the phone. So later that week we went back to buy the car for 4600 dollars. The funny thing about this entire thing is that the guy originally took down the listing because his nephew wanted the car, and when we were signing the papers to buy the car the nephew was at the table.