To make a long story even longer, I'll start from the first time I saw this car, sitting behind a mechanic's shop in town in 2018. My boss-at-the-time and I had stopped there because she needed to get her tire changed. I noticed that there was something that looked neat sitting in the back and asked her to drive around. I had an MR2 while I was in high school, so I was excited to see one in Gainesville. I briefly asked the owner of the shop about it, and she said that it belonged to a friend and it wasn't for sale at the time. I stopped by a few times over the next couple of years, just to take another look at it and see if he was willing to sell it yet. It had clearly been sitting for some time and there was moss starting to grow on the outside of it. The story was that there was something wrong with the ECU and the car was just left to sit because of that. Supercharged AW11 ECUs are next to impossible to come by, so replacing it wasn't an option.
The second time I saw the car, in early 2019.
Fast-forward to 2021, COVID panic was starting to slow down, so I figured that I'd stop by again and ask about the car. This time they agreed to sell it to me for a price that I knew was too good to pass up. I called a friend of mine with a trailer and asked if he'd help me load it up. By this point, the car had been sitting for close to 4 years, so it was pretty filthy on the outside and I knew it would need a ton of work.