I bought this white GTE on 07/11/01) to replace my previous Antibes but to be honest, it was a decision I often regretted!

The car was completely standard when bought, except for a set of 15" Astra GSi alloys as seen in the pics below.
The tyres on these wheels were miss-matching though and one had a puncture so I fitted the Cav GSI alloys from my Antibes, since they had the mint set of 195-45-15 tyres on them.
I couldn't decide which wheels I preferred, but I finally decided to keep the Astra wheels to put on the GTE, so on 31st Dec 01, I had the 195-45-15 tyres swapped to them from the Cav alloys.

Also on that day, I had my JP Stainless Zorst modified professionally to fit on the GTE.
The manifold and down-pipes on the GTE are different to those on the 1.3 Novas, so I couldn't just swap it over from the Antibes. The end joint was cut off of the JP and a new end section (including a new bracket) was fabricated to join up with the GTE down-pipes. This was then welded to the rest of the JP and jobs a good 'un!

The car was quick and fun to drive but it wasn't a patch on my Antibes!
The GTE was quicker, but I never got attached to it in the same way due to a few niggly problems tainting the whole ownership experience!

The first problem that imediately showed it's self was a great difficulty in putting in fuel, plus there was a strong smell of fuel, especially just after going round a bend to the left!
There's a none-return valve in the fuel tank in-let pipe which was not working, so everytime I went round a left-hand bend, fuel ran up the pipe and leaked out of the filler cap!
NOT GOOD!
There's a beather pipe which is supposed to allow air to escape from the tank as fuel goes in, but this was blocked, which made filling up tricky to say the least.

Anyway, I bought a new valve and the problem of fuel leakage was sorted but filling up was still a problem that I never managed to remidy.

The car ran fine up until the weather got colder, at which point it would struggle to start!
It was a simple problem though - the fuel injection system relies on information from a varity of different sensors, one of which measures the coolant temperature.
When the engine is cold, the coolant temp. sensor tells the engine the enrichen the mixture to make cold-starting easier. It does basically the same job as the choke does on a carburettor equiped car.
The new sensor was about £18 and takes 5 mins to fit - once done, it was fine and I never had cold running problems again.

By the way, if you have any promlems when running cold or hot, check the coolant temp. sensor as it can also cause hot-running problems if faulty.

I had big plans for this car when I bought it, but the more I had it, the more I noticed problems, especially with the body work.
At it's first MOT test, rust was noticed under the front wheel arches in the area behind the head-light mount, which it failed on.
Since I'd got my own welding equipment (bought when I did the rear arches on the Nova), I decided to do the repairs myself.

Anyway, once I removed the front off-side arch, I found a lot of unexpected corrosion and had to do a lot of welding!
I'll put pictures up on the site soon!

In the end, I never fell in love with this Nova in the same way as I did my previous two and as more problems started to emerge, such as a leak in the fuel tank when full, I was quite happy to let it go!

Well, that's when the Cav turned up, quite by chance and that was that! The GTE was swapped and I'd got myself a nice MK2 Cav SRi
I wouldn't return to Novas until 2004 when I bought my current GSi