Flame Thrower - EP82 Starlet
This one came together on short notice. Dave was selling his EP82 Starlet that weekend, and I couldn’t let it leave without getting it in front of the lens one last time. The plan was to bring some warmth into the winter — a small car shoot framed by the Christmas lights of Waterford City. The idea was to let the glow of Winterval wrap around this small, angry blue hatch and give it a bit of seasonal contrast. But as always, plans and reality rarely meet halfway.
By the time we got there, the city was gridlocked. After-work traffic, weekend shoppers, and half a dozen Winterval events meant every car park, every side street, and every quiet corner was crammed. We circled for a while before calling it. Plan A was dead.
Plan B, however, wasn’t bad. We found a well-lit industrial area on the outskirts — quiet, spacious, and surprisingly cinematic under the sodium glow. Sometimes those last-minute pivots end up working better anyway. The cold air made the light crisp, the car’s blue paint cutting clean against the night sky. There was no background music of crowds or Christmas choirs — just the idle burble of the Starlet echoing off the walls.
Once we’d grabbed what we needed there, we took to the ring road for some rollers. The air had dropped to near freezing, and after a few runs, I’d lost most of the feeling in my fingers. But as the last bit of warmth left my hands, Dave decided it was time to turn things up a notch.
He flicked the “fun switch.”
In an instant, the polite little EP82 transformed. What had been a tidy, nostalgic hatchback became something completely different — loud, angry, and unapologetically anti-social. Five-foot flames erupted from the exhaust with every lift, painting the cold air orange and blue. The sound bounced off the roadside barriers, that unmistakable crackle of overrun echoing in the night. Watching it through the viewfinder was pure chaos in motion — a mix of precision and madness that only old-school turbo cars seem to capture so well.
And it wasn’t just the flames that made this one special. The car had plenty of personality baked into it: custom vented wings, the lower half of a GT bumper, a set of fishnet Recaros that looked straight out of a late-90s tuning magazine. Inside, a Link Monsoon X kept things under control while an ECU Master HUD glowed from the dash like something from an arcade cabinet. Every bit of it felt handmade, thought out, and unapologetically personal — the kind of build you don’t see too often anymore.
We wrapped the night with frozen fingers and wide smiles. The footage was raw, a bit rushed, and unplanned — but it had energy. The kind of energy that comes from chasing light, sound, and movement before it disappears.
Sometimes the best shoots are the ones that fall apart first. No schedule, no crowd, no perfect backdrop — just two people, a camera, and a car that spits flames into the night.
