Detroit (Tokyo) Muscle

As I am working on rebuilding my little Honda Tin-Can (from my fender-bender) I am wondering how far I should go in the maintain and rebuild process.

I spent my lunch break reading about the legendary 71 Plymouth Belvedere GTX, the car owned by my father back in the early 70's. I didn't know much about this car, other than dad would always go into that weird, radio-announcer bass and go "4-26 hemi...the most powerful engine blah blah blah" and I'd tune the rest out.

But as I wandered today through my rambling thoughts and wikipedia articles I came across a weird regulation in the Nascar rules that state that 427 cubic inches is the "maximum allowed displacement" for a regulation racing engine. Apparently the 426 hemi took first, second and third at the Daytona 500 soon after they were introduced, and other companies (Ford, Chevy) successfully got it banned for a year before its "stock" parts were widely distributed to the public and it was allowed again. To this day the regulation stands, the 427 cu. in. engine is as large as it gets. And suddenly I remembered my dad's ridiculous rants about his old car.
Could it be, I asked myself, that my dad actually knew what he was talking about and had the ultimate, most bad-ass car ever?

Further research revealed the truth, the 426 Hemi produced way more than the 425 HP that Plymouth claimed, but in order to keep insurance rates low (and sales high) that is what they advertised. Further, only 720 GTX's were sold with the 426 Hemi, and to this day it remains an extremely valuable collector car. And of the 720 GTX's made with the 426 Hemi, only a few were 71's, as the production level was way down that year.
It's quite possible my dad had one of the rarest, most valuable Plymouth cars in company's history. Today a 71 GTX with a 426 Hemi is so rare (30 known to exist) they each have their own name and sell for $250-500k.
And my dear old dad sold the GTX and bought a Vega.
When I mentioned that story to a co-worker, he about flipped out. Apparently he spent his 20's (in the 80's) rebuilding late 60's, early 70's Detroit muscle cars. When he found out my dad had a 71 GTX with te 426 Hemi he was blown away. But it was the downgrade to a Vega that really caused him to gasp.

I never really understood how valuable the 71 GTX my dad had was until today.

And so it makes me wonder about my own car: that little, dinged up, tin can, Honda Del Sol that looks like the runt of the Honda litter. Similar to the GTX, the Del Sol was a novelty car built by a major automaker during its heyday. There were slightly less than 75,000 made between 1993 and 1997. Today approximately 1/4 of those remain on the road. In the next 20 years they'll fade into history. Could it be that I should cling to my little Del Sol, or god willing, fix it up?
It has crossed my mind that someday people may go "remember the days when cars didn't look like jellybeans?" And there will be that spiffy little Del Sol under a canvas in my barn, and I'll drag it out and fix it up and when I drive it down the road people will openly gape in admiration for a day when you actually had a fuel-injected single overhead cam engine that didn't talk to you and discuss its feelings.
And maybe, just maybe, some other person my age will feel sufficiently nostalgic and offer me 45,000 dollars for that little car, and it'll be theirs, so they can drive it around and remember how great it was when Tokyo Muscle ruled the streets.

I guess the problem is when I pull up to a dealer to get a new car the dealer will offer me a few hundred bucks for the Del Sol (my dad got 300 bucks for his GTX)...but its worth more than that to me, and 30 years from now it may be worth a lot more, to me and to someone else.

Especially if I swap in a B16 engine, turbocharger, add sway bars, put in a stage 3 clutch...