A YouTuber was stunned to come across his dream supercar from the 1980s, left to rot and sitting abandoned. So he decided to buy the car and give it the full restoration that it deserved. Charlie, the man behind the YouTube channel Hudson Auto Films, bought the car around a year ago.
The Nova is an obscure car that started out life based on the Volkswagen Beetle, with a new fiberglass body and a one-piece canopy that flipped forward, almost like on a fighter jet. The car was sold under different names all around the world, and it was sold as the Sterling and Sterling Sebring in the United States.
In a recent video, Charlie states that he bought “what was left” of his dream supercar, with the Nova in a pretty poor way. It had been left in the undergrowth for decades, and while its fiberglass body didn’t rust, it had been left cracked and pitted, and old repairs had flattened some of its body lines.
His recent video was all about tackling the bodywork and getting it back to the standard it should have been in. It has not been an easy restoration, but it is one that has been a real labor of love for the YouTuber.
The Fiberglass Body Needed a Lot of Attention
As Charlie showed in the video, the fiberglass body needed a lot of work. Fiberglass doesn’t rust, so that is one thing that worked in his favor. However, it was cracked and pitted, and old repairs had flattened some of the sharp lines of the supercar’s body. So all of that needed rectifying to get it as close to its original factory condition as possible.
Fiberglass bridging filler was packed into the damaged panels, and then a long sanding block was used to find the high and low spots dotted across the surface. The work wasn’t without its trials and tribulations, however. One set of filler failed to set, which meant they had to scrape it all off and start over on that section. That set the bodywork repairs back a few hours.
It was the canopy that proved to be the worst part of the car to restore. Charlie and his team did manage to get a canopy from a donor Nova, which did look in better shape than the one they had at the time. But it didn’t fit correctly, being an inch narrower on each side. The gap at the rear was big enough that you could put your hand through it! In the end, it was the original canopy that they used, given it was a good fit for the supercar.
The Nova Could Be on the Road Again in 2027
There is still some way to go on the restoration of the Nova. The team managed to use the rear bumper from the donor car, which, despite being bent and full of holes, was able to be reshaped and fitted to the restoration car, and it fit much better than the canopy from the donor machine. Old holes across the bodywork were filled in, and the worn edges were reshaped to give the supercar its sharper lines back.
The YouTuber estimated that the body still needs around 25 hours’ worth of work before the final primer can be applied. Part delays on the engine had set the project back a bit, and Charlie had become burned out from all the work involved. However, it is progressing, and Charlie wants to do as much work as possible heading into 2027. In fact, he is aiming to get this Nova back on the road by the summer of 2027.