If you feel like you’ve seen this brown Dodge Daytona Turbo before, you’re not mistaken: we wrote about it a few months ago when it was offered for sale by what was presumably a student who spent a boatload sorting it out. The car then disappeared, presumably sold, but now it has reappeared and is being offered by the shop that performed close to $12,000 in repairs. Even as someone who buys potentially risky vehicles, that number made my eyes water for a car like this. Now, it seems that either the shop purchased it; a mechanic’s lien was placed on it; or the seller agreed to flip it over to the repair shop for a rock-bottom price. Now, this 1984 Dodge Daytona Turbo is being offered here on craigslist for $5,495.

When you rely on a shop to do the work, it’s crucial to have a close relationship when embarking on a major project. If it’s just some small repair or regular service, there’s not much to fear; but if you bring a vehicle in with thoughts of a full-scale mechanical refresh, the numbers can spiral out of control quickly. As someone who often relies on independent shops, I first make sure I’ve given them a test run and that the work was of a decent quality and fairly estimated/priced. Once that’s behind us, we can move on to bigger undertakings. It’s hard to say what happened with this Daytona, but it does seem like the previous owner suffered death by a thousand paper cuts trying to bring it back to life.

When we wrote this car up previously, the seller admitted that despite all of the work done, it still had a high idle and seemed to be running low on oil. That blew my mind, considering these are not overly complex machines and given the scale of investment in maintenance, those are two items that seemingly should have been addressed early on. The seller makes no mention of any outstanding issues, but given the price hasn’t changed much ($6,000 was the original ask), I doubt much additional work has been done. Fortunately, all of this Daytona’s positive attributes remain in place, including the loaded interior, clean leather bucket seats, a 5-speed manual transmission, and excellent all-around cosmetics.

The seller confirms that his shop performed close to $11,200 work of work on this Daytona. While I can appreciate going all-in on a car that you love, this was not the smartest vehicle to dump that much cash into – especially on a student budget. The Turbo 1 engines generated around 142 horsepower, and you can certainly bump that number a bit with some mechanical upgrades that these engines are known to respond well to. The rust-free body and what I assume to be original paint inside and out (the factory decals give me a high degree of confidence that it hasn’t been resprayed) are definite selling points, but I’d want to affirm that the issues mentioned last summer have been addressed. Thanks to Barn Finds reader Curvette for the find.