Hindsight is definitely 20/20. I'd change basically everything I did with my car if I could go back and do it again lol.
The very first car I checked out when I was 15 was a 1988 4WD Turbo (Canadian badged Alltrac). The guy had replaced a bunch of stuff but my gut feeling was it had other issues lingering. Looking back I'm guessing it had a blown headgasket and I would've been SOL with no money and no skills to fix it.
After that I stumbled across my 1987 GTS Coupe at the local Toyota dealer. We almost missed it because it had a plate on the back but it turned out one of the sales guys was daily driving it (may as well be adding mileage to a 18 year old car with 430+ km on it vs something new). It turned out the first owner was the head sales rep back in the late 80's, he drove it for 2 years til the 5th gen was coming out and the owner of a tire shop about an hour away bought it. He lived here though so he commuted in it every day til he traded it in on something newer. I absolutely loved that car, bright red, power everything and the interior was immaculate because it only ever had the one guy in it. Sadly I spun a bearing in the motor in the month of it's 20th birthday. I ordered a motor from Japan but the importer sent a completely junk motor. We sent it back but in the end I ran out of time (I needed the hoists and stuff in auto class so graduation = no tools) and had to scrap it.
While trying to fix that I needed a car so I got my 1992 GTS. Lots of stories about that car, I drove it through college and my brother drove it when I moved away for university. During college I got into watching the WRC and dreamed about getting an Alltrac. I ended up registered here and after university a friend of mine told me about someone they knew with a GTFour. She was nice enough to meet up with me and take me for a spin (and even let me drive it) and I was hooked. I started looking around for one and found two black RCs for sale a few hours away so I went down and checked them both out. The first had some mods that were nice and a couple things that were too wonky for the price the guy was asking. The second was in rougher shape but almost entirely stock and the one I ended up buying. I wasn't really wanting an RC since in my mind they're pretty special and I didn't want to try rallying in something like that but if I didn't buy it the guy was going to part it out. That was spring 2011, just going to pick it up and trailer it home was super sketchy and should've been a warning about how buying it probably wasn't the best idea I'd ever had but it sure has been interesting.
That's the car I've still got, I have the GTS as well but I stopped dailying it when the clutch started acting up more back in like 2013? (I thought it needed CV's and then a TOB but the springs in the disk had failed). The RC sucked up all the energy I had for working on a car so it's been pretty neglected, I had some adventures with it a couple years back but since this is Alltrac.net I won't bore you with those stories.