scathing

I was half expecting another service station attendant to walk out of the shop, and being cut off by Schmacher with a swift punch to the face.

No, but even on dedicated circuits you have ripple strips and other kerbs. And most tracks in Australia aren't dead smooth. On a street circuit, only a few (at best) are perfectly flat. And as people have said, ultra stiff does not mean better handling. Its not just drifters use the weight shift that comes with suspension compression to adjust the attitude of the car in and through a bend - racers do it too. Less weight is still better than more weight with good balance. A stereo isn't a mandatory part of making a car go fast, so pulling it out and relocating stuff you do need (battery, fluid resovoirs, etc) to improve balance is still better than sticking a pair of boxed subs in the boot. The weight also sits relatively high as well, which increases your centre of gravity.

The handling of a stock S2000 isn't that good. It might have a 50:50 weight distribution, but with the suspension geometry the rear tends to break away and do it suddenly. There are quite a few people on a 350Z forum I'm on that bought their cars with the insurance payout they got after wrapping their S2000s around telegraph poles. Most of them did it the same way. Cornering hard, the tail savagely breaks loose with no forewarning. With the short wheelbase they either spin, or get into a tank slapper. Even the local mags say that the back end of an S2000 is a mystery. Up until 8/10 its fine, but when you push it harder it starts getting really spooky.

I stand corrected Then again, CarsGuide is run by News Interactive...so their quality of journalism can be summed up with two words: "Daily Telegraph". I am reasonably sure that Porsche, at least, has already relocated the vast majority of their hot weather high speed testing to South Africa already. With better road surfaces, similar weather, and being in the approximately same time zone as Europe, its just a better location for most European companies to do such testing. And I'd read in Motor (which, I suppose, also gets stuff quite wrong) that Holden / Ford had ceasted doing v-max runs through the NT on their development cars due to OH&S concerns. Anyway, I wonder if all the speed camera revenue in our most sparsely populated territory will make up for the $9 million shortfall from the loss of business, as well as affecting our local car manufacturers' ability to test their cars in a full range of environments.

Given your desires, I'd probably say that instead of having a power target and aiming for maximum response, why not invert it? Have a "response target" for the engine, and then just see how much power you can make while retaining that level of response within your budget? If you can only make 200rwkW, then that's still more than enough for most touges in your RWD car. If you manage to hit 230rwkW, then why detune it to get maybe a little more response that you didn't need anyway? Food for thought.

Actually, most manufacturers think the US guys are more service-phobic than Australians. Its why the Japanese didn't try bringing in a lot of their turbo cars into the US for ages, since as we know turbo cars are more sensitive to "oil change and tune up" intervals than NA cars. Especially the simply engineered, long stroke, high capacity engines that the US guys seem to love.

That is true. An S13, being inherently lighter and shorter, will be far more chuckable than an R34.

I don't know what's going to happen when they let Clarkson in it. He loves the Monaro, he loves supercharging, so that diaper might be needed for other reasons.

My power curve is almost straight. The gradient is a little steeper from 65-75km/hr but from there to the top it may as well be dead straight. Will take a photo when I can (since I have no scanner) and post it up later.

Just read the article. Not the PWR part. Looks like a UK dealer fit. Interesting....

That'll be the PWR intercooler kit, then. Motor did a review ages ago, and apparently it was going to be offered as a dealer fit option (as well as being a warranty covered retrofit on any LS1 engine in the Holden range). Never heard anything official about it, though.

I'm all for proving me wrong. Then again I assume the worst in people. But, the problem is, most of the time they don't.

No, but statistically they've got a good chance of doing so. And the reputation garnered by "teh Fast n Furioz" Skyline fans just ruins it for everyone else. Even before I read the rest of your post, I knew that it means you've never drive a slow car before and had to....you know....learn how to drive. If you have a look at all the great motorsport drivers, most of them learnt in shitheap old bangers. This is Peter Brock's first car / paddock basher. Mark Webber also learnt to drive in a paddock basher. The list goes on, and its not just here. Internationally, you hear a lot of pro racers grew up driving similar (for their region) clangers. Michael Schumacher's first car was a kart with a lawnmower engine. They're all cars where you have to learn to carry a high cornering speed because of the lack of acceleration, but you have to learn to balance and gently feed inputs into because the stock setup doesn't like going that fast, if you want to go fast point to point. Cars, and probably skills, you've never had to aquire in your WRX, because you've had so much grip and grunt that you can just turn slowly into a corner and stomp on the throttle once you've got the wheel straight. That doesn't mean people who have grown up driving Lasers or Geminis are going to be the next "Peter Perfect" Schumacher-Alonzo, but in my experience people who've grown up doing enthusiastic driving in underpowered cars and upgraded later tend to be miles quicker than people who've only ever driven in fast turbomotors. They also tend to have a higher aversion to telegraph poles.

I wonder if they'll sell the APS TT kit off DK's Z on the cheap?

Race Brakes Melbourne will have them. Apparently Competition Friction is the official importer of Ferodo pads as well, so I used to source from them. And yes, for the occasional track day you should be fine with pads and fluid (although I don't know the R32 that well). My car used to be seriously underbraked, but with DS2500s / RBF600 fluid / slotted front rotors I found it very difficult to fade them out on the track during a standard 15 minute session on street tyres. Chances are your street tyres will overheat and go greasy on you before the rest of the braking hardware exceeds its limits. It wasn't until I went to semi slicks and I could stand on the brakes doing a Takumi-style "supa late boraking tekneek" without locking up that this "stage 1" upgrade became a limitation. And even then it wasn't until the tail end of the session that I ran out of brakes. Unless you're some kind of psycho daredevil, if fading them out on the track is difficult it makes fading them out on the street near impossible.

If RT615s wear out faster than RT215s, there goes me buying a set. I'd rather use Comp-Rs on the track, and I can't handle such a short life for my street tyres.

If you do decide to go for a rebuild, as well as getting lightened internals you might want to up the compression as well. You only need low compression for big boost - if you're running low boost then a higher compression won't matter so much, but you'll pick up more power and response. Especially off-boost. I don't know if it'll make the engine more willing to rev to redline, but it will make the engine pick up in the midrange (which is what you want for touge).

For maximum uniqueness, what people need to do is put a CA18DE out of an Exa into an S13, and have the world's only 1.8L FWD Silvia.

Every insurance company I have spoken to has given me a full NCB even though I've been driving company cars / fleet vehicles until I bought my current car. That means I've pretty much never had insurance with my name on it until now. All the companies I spoke to (NRMA, Just Cars, Young & Cool, Famous & Classic, Shannons, to name the ones I can remember) just asked me how many years I'd been driving for, and how many accidents I'd had, and calculated my NCB off that. They just took me at my word. Even then, some of them didn't ask for the name of everyone driving the car. The only thing they wanted to know is the age and driving history of the youngest driver. Some asked for the number of drivers, and the above details for the youngest only. And that youngest driver is what they base the premium and excesses on. Just remember, it costs insurance companies almost nothing to let you give them money...which is all they're doing when they collect your premium. Now, if you get into an accident, they'll run a history on you themselves. If they find out that you were lying about your accident / infringement history....not only do they get to keep your premium, but they don't have to pay out your claim either. Win-win, for the insurer. Its in the insurer's best interests to not scrutinise you too closely when taking your money, and let you lie as a convenient escape clause from the policy. It doesn't matter too much to them whether an idiot pays them $3000 a year or $3500 for a sheet of paper and an entry in a computer database, but it does matter to them whether they pay said idiot $15000 or $0 when they inevitably smash their car.

If you own / run a smash repair shop, you can always fix it yourself.

True. I can't believe how much louder my car was. But every time I've heard one being revved out on the street, they've sounded a lot louder than that one.

Maybe I like things that like the cock.

Was a pretty good night. Loved the sound of that Ferrari 360 being revved out.

Lowenhart LSR. 20" of justice, baby. And how hot do they look on that Merc convertible? They looked mad on that 350Z, but given that Lowenhart aims for the VIP style look I reckon they'd look even tidier on a V35 coupe.

To quote Jeremy Clarkson, "I'd rather have bird flu than drive that car"