scathing

Look harder. If you can afford to make 270rwkW, you should be able to afford to buy rims and tyres to suit. Don't play if you can't pay.

I don't see the pads as to blame. But if you've got a pad that can handle higher temps, your rotors will hit higher temps if you start braking to use that extra capacity. In the OEM setup, the pads can act like a thermal cutout. You can't get too much heat into your rotors because your pads will overheat and pack it in well before that will happen. But go to a pad and fluid that doesn't mind a bit of work, and all of a sudden your rotors are achieving temperatures they didn't used to. And you'll start seeing heat problems you wouldn't otherwise achieve with lesser pads. As an analogy, we all know about the WRX's driveline. The clutch is intentionally weak, so if the tool behind the wheel decides to keep doing redline clutch dumps the clutch lets go. But when those owners decide to upgrade the clutch....since the clutch can now transfer more torque.....the gearbox then takes the load and starts disintegrating. (This is all speculation on my part, but what I'm saying is that while the pad isn't guilty of extra heat its also not irrelevant to why the rotors are heating up more.)

Is there any explanation accompanying what you quoted? I don't see how going to a "wider wheel" affects the ride quality overly much. Nor will it necessarily improve handling.

Good old DBA's. I know quite a few people that have cracked DBA rotors. I did that the above at EC. I came off a pretty heavy session (playing chase car to a MX5) and forgot to do a cool-down lap before bringing it into the pits. That said, I think it was cracked when I was driving down pit lane to my garage (had a weird pulsing coming through the brake pedal), so parking it without a cool-down lap may not be the cause.

Meh. Porsche Australia and Motor Magazine managed to drive a 996 Carrera4 across the Simpson Desert. It wasn't completely standard (it had a lift kit, underbody bash plate, off road tyres, and maybe some extra heat exchangers) but it wasn't highly modified either. I know what I view as more of an off-road achievement.

What ever happened to Tom Walkinshaw Racing?

Then buy a car that isn't unstable when you back off at your asserted 110km/hr (or so). I've never had the fear of instability slowing down from the speed limit in any car I've driven, including an 80's VW van and a Holden Camira. The van might get caught in crosswinds, but certainly nothing that's made me fear for my life. In your first post you were going on about how safe your R33 is......if your car gets instability under braking at relatively low speeds, maybe you should revise your perceptions on what a good handling car is. Is it because the Skylien can nevar loose?

The 350Z Roadster is even uglier on the inside. http://www.nihoncarandbike.com/en/news-339...MD%2C+HDTV.html I like the MX5's kit. The two Nissans shouldn't have been butchered like that.

Impossible for you, maybe. WRC drivers cope just fine. The manual lever turns into a handbrake at speed and they use the wheel-mounted controls. The Peugeot WRC cars use two rings mounted to the steering wheel. One ring runs in front of the steering wheel, the other behind. So regardless of the position of your steering wheel, your gear change actuator is always in the same location. I think you pull the ring behind the wheel to change up, and push the ring in front of the wheel to change down. I just doubt any street car will run such a setup, but its a cool solution to the "how do we change gear when the wheel is all over the place?" problem people who travel sideways will always have. Its not a problem with the principle, just an issue with implementation.

Porsche invented the DSG gearbox back in the 60's, but they didn't like how harsh the shifts were. Its fine for the track, but they didn't feel it was smooth enough for the street. Now with better actuation and computer control its not an issue. The 997 Turbo doesn't have a DSG because it weighs twice as much as a traditional auto, which is heavier than a manual 'box. But Porsche will release one soon, apparently. And there's more to life than just a quick shift action. How about when it changes gear? As I said, I hate most of those Tiptronic gearboxes since they change gear for you. The Boxster I rented had a Tiptronic, and every time I got near redline it would auto change up. Frustrating when you've got your braking point lined up with the redline, and the thing just changes up on you and lunges forward as you're wanting to use the brakes. I don't need a clutch, and I don't need to engage the gear myself. I just want to select the gear, and be the only contributor to when that selection is made.

Shouldn't the f**ker be running over his own kids, instead of yours? At any rate, people should learn to just chill out and roll with it. While I think the Toe-rag driver is a complete f**k stain, if you go around prodding a rabid dog you should expect to get bitten. That said, chances are I'd do the same as you in the same situation. What's the speed limit on the Calder, anyway? And after your impact did he stop and exchange insurance details? As a suggestion, I'd pull his plates from your post. While you're telling people you don't condone vigilante revenge its still not worth the risk in case it does happen and you've written this angry post.

Because their next of kin can be a bunch of gold digging scum and sue the event organisers for not protecting the idiot against themselves. Its stupid. We live in such a car oriented country thanks to our useless public transport yet the government then tries to crack down on illegal car-based enjoyment without setting up some affordable legal alternatives. What else are people going to do if you don't give them a legal venue to go enjoy their cars, that they can afford to go to?

I originally thought the same thing, until I read the review. Apparently their component supplier for the fuel neck filler gave them a run of parts that could potetentially tear. Since its a production issue from a third party, you can't pick up on it during development. And a lot of S1 cars have issues. You can test and test on a few cars that you've carefully built for testing, but until you start actually producing them en masse and on a timeline you'll never find a lot of faults. Being Australian and such a "make or break" car, we will hear everything about it (good or bad).

Since I drive a street car, I'd probably spend the cash on making my car well sorted and comfortable. Make sure the suspension, brakes, rims & tyres are up there. Brace the chassis a bit too, if it needs it. Then spend some money on good seats and stereo. Anything left I'd throw at the engine.

Why not contact Heasemans? They're the official dealers or whatever for Bilstein, and Bilstein Australia is next door to them.

Tein suspension normally has a range of spring rates the dampers will cope with. OEM, they usually come with "middle of the road" springs. If you find they're not stiff enough, you could always order a new set of springs at the limit of what Tein recommends for the shock. Otherwise, to be honest, Flex are probably the best compromise for street and track. I've ridden in S15s and Z33s with Flex, and while they're very firm and can get a bit jolty over constant undulations, they're still well within the bounds of what you'd call "streetable".

I wouldn't recommend it, either. I've driven on Comp-R semis as daily driven tyres, and since it was winter it was one of the scarier times of my life. In the wet I may as well have been on ice....and what do you know it was always raining..... I would suggest keeping your OEM rims. Find good tyres that are as wide as possible that will fit your rims while retaining the OEM rolling diameter. Check the tyre thread for feedback, and then see what falls into your budget.

I bought second hand Advan A032Rs in 235/45 R17 for under $100 a pop. Mind you, they were very second hand. Track days only, and only if you're not doing competitive motorsport. On the plus side they never overheat and even after a couple of track days / supersprints they don't look any more worn than when I got them. If you buy brand new RE55S, A032Rs, R888s, etc you're looking at $450 a corner.

What DarK said. While I believe the LS1 AFM is slightly larger (90mm if memory serves), do you need that extra diameter? Most "serious" machines run Z32 AFMs without maxing them out, so given the ease of compatiblity you'd have to be generating some serious airflow to warrant going bigger and having to correct it.

As long as the gearbox changes when I tell it to, and only when I tell it to, I don't care if the car has a clutch or not. Most of the high end clutchless manuals will beat a human in gearchange time, and the good ones hold whatever gear you select unless the car starts stalling. If the next GT-R is released with a DSG gearbox I'll be very happy. Instantaneous shifts means no lag, and as long as it lets me bounce off the limiter instead of changing up then we'll get along just fine.

I can't believe I'm having to explain how breathing works...... Your shirt has nothing to do with the combustion process. Nitrous oxide, introducing one of the two molecules required for combustion (and, for the last time, its not the fuel), does, does so by providing oxygen. You know, that molecule that the engine would otherwise "breathe in" from the atmosphere. Which means it has everything to do with whether it "breathes" naturally, since it affects the amount of the active ingredient gathered when you draw "breath". So, as an analogy, a person walking around on the street is naturally aspirated. A person diving under water with an air tank is not naturally aspirated. It doesn't matter if he ate carbs or simple sugars that supply the fuel used in respiration or that its supplying about 1 atmosphere of air, the fact that the air going into his lungs has come out of a tank means its not natural. Just because our guy with the diver's tank hasn't stuck a hair dryer into his mouth and turned it on instead doesn't make it any more natural.

Scroll back. If you were keeping abreast of the thread, you'd know that I specifically said that I didn't think N2O was "forced induction", in the same way a compressor is. I said it was just not normally aspirated either. So far no-one's given me a plausible justification for how chemical aspiration is "natural". All I hear is "its not FI", but not FI doesn't automatically equal NA.

They are also the size of a control tyre for one of the motorsport events, so its relatively easy to find new and second hand Comp-Rs in that size.

Oh, so you do realise that the fuel type is irrelevant. So you've just got no idea what nitrous oxide actually does for the combustion process, then.

Remember how I said the fuel was irrelevant yesterday? That still pertains. Do you even know what nitrous oxide does? Nitrous is not a fuel, its an accelerant. It is not a fuel replacement or enhancement, it is an air replacement / enhancement. If you dump nitrous into your intake, you have to add more fuel to go with it. You can switch your engine to run on LPG and change nothing else you can cut petrol out 100% from the combustion process by running it purely on LPG, but if you add a nitrous system and change nothing else you can't cut petrol out of the combustion process and just inject nitrous into the intake. Since we were talking about aspiration, I was under the mistaken impression that people knew what that meant. I didn't feel the need to actually qualify my statement and say "adding a mechanical / chemical component into the oxygen supply", since "intake" implies we're talking about the airflow through the engine. So, in other words, your fuel system has zero to do with your aspiration type. Putting a turbo or S/C onto your car doesn't force more fuel into the cylinders. It forces more air in, and the injectors force more fuel in.