scathing

I used to have a Pulsar SSS. I found it quite drivable....for a FWD car. All FWD cars will torque steer. I drove a DC5 Integra Type-R, and now that thing torque steers (especially with that LSD). I hadn't driven a FWD car for around 2 years when I took one for a thrash, and punching out of a corner and revving it out to redline induced some steering wheel tug I mistook for hitting a pothole at first. The Clio is the same. A bit of tugging at the wheel, but you just hang on to it. There's less finesse when dealing with the wheel, but you can drive around it. I'd hate to try it in something with as much midrange as a turbo engine though. You'd spend too much time fighting the wheel to drive.

copy+pasted from the NSCC forum, where a member copied+pasted the LS1 forum.

Try this sucker: http://www.airpowersystems.com.au/350z/aps...ts-09/index.htm I still remember when APS posted news on their site (which has been removed) and they had that kit up to 750rwhp. I've ridden in this car, and after that I was sold. The power comes on so progressively, you'd swear it was OEM. It reminds me of a stock R33 GTS-t / S15 in terms of power delivery. It swells from around 2200RPM in a very smooth manner, and it pulls all the way to redline. The only thing about it that's not stealth is the sound. At low load lift-off it flutters, and when you're giving it a bit more throttle when changing gears it sneezes. With the exhaust it does sound a lot more aggressive, but its not loud and droney so it suits the car's character.

Hopefully VQ parts will have dropped by then. I'm waiting for second hand APS TT kits to hit the market, and then I'm going FI. I'd also consider buying a 4 door V35 if I had to get a sedan. Most of my bits would carry over (the catback probably won't because the cars don't share the same wheelbase), and APS says they've TT'ed quite a few V35 coupes in the US so hopefully I can get me some of that action too. Ideally I'd get the 4WD variant of the V35 sedan, and run a HKS Rotrex supercharger on it.

Its not particularly fair to compare the powerup possibilities of NA vs FI. Its a lot easier to squeeze more power out of a FI engine by winding up the boost, and you have more "bolt on" things you can do before you have to open the engine. How well does a VQ35DE power up, with aftermarket mods, compared to an RB25DE or a RB30? Or an SR20DE, or a 2JZ-GE? Or compare a RB turbo motor to a modern one. I wouldn't mind seeing if people have done much tuning on the VQ30DET (I think its in a non-sports car though, so chances are few people do). But if you look at the modern turbo engines, like the 1.8T VAG uses, or the SRi Turbo's, etc, they all make good gains. I'll bet all the Euro snobs are salivating over the upcoming BMW 3.0L twin turbo I6 petrol engine. Finally a 3 Series BMW that can provide a platform that will keep up with a tuned Japanese car in a straight line. As an aside, if you're interested in VQ tuning you might find this interesting.

Car catches fire, you stop driving it. You stop driving it, the engine stops burning fuel. System works as advertised. No refunds.

Thanks to hot hatches coming back into vogue, the guys making them are engaging in a power war. The problem is that high-powered FWD cars suck...as evinced by the Astra VXR and Mazda3 MPS, both of which have major powerdown issues. The tricky LSD in the new Focus is apparently a pain in the arse, too. Give me a RenaultSport Clio any day. The one I test drove a few years ago was a hoot to drive, and didn't have too much power for it to handle.

Toyota proved that no-one went broke building bland cars. Which is why the Aurion, BF Falcon and VE Commodore look like cardboard cutouts of each other. Whereas all the different cars in VAG use the same underpinnings and bespoke bodies, the Australian auto industry uses the same bodies with different underpinnings and highlights.

Forget the Viper. Go old-school and get a properly tuned Cobra instead.

Because the vast majority of their regular customers are discerning enough to care what kind of tyre they get, and make a fuss if they don't get what they asked for. Just so long as those boring black things prop up the gaudiest bits of badly chromed pig iron that adorn the shop window and kind of fit on their cars, the regular customers remain happy.

They get RS-V04s are shit cheap, and they sell them for pretty cheap too (I got 245/45 R17 from them for $180 a corner, and even then I probably overpaid). Since they're not street legal in Australia, they can't really sell them for competition use where the regs say that the tyres have to be street legal. And your typical ricer won't want those tyres since they make too much noise when you drive on them so you have to turn the stereo up until it distorts, and don't come in 215/35 R19 for the chromies on their Mirages. And they don't last long enough, so they have to keep replacing them. Which means they can have issues offloading them, since that only leaves weekend warriors doing amateur motorsport where the scrutineering and penalties are a lot more lax. And people like that are always short on cash. Mind you, I'd rather eat a whole bunch of prunes and shit on my wheels rather than drive on Ziex tyres. So I'm not saying that its not completely f**ked up on their part, but just that if you were paying proper Comp-R semi slick prices (e.g. $300+ a corner on 17") you were getting ripped off even before they tried to bait and switch you.

Results 1 - 10 of about 6,030,000 for engine knock. (0.33 seconds) If that makes no sense, it means it would have taken you just over a quarter of a second to get an answer if you'd gone and looked.

Run without a wastegate for long enough, and you'll find a trail of problems coming from the back of your car.

When I read most of it, I look at it as light hearted ribbing (its normal for people to give shit to other makes / models, and its also normal for them not to be serious). But then, for people who haven't been on the forums long (like our new Supra owning posters) they might not see it that way and take it at face value.

You only have to deal with them once, and then you can take all the money you saved and spend it elsewhere. It is quite difficult to find people to even match their prices. I'll put up with quite a bit for low prices, but I'm only interested in a quality product....which is why I don't buy wheels from the Temple of Chrome.

Why not, it worked for Bernd Pischetsrieder. As the CEO of Volkswagen, he told everyone the concept Veyron was going to have 1000hp and do 400km/hr.......which was news to the engineers who could not promise anything near that. When they did preliminary testing and realised that the shape was complete shit for aerodynamics and cooling, they were told to deal with it because Pischetsrieder loved the shape so much it wasn't getting changed. I reckon the Bugatti / Volkswagen engineers did an awesome job considering the inherent flaws the marketing parasites (as usual) inflicted upon them. Which means, of course, even a bodyshape as ungainly as a Skyline might be able to do 400km/hr with full stability if you throw enough money at it, and ignore the protests of the engineers.

How many revisions did the various RB versions get over its 15+ year life? The VQ35DE has been around for quite some time, and appeared in Wards' list of Top 10 Engines of the Year (in its class) for the past decade. Its just not ever been put into a sports car before. I'd agree that it wasn't engineered for a sports car application in the first place (too much low end, not enough top end, and weak internals) but the fact that they're revising it doesn't indicate an inherent problem with the VQ design.

If I start work late that day, I will come.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. You can only extract a certain amount of power from a given volume of fuel at a certain RPM (basic physics). With NA you can't wind up the boost and cram more fuel in at a certain RPM point, so all you can do is modify until you get closer and closer to the point where you extract 100% of the fuel's stored power. If bolt-on mods aren't doing as much as they used to, it means its because the OEMs are building their powertrains better than they used to. I can't see why its disappointing that you have to do less to make as much power as the underlying engine architecture will let you, unless you're only interested in bragging about how much more your car makes than stock rather than how much it makes in total. I think its a good thing that they're not making stupid beancounter decisions to put overly restrictive parts on the car purely because it'll cost them a few bucks less. The car's not perfect (the standard exhaust is very restrictive. 221kW from a NA 3.5L engine with a flat torque curve is nothing to sneeze at. The M3's award-winning inline 6 lacks the bottom end grunt of the VQ (while also costing a f**kload more), and BMW says its at the limits of what a street legal setup of that engine can offer. Rebuild a VQ with a forged bottom end that let you spin it to 8000RPM, and run cams to suit your new redline and sporting focus, and you'll have an engine more torque and more power everywhere. And with the HR due out next year, which fixes the VQ35's biggest flaws (the glass bottom end and hideous exhaust manifolds), the engine will probably see even fewer gains when you modify it....but then it'll make more power from the factory.

My car pulls just under 190rwkW on CRD's dyno, with some pretty standard bolt-ons (catback, intake spacer, Unichip, and a pod filter that's more sound than performance). I'll be looking at replacing the extractors and cats in the near future, and with that power curve I'm also going to bump up my redline since it seems to pull pretty well to the limiter. If the car still pulls solidly to my new limiter I'll find out if I can cheaply have a set of rod bolts installed (the weakest link in the infamously breakable bottom end) and keep pushing the redline up. Your biggest problem is that these engines are new in a performance application, so parts are rare. That drives costs up. What are you looking at upgrading? The Z33 or the V35?

Due in the 2007 350Z. And yeah, it does look pretty nice. I wonder if I can retro-fit it?

I got a set of Advan A032R's from them at the beginning of the year in that size. They don't get them that often, so its best to hit them up at the end of a race season, or right before the beginning (for people who keep the old tyres for testing and get new ones for the beginning of competition). As others have said, try Gary's to score some second hand Dunlops. The other thing is to show up to a race meet, like the State Championships. Garys and Gordon Leven will have their trucks there doing tyre changes for teams, and they might get a case of the CBF's when it comes to carrying near-dead tyres back to the shop. They might just leave them at the venue, but if you go during the day (especially on Sunday since that's race day) they might still have them around. A mate of mine said he saw the tyres from the V8 BRutes being added to the Wakefield Park tyre walls after a weekend, and the guys at Wakefield said anything in the pile was free for the taking. Some were in reasonable nick (for a free tyre), but he didn't have room to grab me any.

yogi - they actually work for Bilstein (which I know is right next to Heaseman's), and the car looks great with those wheels on. And yeah, it looks great (although I can't find any pics of it right now).

Here is Option's article on the VQ powered car race at this year's Nismo Festival. http://www.jdm-option.com/eng/feature/05_12/z33_v35.html While most of them are 350Z's, there are some guys using the V35 Skylines too. Makes for pretty interesting reading, especially if you're interested in seeing where the Japanese guys are going with VQ NA tuning.