scathing

the 100mm minimum is measured from the lowest point of the car. So whether its your front splitter, side skirts, or exhaust pipe, everything on your car has to sit at least 100mm off the ground.

From my interpretation of the Vehicle Standard Information (bearing in mind that I'm not a lawyer), there's no limits to the diameter of your wheel. The VSI No. 9 (Guidelines for alternative wheels and tyres) states that your wheel track may not increase by more than 25mm. Your alternate wheel may not be more than 26mm wider than the factory rim without an engineering certificate. The outside diameter of your wheel and tyre combination can not be more than 15mm greater. This means if your OEM wheel is 13x4, you can legally run a 22x5 rim if you can get it under the wheelarch and find tyres with a low enough profile without needing them engineered. However, a 13x5.5 wheel requires an engineer's certificate.

Fact: your car sits 30mm below the legal minimum. So your desire to have your vehicle's lowering signed off by an engineering signatory is mutually exclusive to your desire to not increase your ride height. So which one do you want more? Because you're not getting both. If your engineering signatory does a dodgy and signs off on it anyway, the moment a cop measures the distance they'll defect you anyway (since its clearly not legal, no matter what your sheet of paper says), and if you say that your engineer signed off on it then chances are they'll investigate him for abusing his powers and have his signatory powers removed.

If you make major modifications or repairs to your car then it requires an engineering signatory to ensure your vehicle still complies with the ADRs. Its not a matter of just "getting it fixed", and its not something that you need to do only after you get defected. If you weren't modifying your car in a half-arsed way, then you would have already obtained the certificate before driving the car around. The point of an engineering certificate is to have a qualified and independent person validate that your vehicle is still roadworthy. The engineer doesn't actually do any work on your car. They look at someone else's work and ensures that its not dodgy. That's why you need to have the car legal before taking it to them, so they can sign off on it.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with that. The strut brace stops your chassis from flexing, allowing your suspension to do its work better. Regardless of whether you're driving an Excel, tarmac rallying, or competing in F1 its better to have the suspension absorbing bumps and settling the car around a corner rather than your chassis. For general street use the differences won't be major enough (some people say they notice much better steering feel after adding a front strut brace; I've never owned a car without one) but for any kind of "quick" driving, on any surface, its better to have the chassis as rigid as possible.

In addition to what SK said, your mate mustn't be that young if the cars he's working on can have its handling improved 25% by adding two thin metal bars. You'd be lucky to get 25% improvement in handling with a full cage in a modern vehicle, let alone a pair of braces.

What Zigen said. I've had tyre dealers try telling me that Falken Ziex tyres were decent sports tyres. Needless to say I was heading out the door before he could start the next sentence, since it wasn't April 1.

Maybe its just my inner despot talking, but the people who run the series should have just laid down the law. Forget this consensus shit. And if the majority of competitors would have been ****ed, then make a decision that would have gotten them on the grid. The way I see it, you can't expect one racing team to do something that harms them and benefits other teams. They should do "good of the sport" stuff as long as its equal to everyone, but you can't ask a competitor to permit something that puts them at a disadvantage compared to everyone else. So, like little kids (and after the "we're not racing", "We're not compromising" dummy spit, F1 teams come across as spoilt little kids) if asking them to do something doesn't work, you tell them.

Then get an R33 GTSt instead.

If you're trying to save money, trading in your non turbo Skyline for a turbo Pulsar may not really change your Total Cost of Ownership, especially if you're going to modify it. Turbos (especially the GTiR, which has a reputation for overheating) need a lot more TLC than a NA car.

Here's a pic of my adjustable sways. You just need to get the car elevated enough to get at that nut. The hardest part is trying to get the bolt into a hole that's never been used before. With them painted, the holes are just a little too small for the bolt, and they go in at an angle, so you need a fair amount of force to push them in the first time.

Right, so because a dedicated race engine that probably gets pulled down and rebuilt after every meet doesn't need something, then why would a street car that is expected to do hundreds of thousands of kilometres without stripping down have to worry about it? Drag cars don't run air filters. I guess they're not necessary either. FI race cars don't use turbo timers either, and no manufacturer ships with one. Clearly if they don't think its necessary in a race situation or to avoid warranty claims on street cars, they're not beneficial on FI cars either. JGTC cars also run 12.x:1 compression and a fair whack of boost; want to try that on your street engine? Here's a hint: never use what goes on with a race engine as an example of what's right to do in terms of maintenance and longevity for a street engine. Unless you can afford to replace or rebuild your engine as often as race teams pull down theirs.

You may as well ask everyone to pull over at the Canadian Grand Prix so Jacques Villeneuve can win on his home soil, on a track named after his deceased ex-F1 racing father, for this concept of "good will" and "showmanship for the paying fans". Good will has no place on a race track. You're either out there to win, or you're not. And, if you're not, you're just a mobile chicane. Maybe that's what Minardi and Jordan should have done. Just slowed down on the last 2 turns so the Michelin shod front runners would have to weave around them at a lower pace. For good will and to provide a show of overtaking for the fans, etc etc...... Ferrari stuck to the rules. Rules that were designed to handicap them the most. All this "cost saving" shit was put in to stop the team with the biggest budget from bringing masses of spare parts and pretty much rebuilding their cars between sessions. Ferrari threw up massive objections before their implementation, but you don't see them chucking a hissy fit and refusing to race this year because they have to carry their engines over 2 races, and run on 1 set of tyres. Since these new rules, designed to **** them over, have finally bent over the rest of the field why should Ferrari do anything but smirk and let the rest of the teams see how it feels when the shoe's on the other foot?

I wouldn't, but that's one reason why I'm not a professional racer. But every time those guys step in to a race car (especially ones that go as quickly as F1), they know there's a good chance they're going to crash. This is what Ralf Schumacher said after his second high speed accident on the Indy circuit: However, it also reminds me of this: So which is it? Are they ultra competitive, boundary pushers who not slow down even though they know its dangerous, or are they too scared to race and come to a complete halt if they know its dangerous?

Its not that surprising, really. It also doesn't help that SUVs have the aerodynamics of a brick shithouse, so making the aerodynamics slightly worse has less relative effect than making the engine power a compressor that's not increasing the air density going in to the engine. Try the comparison on a car with a low drag coefficient, and it would probably be a lot closer.

I agree. with the fact that the money's negligible. And the other thing is, the guys who make your bars can't guarantee your setup. If you're running different spring and damper rates to their development vehicle, then the swaybar effect you'll need is different. Even if you only set them once and leave them be its worth it, since you're more likely to have a swaybar that's a good match for your suspension rather than one that's in the same ballpark. Otherwise, you may as well say that unless you're going to sit there tuning it all the time, why get a programmable PowerFC over a Powerchip or some other "pre-flashed" ECU tune.

Oh look. I agree that trying to read the little shit's post was like trying to mentally swim through a vat of honey. It reminds me these Penny Arcade strips, just with less funny. All I'm saying is if you're going to school the fools (and I am all for schooling fools in the most vitriolic way possible; my nick isn't just some random word I picked up from the dictionary), you need to make sure you're right first. Schoona - I have a question for you. If the answer's yes, try writing it too.

Wow, you should stop calling the kettle black. Your English is excellent, and your ability to spell is a lot better than most people's (native English speaking or not). But if you're ever going to burn someone about their spelling / grammar, you need to make sure the very post you're doing it with doesn't contain any errors to avoid looking like a hypocrite.

*clears throat* I'm guessing that it was on the same part of the curriculum that covers punctuation. But I agree that it appears spelling is a "lost art" among some people these days. And irony is the humour du jour. It seems that subtlety isn't high on your list either. I was hoping mentioning the irony would be enough. And you also left the apostrophe out of "don't".

I'm guessing that it was on the same part of the curriculum that covers punctuation. But I agree that it appears spelling is a "lost art" among some people these days. And irony is the humour du jour.

I don't think an RX-7 needs a cast iron, inline 6 engine in the front of it. It would completely ruin the weight distribution of the car, which is one of its greatest properties. If anything, I'd put an SR20DET into an FD. Even then the motor is a fair amount longer than a 13B-REW, but the block should end quite close to the struts. I love the look of the Series 8, but I'm not a big fan of rotaries. A lack of low-end torque, horrible fuel efficiency, and low engine life. I won't get into the mechanical inelegancies of the rotary engine (I had a discussion with friends, and I don't match their mechanical knowledge enough to repeat their issues with them) but, even from what I do know I don't like them.

I'd say that you haven't watched ACA for quite some time then. If you'd like to see the quality of Australian "current affairs" programs today, check this Media Watch story out.

Do you know what a self-fulfilling prophesy is? Let me give you a hypothetical example, to illustrate. Its when someone on a forum chucks a massive whinge that a thread is going nowhere, after wandering well off topic from their first post and constantly attacking the poster rather than discussing the matter at hand. Its just a hypothetical situation, mind you. I'm not referring to anyone specifically....... :innocent:

Hey, just because you can't drive doesn't necessarily mean other people can't. Stop projecting your inadequacies on others. If your experiences on foot when you were younger didn't tell you about the amount of grip you can get on wet gravel at the bottom of a steep hill provides, that's your problem. At any rate, he's always got the Stagea to "learn" on. I'm not saying that he's the next Michael Schumacher (there's a good chance that he'll have a prang eventually), but at the same time I know plenty of people who never crashed a car due to a lack of experience.

So the MoTeC units that are the racing world's most popular "off-the-shelf" replacement ECUs aren't even worth a look-in?