scathing

I'd start a thread for the worst car design of this century, but there's no point as we all know its going to be the entire Ssanyong range.

Yep. It's important to list all the best performance parts in the world on your front guard, especially if you don't have them. The decal is as good as the actual part down the quarter.

My bad. I thought they stopped doing them in the late 90s. The FD RX-7 would also be pretty much the top of my list, especially since we're not considering the interior.

No offense but if you want something fast through the cones you should get something lightweight and with a short wheelbase. The Supra isn't the best car for it (neither are Skylines). That said, depending on how narrow the cone distances are NA is probably quicker than turbo. With no lag and immediate response its easier to control the car, and too much power is actually a downside. Pull out as much weight as you can. A reduction in weight helps acceleration, braking and turning. Bang for buck after doing your tyre pressures you can't go past sway bars. They'll have the car cornering flatter while not making the car too much worse over bumps. Get them adjustable. Run them in a neutral to understeery setup for safety on the street, and stiffen the rear up when you're on the skidpan. It doesn't matter as much if you spin out, and this way you can get it to turn in. At first you could even try just disconnecting your front swaybar. With no swaybar effect in the front it'll make the rear relatively stiffer, and help the tail come around. You might find the front rolls a bit too much afterwards, but if the balance of the car is better then you'll know a stiffer rear swaybar is the way to go.

Nice car. Wrong century.

Coilovers are generally easy to pick, as most aftermarket manufacturers will paint them in a cool colour or stick their branding on it. Nissan may have outsourced manufacture so a non-Nissan brand isn't a guarantee that its aftermarket (the 350Z / V35 uses Tokico for example, who also do aftermarket gear) but its a good indication. If you want to know if its height adjustable, jack the car up so you can see the strut. This is a Tein coilover: See below the spring you've got those 3 notched disks, and between them its threaded like a screw? If you've got that threading then your dampers are height adjustable. As for rate adjustment, at the top of the strut there will normally be a knob. The shape may vary, but in a lot of cases this is what companies use. Some companies will provide you with an extra tool (usually in an Allen Key shape). Tein and G4 do this that I know of, and I'm pretty sure they're not the only ones.

Not off the top of my head. I paid the $400ish from Maltech, and I didn't find out that VSport had Goodridge until after I'd gotten the former. I remember the price being lower though.

Dealers lying through their teeth is something I'd wholeheartedly agree with. And its why I reckon they're a pack of cocks. My personal belief is that Nissan Australia should sell parts from Nissan Global vehicles. Get them from the supplier and sell it at their regular margin. Servicing I don't, but then I wouldn't let the monkeys that work at most dealership workshops anywhere near my pride and joy if I can help it. They're bad enough on cars they are trained to deal with - I'd hate to see what they'd do to a vehicle they just picked up the manual on. But I understand why they don't from a business perspective. Every official importer of foreign goods always rubbishes parallel imports, and usually for good reason (to their business model, not objectively).

So what you're saying is that the US went from a losing position to a winning one with the development of that weapon? So who's smarter now? Wow.....I never thought I'd ever say that an American was smarter than someone else, but to be fair they did import all their brains from Europe. Bringing the analogy back on topic, battles are nice but winning the war that matters. The Americans won by making 2 massive explosions rather than going for thousands of teeny tiny ones. I guess size does matter.

That is true. But then the cause of all those big banks f**king the economy was because money was lent to individuals who had a track record of thinking that they could afford more than they actually could. That delusions between what these people "thought" and reality seems to be something you're familiar with. Exhibit A. You bought a car from Nissan Japan. As I said earlier, and you evidently missed despite your claims of being able to read, a different company to Nissan Australia. Since you can't differentiate in the paperwork that should have come with your car between a parallel import and an Australian delivered model then yes, I would recommend getting new specs. Before you make more assumptions, I am not an optometrist either. There's no international warranty offered on a Skyline, unlike your fancy watch (or would you prefer to call it a chronograph or timepiece?), so a sensible person would realise that there is no obligation for this third party to support you as they never put the processes in place to do so. If you call the company that originally sold the vehicle, you'll get all the support a reasonable person could expect. I suspect that you'll be disappointed though. Because so many other companies have done so well in the current economic climate? And yeah, if you can't get people to buy more cars because they're all broke due to banks lending money to people with reality disconnects then yeah, plan B is to get more people to buy cars from you than someone else. If you leave people with a need but no choice they'll inevitably come to you. It's not ethical, but business people have little interest for ethics these days since everyone seems to be focused on profit.

With AWD traction and NA power you can probably afford to get a longer lasting tyre. Nothing shithouse (like Nankangs) since AWD doesn't help you under brakes or turning in but you don't need to worry as much about corner exit grip. $220 a tyre in 15" (I found the stock wheel size here) will buy you some pretty good rubber. are one of the best bang-for-buck tyres you can get for dry weather grip right now. They are quick wearing, but grip well. I bought 14" ones recently for under $130 each, and I'm pretty sure you can get them in 17" for about $220. For stock 15" R33 GTS4 wheels you'd be looking at like $150, as a guess. Yes, do it all at once. If you get new wheels I assume you'll want to go to a bigger rim size. That means the tyres from your stock wheels won't fit. It'd be worth considering as the sportier tyres out there are getting harder and harder to find in 60 profile, and so you'll be lumped with econobox and family hack tyres. If its in a package the shop will give you cheap-arse tyres. But they should be fine for getting you around day to day.

f**k them. Where's the Hako? Yours is one of the tidiest I've seen, and one of the few that I don't instantly dislike (Wilch's being one of the others) but I'd still take an R32 or R34 over them. I just wouldn't be emo about the looks if I did own yours.

Dunlop DZ03G. Ask for the softest compound.

What kind of driving do you do, and where? What's your budget? Those factors should most influence your decision. It'd also be nice to post up the required sizes, for those of us that don't know what the dimensions of your stock tyre are.

Nankangs are shit. I've got them on my stock 17" wheels for track/skid duties, and on the girlfriend's MX-5, and they're only good if you want to do skids. We've done 3 track days each on our tyres, with no signs of wear. I'm going to bin hers since they're her daily tyre, and in the wet they're dangerous. You should not be able to rip seconds in a stock auto MX-5 but, on Nankangs in the wet, you can light them up. If you're looking for tyres to go on a wide V35 aftermarket wheel, get Falken FK452s. I find them a good touring tyre. A bit noisy, but they work well wet or dry and come in a big range of sizes.

I've got Maltech lines on the Z33, which are ADR approved. I don't know how well (or how badly) brake lines can work and I also did a Brembo caliper upgrade at the same time so I can't even accurately comment on feel. I have tracked the car since and not died. They're a Victorian company to boot. V-Sport sells Goodridge lines, which are apparently also ADR approved.

They lost the war, so how smart could it have been?

It also wouldn't be hard for Porsche to get one of those aftermarket ECU tuning tools to drop the boost or pull out some timing, let alone something like inserting restrictors into the intake or any other multitude of invisible mods (not that anyone saw the car Porsche used as they didn't publish a video).

A fair few number of people I know (me included) have AutoWatch systems. I haven;t had any issues with it yet.

The one where the spokes warped and the disk pushed out was posted by the owner of the wheels (not a rehash of a rehash of a link) and I'm pretty sure I've seen one or two others posted first hand. I don't personally know the guy who owned those warped wheels, but then I don't personally know Pete either. Pete's experiences are interesting, but not exactly definitive. I know people who've never had issues with ROTA, Lenso, etc even under sustained hard use but the ratio of success:failures compared to the wheels ROTA models theirs on seems to be a lot worse. If some engineering testing firm grabs a dozen sets (to avoid a one-off manufacturing fault) and stress tests them against RAYS/Enkei etc and finds them just as strong and publishes a detailed report on their methodology etc then fair enough I'll take that as definitive despite it being from only 1 organisation.

Hi. Thanks for the post. Too bad we're not talking about fast cars, but good looking cars. If we have a look at the original post: it's got nothing to do with how fast it goes.

Nice example. Too bad its irrelevant. Your watch is identical for any market it is sold in. It was designed to have an international warranty, and so it does. Practically any car has to be engineered specifically for is country of sale. Hence why it'd be financially impossible for any car manufacturer to offer a global warranty on a vehicle. At any rate if Omega sells the watch in Australia then the knowledge is there to service the product under their existing processes. They don't need to spend extra money training staff on a product they never intended on bringing in. The JDM R35 isn't identical to the Aus delivered one either, and in taking a risk-averse stance they'd rather not support it than try to. The Skyline is a Nissan Japan product. Nissan Australia has very little to do with it. The two are actually different companies. As per the regional differences above, the products are vastly different. Your expectations are why the old adage "The customer is always right" no longer really applies. If I buy a product that clearly does not have a global warranty, how should I expect support outside that country to be offered on anything other than a "best effort" basis? Anyway, Nissan Australia isn't a manufacturer. Nissan Japan has very little say on how Nissan Australia conducts its business. If you buy a car from Nissan Japan and you have issues with it, you can surely ask them for assistance and they'll give it to you to the best of their ability. You might have to take it in to one of their service centres, but how far you took the car away from their shop and how far you need to travel to return it is your problem. Your grey import never went through Nissan Australia so this "product" (which is not global, its only sold through official channels in a specific country) has nothing to do with them. You know what they say about assumptions. If you'd actually followed through with your assertion and actually read what I've posted prior, you'd know that I hate dealing with car dealerships. However, I also have experience on what is reasonable and unreasonable in terms of support scope from both sides of the fence. For the record I currently work for a large merchant bank. You know, the industry that invest money in businesses based on their owners' plans and comparing them to how similar plans have worked in the past, and at a size that makes them quite risk-averse. Lets go back up your post a bit.... Protecting your interests to ensure profitability despite a failure to keep costs down seems like "sound buisiness practice" to me. Same with discouraging customers from going to a competitor (in this case grey importers). The aim of business is to make profit. Whether you do it by increasing revenue (via margin or volume) or reducing costs are just details.

12's? Unless someone is bringing a FI car out, that's not likely to happen. If I bring the only car I have fit for chucking down the quarter, I'll be aiming for 16s.

Yeah I noticed that when Porsche did their own tests in the R35, they got an engineer and not their chief test driver Walter Rohrl. Their announced 997 times were put down by Rohrl, which were faster than an R35 driven by a guy who's primary job is controlling a slide rule. That's like saying that Motor Magazine is lying about lap times set in my car because I can't match Neal Bates' posted time, even though my car has mods.

Pete provided his "first hand experience" on the Internet, which is how the majority of us know him, which makes his opinions about as valid as the posted internet pictures. You can't rule out the experiences some people have had just because they shared them online, without ruling out everyone's.