scathing

Hence my sharing my thoughts on your thoughts. Yes, I have. Actually, I'm trying to help you as a person. So your solution to counter the behaviour of people without experience is to deny them experience? You also pretty much failed to directly respond to anything I brought up. There's probably a good chance that you can't be helped, if your evident allergy to education is anything to go by. I never denied it (although your complete lack of referencing source material makes your claims unsubstantiated and therefore unreliable). Where your opinion and mine differs is what to do about it. My opinion on what should be done is a bit more complex than that. Simple solutions are good for simple minds. In a nutshell, I think: 1. Sensible and applicable vehicle restrictions 2. Driver education (not merely driving skills, but behaviour and consequences) 3. A less aggressive attitude from the public and law enforcement (history shows that you get better results from the carrot than the stick, and "persecuted" people tend to lash out even more stupidly) 4. More accessible places for enthusiast drivers to legally and safely drive their cars in such a manner (closing Oran Park is a big negative, in my opinion) and so a cultural shift that not everyone who likes cars is bad 5. Forcing convicted hoons where an accident occurs to do community service, where they have to assist the ambulance services which means they also get to visit all those crash scenes and have to see first hand the consequences of hooning 6. That aforementioned conviction will also record a loss of license (but not necessarily impounding the cars), and the penalty for driving during the suspension period being a jail term rather than just extensions to the suspension. After the jail term they can recommence their suspension and do community service for the duration. There's more detail than that, but I'm not really in the mood to flesh it out more than that. You get the idea. A jail term should be a last resort for serial offenders who do something serious, not straight off the bat for someone who happens to be speeding with no context on where or when. Every experience that a person has that they can take something away from is a learning experience, which makes it an education. People who don't learn anything are inevitably doomed to repeat their mistakes. As such, yeah, technically I support driver education as a theory - I just don't think any exist that meet the criteria as a course everyone should have to do to obtain their license. If you have a look at the mood here and on other car forums, most think street racers are complete f**kwits. However, the fact that anyone who happens to like driving gets tarred with the same brush means we have to defend ourselves against attacks that don't actually apply to us. Taking someone's car away and just letting them sit there does sweet f**k nothing to fixing the problem. When they inevitably get their license back if they don't know its wrong they'll just do it again. The fact that almost 3/4 of people who go to prison end up back there again is proof enough that just letting people idly stew about their predicament without being shown a better way end up doing it again.

Is that because punishment without rehabilitation has worked so well for other serious crimes? I mean, people who go to prison never re-offend, right? I mean, a 70% recidivism rate isn't that bad. 3 people out of 10 people who go to prison not ending up back there has got to mean something. Back in 2006 it was only 43% of prisoners re-offending but hey, who's counting? Absolutely. In the year after the P plate restrictions were brought in, we had a 37% increase in the number of P platers who didn't reoffend - mainly because they were permanently imprisoned in a coffin after their first offense. Not only didn't they hoon anymore, but they didn't commit any other crimes either. Win-win, right? People as smart and "geeky" as yourself would immediately put the correlation between people not being allowed to drive "high performance" vehicles and increasing the death toll as a clear indication that the system is working well. Just like how recidivism rates have gone up in line with prison sentence increases. I guess people just aren't as brilliant as you, and too reliant on irrelevant details like "facts" to come to conclusions. OK, I can't hold the sarcasm up any longer. Trying to pretend to agree with your nonsense is actually hurting my brain. As someone who lives on the North Shore but visits a lot of people out west, I can only assume you've never been to Chatswood. Or perhaps the rarefied air in the neighbourhood is reducing the oxygen stream to your brain. Chatswood's probably the worst place on the North Shore for running into hoons doing happy laps around the only mainstream cinema in the area. You get less out-and-out racing than you do in the west, but then the North Shore's roads are so narrow, winding and full of speed humps that you really can't do straight line drags like you can on the Great Western Highway. That said, there's still plenty of kids who'll want to give it a short squirt if you line up next to them in a nice car. It also helps when you (or your parents) are rich enough to be able to grease the legal wheels of justice. John Singleton managed to get off a charge of doing 160km/hr on a public road in his Bentley because his lawyer convinced the court it was OK because it was a sports car and therefore safe. How's that for the mentality of people of certain socio-economic levels? The law doesn't apply to him when it doesn't suit him. Anton Faber-Castell (yes, the pencil company family) got busted doing 200km/hr on the F3 while on his P's, in his dad's BMW 7 Series. He kept his license, got put on a good behaviour bond, and no was conviction recorded. You wouldn't even know that they'd been doing stuff like this if you didn't read the news since the convictions aren't on their permanent records, but as drivers the only difference between these high socio-economical hoons and the guys you're heaping shit on is the fact that they can afford to buy their way out of trouble.

GReddy was the first to release theirs. APS and Power Enterprise released theirs soon after, I'm not sure which was first. HKS' twin turbo kit is relatively recent. Their released a Rotrex supercharger kit for the car first, then a single turbo, then the twins. Quite a few US companies have released some (JWT, Turbonetics) which apparently are quite good value if you live over there. There has never been a twin turbo 350Z. The closest to factory supported you'll find is the Nissan UK developed 350Z GTS, powered by a Novidem supercharger. It never went in to production.

Considering the step up from the regular R34 to the R34 Z-Tune, what the Baron has suggested wouldn't be enough (in my books) to justify the tag. I'd agree with the synchro'less box. If the double clutch gearbox is as smart as they say it is, surely it can rev-match electronically rather than rely on synchromesh.

During our interview with Garry he said he wasn't aiming for this place to be a competitor to Wakefield (let alone a replacement to Oran). Garry wants it to be a feeder into people who go driving at those places. For people who are kind of interested in track work but are too scared to even do Wakefield (yes, those people do exist) it would be a smaller "first step". The impression I've gotten of its main purpose is public road driver training, however. Having a narrow road with lots of bends and switchbacks is a better simulation than a massive concrete patch or a super-wide "corner - straight - corner" race track. All the surface needs is some potholes and animals scurrying across it, and it would feel like your typical country back road.

You can sit a centrifigual supercharger where the factory airbox sits, or mount a screw type between the V like Stillen does. You can run single or twin turbos as usual. The main question is whether you can everything plumbed in. The bends to get a turbo kit to fit look like a rat's warren. I'm also not seeing people's current fascination with twincharging. The APS/GReddy/PE twin turbo kits for the VQ35DE deliver plenty of tractability down low and will still flow 400rwkW with the right supporting mods. I've driven 350Zs with around 300rwkW and down low they still pull strongly enough. It doesn't feel any worse than my NA car at any point in the rev range. The cost of getting a supercharger kit would pay for a VQ37HR crank and custom internals to fit a VQ35DE (you can choose whether you want to drop the compression ratio and up the boost or keep the ratio high and retain response), which will give you more stroke and thus low-end, and the custom plumbing required for twincharging would pay for at least a set of cams.

You can run 9.5" front and 10.5" rear with those offsets without breaking a sweat. If you can run massive deep dish without "cheater" tactics like curved spokes you owe it to the world to do so.

The government needs to buy land to put all these impounded cars, pay towies, and employ staff to look after them. The fines chargedWithout their own transportation, they also need to invest in public transport or they'll lose their jobs and go on the dole. If the idiots also kill someone useful while driving like f**kwits, that's also a net negative effect on the state as well. If you want to talk revenue raising, keeping idiots on the roads and just continuing to fine them would be a lot more financially prudent than getting them off the roads and cutting off an income source. I'm all for novice drivers actually having to gain a lot of supervised experience in a wide range of situations before being permitted to drive unattended, that has been verified by an independent (and hopefully qualified) source rather than dodgied up by bad-habit-possessing friends and family.

Better get this guy to move to Port Stephens then.

Running higher offsets than stock (regardless of wheel width) is illegal, bad for handling, and looks shit. It's a trifecta of rubbish. FYI they sound like S15 or R33 sizes. Also, they're not RAYS wheels. They're 5Zigen wheels.

Tangentally related to the idea of harsher penalties for P plater "hoons": (Full article here) In other words, rather than just punishing young drivers for doing stupid things by taking away their liberty (or cars) and calling it quits, even a conservative politician says it's preferable to try and educate people in a better way of behaving.

Probably not, but a four door for seat car with a reasonable boot is more practical than a 2 seater with a giant metal girder bifurcating the rear storage even if the engine goes through petrol and oil like its going out of fashion.

But that's just a guess. An educated guess, but a guess nonetheless. With a beacon timer there's no running a "close enough" measured number through a series of equations to make it "closer enough". What you measured (i.e. what your timer observes in the real world) is what is true, or as true as the hardware can measure. That I'd agree with. Most people doing random track days in their daily driver street cars would struggle to be so consistent that hundredths matter. I'm looking at getting a Driftbox eventually so I can log my line through a whole lap. I want to be able to overlay my lines onto a map to see how consistently wrong I am at them and how, as well as measuring sector times without having to buy an expensive timer and multiple beacons. I definitely won't be getting one of those phone-based GPS timers, given their inaccuracy.

That honestly depends on how much boost you want to run. Half a bar of boost will see you to around 280rwkW on most twin turbo kits with a very linear power deliery (the ones I've driven have felt like stock R33 GTS-ts/S15s in terms of how it feels across its rev band, just a shedload faster), and I know guys who've daily driven their TT 350Zs for years without engine strife. The higher compression means it's far more responsive and economical than a stock turbo'ed car. It's why a lot of modern manufacturers have gone the high compression/low boost route to deliver good drivability for their cooking models while keeping fuel consumption down. The supercharger will be easier to install, I'd agree. If you're only after a small power hike (but more than what bolt-ons can offer) it's hard to beat a supercharger. The 230rwkW HKS Rotrex'ed 350Z felt like the engine had just been embiggened, but superchargers are inherently less efficient than turbochargers and centrifugal ones are the worst of the lot.

The RX8 vs 350Z debate was close? The 350Z was quicker everywhere than the RX8 aside from constant switchbacks. The only place the RX8 is noticably better is in "feel" and practicality.

Hey guys. I was privileged enough to be granted a sneak-peak of the new track, as a contributor to Circuit Club's magazine. The track is almost done, but it still needs some surfacing in some spots. The facilities aren't quite as done, but you could arguably start running events there if you had to. I think Garry's aim is to have the facility completely up and running in the next few months. It's a tight 1km circuit on the side of a hill, and is designed to teach people how to control their cars rather than be a flat-out race track. My car is pretty big and heavy on most tracks, but it feels even fatter on this one. It's not a race track, so you don't really get open days. There will be instructor lead training, but I suspect Garry will run some open "private practice" type days for people to just belt out laps. The skid circuit at the bottom is a simple O loop, but will be sprinklered for those of us who don't want to shred our tyres while trying to drift. That said, it's a really nice bit of blacktop, being very tricky and technical. It definitely looks like somewhere to teach someone who to drive/ride. It also looks like a drifter's dream. It really reminds me of those dedicated drift circuits you see in Japan, with banked walls very close to the track and lots of tight curves. It's more a closed hillclimb/country road loop than anything else. There's a video posted as well so you can get a better idea. Clicky

If we remove speed limits from all the roads, then no-one could ever be speeding. That would reduce accidents caused by speeding to zero. Instant win.

S14s came in a "Q's" configuration (i.e. NA), but they're not eligible for import. S15s came in at least 3 NA variants (the regular coupe, which you can't import), and the grey imported Varietta convertible and the Autech coupe with the tuned 147kW engine. Whether it's a rip off or not is arguable. Unless state governments remove the P plater restrictions in the near future, the price of these cars will stay high as they're the only ones P platers can drive. Low supply and demand driven by restriction will see to that. NA S13s have actually held value, if not appreciated a little, since the P plate restrictions came into effect. If I remember correctly the Autech is a little heavier than the turbo S15, as the chassis has been reinforced. With a pod filter the thing has an induction growl reminiscent of a Honda on VTEC.

It's accuracy is only as good as how it's measured, and with a GPS-based unit it's not particularly good. Firstly, it depends on how fast the GPS unit refreshes its position. Most commercial GPS units (the ones built into satnav units and Bluetooth GPS receivers) refresh at approximately 1Hz (i.e. once a second). That means it only checks to see where you are once a second, so it can only be completely accurate to the second. While that's good enough if you're trying to use it for tooling around town trying to work out how to get to the shops, on the track a second is a f**kload of distance and pretty much useless for measuring. In terms of accuracy, you may as well use a stopwatch taped to your steering wheel. RaceLogic's two GPS timers (PerformanceBox and Driftbox) refresh at 10Hz. While that's better, it's still only really accurate to a tenth of a second. They can apply formulae to interpolate values if you crossing the lap marker happens to fall somewhere between refreshes, but that's going to be a guess rather than an measured value. Secondly, there's the accuracy of the receiver as well. If you have a read of the Wiki entry on GPS, you can see there's more information on how accurate GPS can be / is in practice than I can be bothered reading, let alone summarising. In short, there's plenty of scope for error. I know that when I've taken my car for a spirited drive on a winding country road, my satnav unit has confidently told me that I was in a river or a field rather than the road I was actually on. That's without trees or buildings on a cloudless day with a reported 5 satellite connection, so interference was minimal. Your traditional lap timer uses an infra-red beacon somewhere on the track, with a receiver in the car. Every time you go past the beacon (that is projecting in an approximately straight beam) the receiver marks a lap. Since the receiver reacts quite quickly as soon as the IR beam goes into it, it's a lot more accurate. It always measures in the same place, so the distance of a lap is constant rather than slightly variable due to the aforementioned refresh rate.

Have fun. I'd love to come, but I am probably out.

I like em.

Please explain how the engine's compression ratio makes a material difference to what kind of unit compresses the air going into it.

"If at first you don't succeed, try try again"?" I suppose if you're addicted to failure...... You've already admitted that these tough restrictions, along with the extra police attention, aren't doing the trick. The War on Drugs, and Prohibition in the past, have already demonstrated the effectiveness of zero tolerance. Bigger and bigger penalties haven't really done much to stem the tide of illicit drug use. The whole "our big penalty didn't work, lets try a bigger one" sounds like your typical geriatric that wants to stick doggedly to an idea that clearly isn't working because they can't think of anything else, but hate feeling impotent and so feel the need to do something, even if it's the wrong thing. I could go on again about what I think about car crushing, but I've pretty much covered it all here.

The R35 isn't exactly lacking in the midrange. And as others have said, centrifugal superchargers don't give the low end grunt that Rootes or Screw type ones do. If they do, they're causing high parasitic loss in the top end. Centrifugal superchargers manage to combine the bad qualities of both traditional superchargers and turbochargers, with the only pro being the ease of packaging inside the engine bay.

f**k me, but when Americans pay you out for being tasteless you know you've failed at life.