scathing

If we're talking semantics, what does a torque converter have to do if a car is auto or manual either? Surely how the flywheel is connected to the driveshaft is about as relevant as whether you change gears with an electronic paddle or a direct mechanical connection to the gearbox.

Yeah, I've got 3 sets of rims (I don't drag). I've got a set of Nismo LM GT4s for circuit (<3 RE55s), my street tyres, and the stockies are wrapped in Nangkang NSII's. I was going to use these for the Circuit Club Nangkang Challenge (and for dori days) but I went to a skidpan day recently and didn't swap out my more expensive street tyres. I'm tempted to run the Nangkangs at Eastern Creek on Friday and seeing if I can run under 2 mins, actually.

Can't be that cheap though. I've been spinning up my 285s, and now my bank balance is emo. NA FTW.

What's the diameter of the wheel got to do with its width? There are plenty of cookie cutter rims out there, thanks in no small part to people like this who feel the need to drive on massive diameter wheels, but whose guards don't fit wheels of a reasonable width. If you have a look at the Temple of Chrome's web site, most of their 20" rims are 8.5" wide. A 225 width tyre on an 8.5" wide rim will only be slightly stretched.

Keen for a wet day

The engine management system is what controls how much fuel and air goes into the engine. Get it wrong, and stuff breaks. Expensive stuff. $1500 is a relatively small price to pay for good economy, emissions, power and reliability. What other systems would you consider aside from a PowerFC? Don't forget to factor in the cost of tuning. The PowerFC is a very well known computer, so programming it won't cost as much as more esoteric hardware. If you retune after every powertrain mod (which you should technically do) then the lower cost of tuning will put the PFC cheaper when you're talking Total Cost of Ownership.

That is also a matter of perspective, not absolute reality. Firstly, Saab went to a complete FI range (at least in Australia, not sure if they still sell NA Saabs overseas) for fuel economy reasons. If we're talking "similar to NA" in terms of power output, going FI allows Saab to run a physically smaller engine, which improves packaging and weight, while still maintaining performance. If we're talking "similar to NA" in displacement, then once again its not necessarily the case. What's one of the major driveline differences between the NA and FI versions of cars that have both (like the Skylines for example)? The FI cars tend to have taller final drive ratios, which means they sit at a lower RPM for a certain speed in a certain gear. The extra midrange of the FI car allows the car to maintain good acceleration with this different FD, which improves economy. Also, if we're talking about modern FI engines, with relatively high compression and low boost, the engine's internals don't cause the economy hit that old-school turbo cars have. So they're still tractable through the midrange but the little extra air + fuel is offset by the fact that the engine is doing lower RPM because they can carry a higher gear, even around town. This also leads to the fact that if we're talking "similar in NA" to performance, then its definitely an advantage for FI. The FI guys can run smaller, lighter engines. However, they could also run different gearing. As anyone who's compared a GTS and a GTS-t knows, one of the big differences is the final drive in the diff. The turbos have a taller final drive, which means they can do the same speed at a lower RPM in the same gear. If you were to gear a FI car to accelerate as slowly as a NA car, it would be far more efficient as the engine wouldn't be turning as hard. I have a few mates that have 350Zs with APS TT kits (which is only a bolt-on engine mod kit, no modifications to the internals or gearing). Their around-town economy improved after the installation. Having that much extra midrange torque meant they could drive it a gear higher than when NA, and since its boosting across a wide rev-band with stock NA internals that extra gain also happens at around-town engine speeds. I think that they were pulling around 12% (1/8th) better economy after the TT install. The last time I went for a drive with a 350Z TT up Putty Rd, he used about half the fuel I did while maintaining a similar pace behind me. Where I was thrashing the car around in 3rd or 4th at WOT to keep it on the boil, he was in 5th and 6th at half to three quarter throttle. I can only imagine how far ahead he would have gotten from me had he used as much petrol as I did. If you're driving the car "normally" (from an Average Joe perspective) with only light to medium throttle openings most of the time, then a modern FI car will generally be more fuel efficient. Of course, once you go wide open throttle the simple fact that more air goes into the engine means you need more fuel, and so economy suffers.

Would you class a non-symmetric AWD system (such as the Evo's) as "constant"? Its not like a GT-R where there's a possibility of a 0% front torque split, but it still dynamically adjusts the split depending on the data from the sensors. An Evo probably won't be as stable as a GT-R around your high speed flowing bends, but that would be more because of the car's shorter wheelbase and more rally-oriented setup than a fundamental flaw of the Evo's drivetrain itself.

Yep, Jacky Yick is one of the Pro Concept / Seeco Racing drivers. He won the 2007 NSW IPRA's Under 2.0L class in a 1.6L Civic.

What rims do you want? If you want good quality Jap rims, there are a multitude of shops out there (some of whom are sponsors on SAU) that you should consider going to. If you want showy rims, isn't Ozzy Tyres relatively close to your place? If you don't mind second hand, just check the classifieds on here. You'll be relatively assured that the rims will fit your car at least.

Majority is right, because even on here there are quite a few "tourists". I've lost count of the number of threads on here about people saying they bought their Skyline because of how it looks and couldn't care less how it goes, which is why they want to do things to make their sports car perform worse. Which means they just want to be seen in a Skyline, rather than because they plan on enjoying the car for the very reason it earned its desirability. So, basically, you'll get that with every vehicle. How many butchered "sex spec" R32, R33 and R34 Skylines have you seen at car shows sporting retina-searing paint and gauche interiors? How many grey import Skylines are doing laps of the entertainment district on a Friday and Saturday night, whose drivers haven't been anywhere near a winding road let alone a track?

The new surface is looking good, too. Put me down as a maybe for now. Will have to check the budget.

Well, stock for stock (or even if the older Skylines have light mods) they will. Its newer, its faster, its more stable, its better built. In a nutshell, its better in every way. Is your problem that you don't like dealing with progress? Did you feel the same way about R34 Z-Tune owners? Did you think "oh, I don't want Powerplay to bring the Z-Tune in because they'll think they're better than me in my R33 GTS-t, just because their car has AWD and a better engine and a better chassis and better suspension and better brakes and better aero....."?

The Old Pac between the Calga Interchange and Sommersby hasn't been re-opened since the giant hole that swallowed a family. They've still got barriers in the way, although you quite regularly see people driving / riding around them. And, of course, there are residents down there. If you do decide to go on that section of road (and SAU of course doesn't condone you driving on road that have been closed off), be extra careful. Due to the lack of traffic, nothing is blowing the leaves / twigs / brances etc off the road so its really dicey.

There was a test like that? I recall seeing posts about the Toyota Supra GT500 doing testing at Queensland Raceway. Even on dead tyres with their first time out on the track, it blitzed the V8 Supertaxi lap record (by your quoted 10-15s, I think). The Nismo GT500 cars were at least as quick, if not quicker. And there's no way a Z-Tune is as quick as a GT500 car, which are regarded as some of the quickest tin-tops in the world due to their aero and suspension. Ah, but the V8 Supercars run full slicks. The Z-Tune can be optioned with R-Comps from Nismo, but there's still a massive traction advantage when comparing the respective tyres. The V8 Supercars will also have superior aero and suspension, since they don't need to make allowances for road use, and they also weigh less and have 100hp more power with no turbo lag. There's also the matter that the V8 Supercars get set up specifically for each track whereas the Z-Tune doesn't get optimised in the same way. Not saying it wouldn't be close, but in the dry its hard to see how a purpose built top-tier race car is slower than a fully road-legal street car.

Yeah, the 500 in GT500 is the maximum power output (in ps) of the engines for the cars in that class. The GT300 cars have a power limit of 300ps. Yeah, I don't understand the French (who invented the standard units). There's a perfectly good existing metric unit for power (the watt) which is what the Standards Body is all about. The "horsepower" is an imperial unit based on what James Watt hypothesised a horse could do, and then knocked a bit off that so when he made a "1hp" engine people wouldn't disbelieve him.....and the "power stroke" value is limited just to engines and is a metric'ed version of that imperial unit.

I'm with you. The car was designed with that aero piece. Why did you buy a well sorted sports car and then decide to ruin the way it drives? If you want a car for its looks and don't care how it drives, stick to Celicas and Preludes (or Hyundai Coupes and Integras now).

Not if your car is low. My car's at factory height and I bottom out repeatedly. Its worse north of the Waterfall entrance, but even in that bottom section through the trees there are a few spots I'll spark out. That said, I took the girlfriend's MX5 through the entire run and it was great.

They're bowing down to the marketing parasites. They were going to name the 3 series coupe the 4 series, but because the 3 Series name has such cachet it would have been marketing suicide for them to rename the M3 to an M4. Any BMW enthusiasts, who buy them as "driving machines", would know that the car they want is the 4 Series and deal with it. But for arriviste that know as much about cars as your typical social climber that buys a 4 cylinder BMW, they'd think they were getting something else. Its why the 318i is still badged a 318 rather than 319i when the E46 was released, the 320i when it had a 2.2L, and the 323i when it had a 2.5L - the 318i, 320i and 323i names were so famous in the marketplace that BMW decided to ignore their own naming convention.

Slow in the straights is politically correct generic advice. Well, adding 5km/hr to the signposted corner speed suggestions will still keep you under the speed limit so its also acceptable. As for whether 5km/hr over the corner signpost speeds actually constitutes "fast" or not, I'll leave unanswered.

You can. But with this thing you can just plug-and-play. As rs73 said we're not all handy with electrical stuff and getting it wrong could be catastrophic. It also lets you elegantly "return to stock" should you ever need to, since you don't have to cut any of the connectors etc.

Quoted for posterity. Anyway, if you're going up on a Sunday just do at around the speed limit, and expect to not get a flowing drive. The road is always full of tourists on the weekend, and so its heavily patrolled. You'll also find a lot of cyclists during the day, so you'll go around some of those blind corners and find some spastics in spandex doing 20km/hr.

That depends......do you want to learn how to set up a family hack econobox to be driven by the lowest common denominator? Learning suspension from a franchise like Pedders is like learning cooking from McDonalds. You'd be best off finding a smaller specialist shop that does real work with their brains rather than following head office's 3-ring binder on what the procedure should be. Think about the average spanner monkey at a car dealership's service centre.....that would be you. The only thing I will say in favour of Pedders is that if you need to get a foot in the door, it might be easier with a big company and then you can use it on your CV to land a job at a proper suspension workshop.

I'm indecisive. I really like the Evo, with its near-perfect drivetrain (if it had the ability to send 100% of the power to any one wheel then it would be perfect) and the fact that the thing is devastatingly quick. I'd set it up a bit differently since I prefer tarmac driving, so I'd have a 0:100 split like a GT-R in "normal" conditions" but the fact that the S-AYC actively torque splits across both axes whereas ATTESSA only actively splits front to rear is what takes the post for me. The driveline doesn't take away from your ability to drive (or f**k up), like traction or stability control. It just makes better use of what the car's got and extends the limits of the car, rather than locking them to an artificially low point. At the same time, every time I see an Elise I think about selling my tugboat and buying one. I like the fact that it feels amazing to drive and does what its told, and is driving at its most pure (short of an Atom or Caterham) while still being daily drivable (if it had a roof that didn't take half an hour and a scout's badge to set up, it would also be perfect).

I'm with you. I don't like the orange either (actually, I don't like orange cars in general). Its just a bit too "flat" for my liking (compared to it being a "hyper lemon" yellow instead, to use JUN terminology). If I wanted a really vibrant, stand out colour for a stand-out car (like, for example, a Lamborghini) then I'd want it bright yellow. That said, I don't think the GT-R should look that. Its not a "tough" colour. If I afford one the only colours I'd consider would be a bright red (not the flat almost-maroon the car comes in but more like Ferrari's), Nismo silver (the Z-Tune hue), pearl white or jet black.