Things aren’t always what they seem in the car world
Posted Monday, October 12th, 2009 in Featured Articles
It has happened to all of us. Dream all your life about driving an Sti. You get one and you realize that it actually feels slow over 80, it rattles and just doesn’t fit you right. Save for two years for that big turbo kit for your 1.8t A4 quattro. Finally after hours of install and prep you take your “new” car out for a drive only to find that it now suffers from serious lag, those horribly short gear ratios went from being not so good to just plain wrong and now you need an oil cooler. Yes sir, it has happened to all of us. The real problem is that for many a car purchase is a serious financial investment . Once we get the car of our dreams we may infact be “stuck” with that car for years. We have all done that “mod-to-far” where we realized , not only did we just make our car perform worse… but NOW we can’t easily, quickly or cheaply put it back to the way it was. Just so you guys don’t feel like I am preaching to you with no experience, I will give you an example of each of these that I have had the…errr… JOY of experiencing for myself.
The right car is the wrong car? Yes, sometimes that can be true. In my case even when the car did actually meet, exceed and live up to every expectation I had for it. However, there was a small problem I hadn’t considered despite the fact that I had driven said vehicle on several occasions. Let me start by just saying I thought Car and Driver, Road and Track and the like were all mad. Only The British publications of the day got it right. From 1989 to 1995 the world’s finest automobile had been made and we all missed it. I didn’t, I knew it. I had a feeling that old Colin Chapman had been right, learned something in those turbo charged F1 years and had secretly created the world’s finest car. With the refinement that came in 1987-1988 in chassis improvement and a gorgeous redesign spearheaded on a shoe string the car was, in my mind, the perfect car. With weight kept to circa 2,600 lbs dry and a minimum of 264 hp (around 300 with the factory programmed 4 sec overboost) handling , acceleration … everything was perfect. Yes, you guessed it the Lotus Esprit Turbo. At this point you would be asking, “but wait, Tim, you enthuse so poetic about the 1993 car in the project car section of this very site.” Indeed it shall be clear, read on. Somewhere around the year 2002 the stars lined up and I was blessed with the stewardship of my own 30k miles, pristine and black 1989 Lotus Esprit. There is a lot to love about that particular year, if like me, you long for the purity of a car with no airbags, abs or other weight adding encumbrances. I had driven a few other ’89′s and this one just blew those away, being better maintained, sharper and more importantly , fleeter than I had remembered. Right from the off the car was as good or BETTER than I had imagined. Fabulous sounds, lustfully boosty acceleration, literally telepathic steering. This car was immediately drifted perfectly from apex to apex and hurled toward corners at speeds reserved for cars wearing dedicated track tires. It truly inspired that kind of confidence. However. Those first few drives were undertaken bare foot, because with my size 11′s fitted , I literally couldn’t get enough articulation at the pedals , and worse my knees literally were forced against the steering wheel. Tragedy had struck. I had my dream car, it was everything I wanted , except… I didn’t fit in the blasted thing. I soldiered on for about a year and then had to sell the car to search for a newer Esprit. I will provide a happy aside to this story by saying that with the advent of the S4 interior in 1993 the Esprit gained several inches in every interior space dimension. I now have an Esprit that I fit properly in and yes your hand still falls gracefully inches from the wheel on to the perfectly placed shifter, the steering still tells you what kind of ant you just ran over and with even more power it will still squat and slither where ever you direct it. You see my point though. Had I not been in the business of shifting cars regularly anyhow, my …umm.. tailoring error could have easily been a decade long struggle that lead to either A. having a car I never drove , or B. me being dead because my hands met my knees and had no where to go.
So, say you did buy the right car, you are a happy driver but now you want to take it that step further. It is time to modify. Prepare for phase two. This time to get an example that will allow you to either empathize with me or look down on me as a fool… either way, if you are truthful with yourself, you know this has happened to you. Ahhh yes, the early 90′s. Many great (ok, granted they weren’t that great) cars of the late 80′s and early 90′s had great big turbo’s strapped to them and had all sorts of potential just waiting for tuners to unleash. Now, many of these cars had so many problems, and at the time I had far too little money to actually undertake any kind of “project” but why would that stop me. I needed a blow off valve and I needed it bad. After all my Audi 200 Avant was now making around 21 psi and was wicked fast in the quarter (trapping a then stellar 14.1 … what is that sound? are you laughing?!?! May I remind you that this car weighed close to 4,000 lbs !) It was indeed blow off time and no one would be safe until I had one. SOOO, with a little research and a company that swore they ran this on their own car, I bought a new silicone hose and BOV set. It arrived looking very much like I had made it my self, but why should that concern me , this thing is sweet on their car , right? Fast forward an hour or so…. I was off. 1st gear braaap, psssssshhhhh, 2nd gear braaaaaaaaaap, ffffappppppsssshhhh, third gear… braaaap (stop sign) fffpssssshhhhhh, cough , cough stall. WHAT? Start it back up and my poor 200 was straining to idle at 3 or 400 rpms. Surely This was a mistake. NOPE. After some tinkering and finding a spring manufacture that would give me a higher rate spring , I finally got the car to idle, but the truth is , the car ran like CRAP with that vent to atmosphere valve. The mixture was all wrong back on throttle, it would still dip and dive trying to run right, it was all wrong. How wrong ? About S370 bucks wrong. At the time I think that is what I made in a week and a halfs work…. PAINFUL. Was the company at fault? Partly, they should have been straight about the issues the part had (which they stopped offering about a year later). Was it my fault? Well, certainly I shared some of the blame but even after research and talking to others I still wasn’t clear that anyone felt similarly about the part. Further, at the time it was one of those things that not many had tried. I had actually modified my car and made it perform….FAR WORSE.
That is why we created P3… not just a resource for educated knowledge and opinion, not just an e-zine or simple parts portal. We want to help you buy, build and enjoy the perfect car. Here at P3 we have DECADES of experience in parts creation, track time, sales… literally every aspect of the automotive industry. If we try a part and don’t like it. We will tell you why and then find one that works right! Every PART we create or sell will be graded and given a full test. Not a few miles . Mixed loops , hundreds of miles. You can be sure that we share your passion and love all the same cars you do. If you have wondered what a certain car would be like… be sure we have too. With our project cars absolute MAX performance will never be our goal. Creating a better DRIVERS tool will be. If a certain spring rate makes a cars turn in response sharper. We will choose it . If a certain spring rate eliminates roll, but breaks the rear view mirror free from the car …it will be vetoed. If we can’t find the right part for an application… we will make it. PASSION drives us. To that end , you can’t make a car better if you don’t really know what it is like from the start. We will PROFILE all of our chosen cars to the point which, the information and detail we give you… you won’t find it anywhere else. Real world driving, real world explanations… and in a world where we aren’t all multi millionaires, VALUE will play a huge part. Any one with money can by a Ferrari 430 Scuderia, anyone can enjoy that car. Getting that Joy or Passion quotient as we will refer to it… we will aim to extract that from even the most humble Miata. In a world where facts and figures are easy to look at we aim to perfect YOUR car in YOUR favorite corner in YOUR real life. The images, video and content we provide will fuel that fire even when you cannot yet own your dream. Welcome to P3, welcome to our Drivers Revolution.
