Be Excellent To Each Other

daw, look at his little grey balls.

Fuck is going on with those exhaust pipes? Only car allowed to have 3 pipes as far as I'm concerned is the F40.

Looks like BurtTank's big brother

I love it.

Curio likes that car a lot.

It's like they're perversely going out of their way to produce "challenging" (read: fugly) cars like the less-than-fondly-remembered BMW Bangle era some years back? I suppose it's an antidote of sorts as against Honda's increasingly blue rinse image.

To my eyes, that thing looks like a rendering of a chav chariot for 2025. It's probably got a good radio though.

EDIT: Also, 1.6L Vauxhall Astra one minute to this the next..? Wow, that's some serious car flip-flopping, awesome work Hearthly. Just take the "eyeball average" between these two wild extremes and you'll probably be about right. S4 perhaps...?

You say that, but I think the Bangle BMWs have aged very well indeed - the E60 5-series was considered horrific at the time (although I never really understood why) but I think it still looks good today, and is far nicer looking than the current attempts.

In fact, of Bangle's cars it's only really the pre-LCI 7-series that I didn't like the look of.

Did you do that? Quality work if so, sir.

No, went looking for the video I remembered and found the Gif in the process.

@Gaz

It's a totally subjective thing, I guess.
To my eyes the E60 had "Dame Edna Everage headlamps" and was pure horror show, and there was the truly awful E65 arse... it's all a matter of opinion of course.
I do think it is fair to say, though, that the general consensus isn't too favourable.

I do agree that current crop of BMWs ain't exactly things of beauty either (Mercs look much prettier IMO, especially the smaller ones), and pretty boring to look at as well, so I guess

See, I can't agree with that - and the fact that more and more new cars are found with headlamps that aren't a million miles away from the E60s tells me what Bangle was just ahead of his time.


Now, that I can agree on. The pre-LCI arse is truly gopping, but when they revised it for the LCI model it was far, far nicer - and still looks nice today.

Hey.
Life would be boring if we all agreed, there's no right or wrongs here.

That's only because Mr Chris hasn't yet posted here.

The little BTCC A-Class looks the fucking business:

Yeah, that's seriously awesome.
If the car mags are to be believed (and I certainly don't for much of the time), the A Class is a bit rubbish but I love 'em.
Son in law's A45 AMG was great - he's just bought a Macan GTS now though. (I've let him off as he's got two little ones to ferry about )

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/superc ... ow-fast-it

This is "holy SHIT!" Fast

Bloody hell! 2.7 secs 0-60 and 10 secs standing quarter... fresh out of the box?
Hells bells, that is flippin' fast!

New exhaust is on! Just the turbo niggle to suss then remap.

Put a new fuel filter in today, only one head scratching moment when I realised the fuel lines I'd reconnected were stopping the air coming out as I charged the new one with diesel. Popped them off and the fuel flowed freely in.

You say that...



Line lock, trans brake, supercharger prime, 1.8g launch - on a production car.

ohhhhh........... ......

OMG. If ever there was such a thing as a "Cavey Kitemark", that thing would bear it - the very antithesis of all the apologetic, 1.0 litre econoboxes obsessing over their mg of CO2 fairies, 'eccy motors or whatevs (I meant to say something similar about THAT 1970 Dodge Charger R/T with blower and nitrous in the Fast and Furious thread, in what was otherwise a rather silly teen flick with an implausible plot)

What a truly magnificent thing: it does one thing better than anything else, with such single-minded purpose and function at the expense of all else. It's hard to imagine anything less like the GT4, for instance, but by crikey, that is a marvelous, marvelous thing, probably deserving of the last gallon of petrol on Earth. I absolutely love it.

Just wonderful. Thank you for that.

Oh yeah.

Clean-up in aisle three.

Yeah, sorry about that.

Which bits of FnF is implausible? Totally easy to get stuff shipped overnight from Japan.

I guess it wasn't the courier lead times I was particularly thinking of, there, but it's been a very long time since I sat through it.

But black Dodge Charger. Black. Chrome, Shiny. Black. Bellmouth intakes. Supercharger whine. Nitrous oxide, Black. Shiny.Dodge Charger.

I'll be in my bunk if anyone needs me.

When Dodge released the 800hp Hellcat it was close to being the fastest 1/4 mile production car, and they talked about how it was certainly the fastest 1/4 mile non-supercar - right up until they put it up against the electric MPV that Tesla make, and it got it's tail kicked

Not such a problem with the Demon - it's nearly a second faster down the track. But I fully expect the electric cars to beat this one soon, too. They just make so much torque compared to petrol cars they they won't stay unbeaten for long.

Isn't it more to do with the fact that they can deliver the torque instantly, or near to it, and that a lot of them are four wheel drive.

Found a photo of my first car.

The mighty Fiat Panda 1000sx

Yah. They have all of their torque at 0RPM, which is something to get your head around.

I'd be interested to see how much difference 4WD makes on a drag strip - it wouldn't help the Demon much, considering the front wheels are in the air

Opinions obviously differ, here as elsewhere, but fast electric cars have about as much relevance to me personally as fast pendolino trains. I mean, I'm sure a fucking TGV train can do an awesome standing quarter, whilst I'm enjoying something from the buffet car, but what of it?

You can strap retrorockets to a milk float, but it's still a milk float, just a fast one.

I loathe electric cars one and all; they can all GTFF as far as I care. Give me badass V8 muscle anytime.

Heh! Awesome mate, well tidy and a fun little car! Much better than my first motor by a considerable margin

I'm not convinced it can!

I quite like the idea of a decent electric car. Just need to up the miles between charging.

The Tesla Model 3 is the first to really tempt me. It's going to be relatively sensibly priced, and with a real world 250 mile range, would be fine for 99.9% of the journeys I make.

We passed a Fiat Panda on the motorway yesterday, and o said it was squished ugly cute. Like a baby pug is. It didn't look like that, though!

A noticeable improvement on my drive into work today.

Next DIY job. EGR valve degunk!

Awesome work, Z. How much extra poke do you reckon you've got, did they dyno it post remap?

I'm showing the Harley at a local car and bike show this Sunday. Mrs C is showing the GT4 "Gigi".
Here's hoping one of us wins five pounds.

Still doing the remedial jobs before it gets remapped. ADS gave it a health check and said they wouldn't update the software until a few things were sorted out first.

It's in a state now where it can go back to them to work out why the boost is tailing off and hopefully get the remap done then once it's fixed.

The Revo software will take it from 110bhp / 173lbft to 135bhp / 223lbft. Nothing eyewatering but a nice kick up the arse.

It's been very satisfying doing jobs on my car myself though. Makes me appreciate it al the more now I've invested time and effort into it.

Oh, sorry, my bad - I thought it had been remapped. I'll just learn to read.

No worries. I was gutted at the time when I got the call saying it wasn't done but then quickly thought I'd much rather them treat cars this way than just taking my money and mapping it with parts that need attention.

Heard nothing but good reviews about the place so wasn't surprised they'd be thorough in the health check.

This is brilliant, Ari Vatanen back in 1983. Amazing save at about 2:05 or so when he punctures a tyre on a wall. I could not be a co-driver.

I takes a very special kind of nerve, that for sure.

I've spoken to a few, and it's not that they trust the driver as you might expect - they trust every driver. As one guy said to me "None of them are dead yet, so why should they kill me?"

That guy is super cool though, some of them sound like they're petrified half of the time. Love his reaction when Vatanen clips the wall. The low-key "oh" as he gets ready for a massive crash and the incredulous "dear god" when they don't

You did well holding onto the roof trim coming back from the Lakes though.

Ha, I know those roads quite well, although I don't drive them like that We still have rallying here every year, in many cases using the exact same routes from back in the 70s and 80s.

I worked for Dukes between 1996 and 1999, the amount of stuff they had down in their vaults was amazing. (Including a lot of stuff that simply couldn't be put on sale in modern times, like the original 'HAVOC' programmes that were absolutely no holds-barred crash reels, such as footage of Le Mans cars going into the crowds in the 50s with their fuel tanks splitting and igniting, you can imagine the results of that, IIRC over 50 people were killed in that one and hundreds injured.)

That was terrifying. I have questions...

1. That seems like a pretty standard car. Normal gear stick and such like. When did the low bucket seats and sequential gear boxes start to be the thing?

2. What does 'maybe' mean in a rallying context? Is he guessing?

I loved the "mid the service in the village" as if someone was getting married as a chavved up nova screams past at 90mph.

I think I've seen that video...

Yep. Warning. Not nice.

They do this in Sega Rally too. I've always wondered and thought maybe I'd misheard it?