coldel

All depends on what you term exciting. I am sure a professional drift driver in a 90bhp mk1 mx5 going around an oval circuit would make it a spectacularly exciting experience moreso than sitting in a veyron and driving up to 100mph very quickly. GZ I can see you get your kicks from things that just go fast, which is absolutely fine. Others get kicks from sounds, smells etc. (its been written before wont write it again) and handling on the limits which you will never get with an EV. Personally a stupid quick 0-100 time is not the be all and end all of what I term exciting in a car. But each to their own!

Seems to be happening a fair bit now, with the cars knocking on the door of 25 years old and having run EBCs for a fair bit. Can't help but feel nervous still it really does shift for a classic car and now sounds bloody marvelous!

Can confirm a number of Celica GT4 owners have had bad experiences with fitment and quality of Mishimoto rads too.

Surely on the cards not so far down the line is to build your own track car from scratch! The Keyser Eagle Hammerhead Shed - it would be awesome...

Aye should probably let someone else drive my car (would be a first!) - these are sequential BOVs as well, its great watching the internals work as you can see the two moving parts (which makes them different to the standard BOVs as well)

Well, I managed to get onto an AdamC3046 video recently which had me leaving the denbies PH sunday service and have to say was not too impressed with the high pitched whistle the bov makes! In the car it sounds fine but outside it sounds much higher pitched and a bit naff if I am honest. I have an HKS SSQV blow off valve on the car. I did a bit of investigation online and found out something quite interesting, that you can with these specific BOVs change the pitch and sound of the air exiting the valve which is quite neat. You can remove the plastic fin and replace with different shapes to create different sounds. Like below: I also found out that lots of people rather than pay the £20 for a bit of plastic removed the fins altogether and thats what I tried on the weekend, and it sounds much better. The sound is much lower pitched, less of a whistle and more of a whhhhhhhhosh. Not an exciting update by any means but the car sounds very different now and I found out something very cool about these particular brand of BOV.

No need to miss meets, I have been gate crashing them for years in various road going non zed machinery

Good to meet you today pal at Ace. Nice car! How about this I sourced from the world wide of web...do it do it do it!

I had my front bumper resprayed and still got stone chips - apparently the paint takes a few weeks to properly harden so if you can resist driving it for a while if you are that concerned. Otherwise the only other way to prevent it is to wrap it in a clear vinyl.

Yep most people switch out the tyres etc. And yes the Larinis are loud (I had the VSE which was properly loud!) but the miltek is the nice balance.

Absolutely, you have the immediate out of pocket costs like the above but you have business costs which caz you seem to completely ignore each time its pointed out to you? That mark up of 2k as above already has around 1k of costs and risk against it so you are already down to 1k margin. Then you have to take into account in that mark up of rent, business rates, electricity, water, heating, phone internet, cleaning, insurance, staff costs, staff NI payments, staff pension payments, staff training, staff work wear, any equipment costs and software costs and maintenance, trade costs like plates etc, accountancy fees, corporation tax, any trade body membership costs, card payment costs, banking fees, advertising and marketing, breakages and other day to day costs...and so on and so forth. So your 1k mark up needs to cover a fair bit of overhead, lets say generously its 50% to cover all of the above, EH are now making £500 on your car - so they have ripped you off by what? £500? Should they have sold it lower and made no money at all? In exchange you have an A7 with a warranty, completely valeted, prepared, MoT and on the road ready to go. You have peace of mind should problems arise, you have a lot of consumer protection and you have sold your car with no effort no costs of advertising, spending your time with tyre kickers that a 370z would attract, the risk associated with sorting out payments from buyers etc. You drove in and drove out. To be honest, from a consumer point of view there is no warning to be had here it looks like standard dealership practice, they are making £500 on your car which is what a business is meant to do. The idea that an indy would be any more honest is just naive, it only takes a single individual to behave badly, they can work anywhere.

Its great isnt it. Remember not to sit too close to cars in front when in stationary traffic, they cant see you in the rear view mirror and sometimes will reverse backwards thinking there is space! Suspension you want to get on Nitrons I would have thought, the OEM suspension on the turbos was not good so don't go there (it was a friendlier version of the NA suspension which was track focused). But yes, sitting that low, no power steering, very visceral, very raw - as said before, you got to own something like this at least once in your life if you love driving!

Just note that the website often under reads - as any import not properly assigned will not get registered. There are other exceptions too which I cannot remember off the top of my head (SORN'd excluded too?)

It has been mentioned that paint on the cars isnt the best. I am sure a few people on here will chime in shortly...

Great quote! Good luck with it, will make for a great thread...

Again it depends what you call excessively marked up. A company marking up a product by 20% is not excessive by any stretch and although larger chains do report into a wider network and they can better survive harder times ultimately every dealership has targets they are measured against and if they fail consistently the long term result is closure of that branch. The company I work for sells a service, the numbers I stick to on pricing for our department are COGS <35% and margin >30% otherwise we may as well be a charity/NFP. The numbers in the OP are not in any shape or form a rip off in my view, in fact its less than I thought dealers would be aiming for.

There was a cheat on my celica where you lifted the speed needle over the zero pin so it's under it not resting on it then you start the car. It does a speedo calibration every start so once the car is running lift speedo needle back over the pin so it rests back on top. It got me to within a few miles per hour accuracy.

It's what businesses do, they make a profit. They can then employ people create jobs and drive the economy. Not sure what anyone would expect a business to do really. It's not like you have to accept the offer and you bought the car in the first place knowing that you would face the dilemma of selling. As stated above they don't take the difference business costs have to come from that too. But based on 2k from 15k on its own minus costs they are making margin of something like less than 10% which is crazy low.

The speedo is converted using a box which intercepts the signal before it hits the speedo. All imports generally have these. They are however quite variable in how accurate they are. Best thing is download a GPS app on your phone which measures speed and go on a few roads where you can do a constant speed without interruption and look at the difference between speedo and app. My speedo over-reads by about 3mph'ish.

There is a topic on PH about rip offs. Interestingly so many people saw garages charging large margins as a rip off, so many people on the thread thought that the money a garage made when they charged £80 an hour and had a young mechanic on it earning £20 an our was £60. Quite astonishing really. I mean what pays for premises, NI, liability insurance, maintenance, machinery, software licences, accountants etc etc. I bet most people on there thought nothing of buying a coffee from a coffee shop for £3 which surely is just a 5p paper cup with 2p worth of granules in and free hot water, right?

I know, was just lightning the mood But yes, the RX8 were not sold in correctly and thus they quickly gained an image of being unreliable and they died a death very quickly when people couldnt be bothered with rebuild costs.

Plus another £5k in oil over the 20k miles

But you are talking about an engine (again ten years older than the VQ35DE) and its start point is around 210bhp I believe off the top of my head. So yes, maybe by doubling its output power by adding 200bhp plus it might start to struggle, but then adding 200bhp to a VQ35DE without any forging you are looking at a dead engine in a short space of time. And as above, the transmission in the Supra will most likely 'top trump' a 350z in terms of getting it back towards the wheels. I don't own one, am not a fan boy, but trying to trade off the VQ35DE against it in this way is really not a sensible conversation anyway as both engines belong in different eras. There is no denying though ask any JDM tuner that the engine is a masterpiece.

The CLS has to be the most hideous car from the outset. All versions look like some sagging banana, visually awful looking cars every version.

The 2JZ was designed and built a decade before the VQ35DE rocked up, thats a long time in engineering terms. That in itself was amazing, that a supra could turn out performance on par with Ferrari counterparts of the era (aside from a few very high end models). The engine came forged from the factory, which is why when as a VQ35DE owner you get nervy around the 400bhp+ mark about how long your engine might last, the 2JZ is going to go on and on - came with larger injectors as standard as well. Also the transmission is generally good for 500bhp+ again no need for expensive work. Basically when all other engines go in for expensive forging processes costing thousands your 1990 2JZ just needs a bigger turbo (of course being slightly flippant but you see my point). There are fan boys for everything, but the legendary status of the 2JZ is there for a reason amongst car tuners...