DannyBoy

At the end of the day mate, unless there is something wrong with your tyres or geometry, the back-end should not break away unprovoked. There is a deliberate 'warning understeer' dialled into the factory setup, and the only way you can get it to oversteer before feeling that understeer is by sticking your foot in. If you were sticking your foot in round a bend in a RWD car then why were you surprised the ESP kicked in? Oh and this> , is a comma and this> . is a full stop, they are your friends. DB

From what I've read the oil pressure sender usually over-reads for a while when it's on its way out before eventually just becoming permanently pegged. Has it always done this or is it a recent development? If it's always done it then my money would be on incorrect weight of oil. DB

Great write-up It may just be to do with Ferrari not really needing to try as hard as Porsche to compete for their market share, especially in rich bits of London. I suspect a lot of people who buy Ferarris do it just to have a Ferrari, not necessarily because they think it's the best car for the money. 911 customers on the other hand tend to be (in my experience) real people, and not of the 'rich daddy' crowd described above, and are down to earth enough to actually need a good reason to buy a 911 over a GTR for example. Just my 2p. DB

Yep, when I got mine last summer Azure and Kuro cars were up for around £800-£1000 more than their silver and sunset counterparts, with Gunmetal being a little more than silver and sunset, but not much. DB

Yep that seems to be true Ekona, googled it as well and V-power is indeed 99RON in the UK, no idea why I thought otherwise Also found a load of threads on other sites (mainly PH) comparing fuels. Most seem to be full of V-Power fanboys claiming it runs better, but these people also put octane booster into their 99RON fuel in their road cars and say they can feel the difference The few scientific tests around seem to show either no difference in performance or the Tesco 99 being (very marginally) better. How good it is for the engine would be another matter of course. DB

But isn't Shell's super (V-power) also 99RON? Pretty sure it's only 97, but with a bucketload of additives. Maybe someone who uses it can confirm? DB

What do people do about this? just crack out the Quick-Detailer or are there other tricks to avoid a filthy Zed all summer? DB

My Zed is normally run on Tesco 99 but I had to put some shell super in on the way back from the lakes once due to a lack of Tescos. Was a good chance for a comparative test so I zeroed the computer and ran it the whole 350 miles back on shell. This was constant motorway really, so not too many variables and the kind of driving where the Zed can actually get some respectable numbers. There was no significant difference. The decimal point was slightly different (don't actually remember higher or lower) but the whole numbers were the same. I'd run it on Tesco if I were you because where I am its cheaper than either BP or shell super unleaded despite being higher octane. DB

Speaking from far less experience than other members here, but if the oil was low enough to cause such a massive drop in pressure, wouldn't the oil warning light be on? is it on OP? To me it seems more likely a duff oil pump or sender/gauge. I'd certainly avoid driving the car though, as those readings are way below the minimum pressures stated in the manual. DB

Exactly, Nissan clearly did the best job possible when making the car in the first place, they just wouldn't do silly things like fitting single-cone synchros to a 300hp engine, or making the interior out of old dustbins. Their work clearly can't be improved on DB

Anyone else getting serious Fallout 3 vibes from that? DB

1,350

I got my '53 plate at 22, I'm now 23 and I can't see myself ever selling it tbh. I've already spent so much money on tinkering with it that I'd make a catastrophic loss if I sold it any time soon, and I reckon by the time that's stopped being an issue, it will be worth so little that I might as well keep it The way resale values are going I can see this becoming the case more and more. It simply won't be worth selling the older ones in a few more years as the value as a weekend car will be worth more than the money. DB

Unless your car is on 150k+ miles, you practically stole that. Decent low-mid mileage 2005 cars are between 7-8K normally. DB

Steady on. As far as I can tell, all anyone here has done is try to answer the question as to where Tarmac stands in law with all this. I can't see anyone here saying Tarmac should screw the guy for all he's got because of a mistake. In fact Tarmac himself has suggested that he probably won't accept the item for the price he paid. Let's not blow this out of proportion and make it something it's not. DB

I know from my time in retail (albeit in the real world rather than online) that retailers do have some comeback on genuinely mispriced items before the sale is finalised, i.e. 'it says this price on the ticket so you have to sell it to me at this price' isn't actually true. However if you've paid and they've acknowledged reciept of the amount of money you paid for the item you bought, how can that not be finalised? It's not like they think you paid £1300 and you've only paid £20, they've actually said 'thank you for paying us £20 for this item' have they not? You may well have got yourself a hell of a bargain there, whatever it is DB

If they're not M3s they've gone to a lot of trouble to change the front wings and bonnet. I could be wrong but i've never seen those Bulged/Vented bonnets on any other 3 series. DB Fair play, the sites claimed they were 335's though. Either way they look bloody good to me eye Agreed, nicely understated but not boring. Actually had a deposit on a 335i coupe before the zed but chickened out at the last minute as it would have meant borrowing. Pretty good decision as I got made redundant about a fortnight later DB

If they're not M3s they've gone to a lot of trouble to change the front wings and bonnet. I could be wrong but i've never seen those Bulged/Vented bonnets on any other 3 series. DB

Idling pressure seems a tiny bit high maybe, but basically normal. My oil pressure never really goes over about 90 though even at redline and yours seems to almost top out. That could be mine that's broken though rather than yours DB

OK, thought I'd update anyone who is interested as it may help others: I now have a CD009 with only 13K on it sitting in my garage These are NOT easy to find but turns out there are some out there, just still in cars. Basically you have to stop looking for anything as specific as a CD009 or even a 350z gearbox and just do the legwork phoning up big breakers yards. I started with the Jap specialists and had no luck at all, then started trawling through the websites of pretty much every breaker in southern England. Lots of them don't know what they actually have i.e. what year etc. or have misleading or out of date websites, and there are a lot of imports with their uk first reg date given as the MY of the car which is unhelpful. Also many of them clearly don't care about getting your money as they're not even prepared to check the model sticker on the gearbox to make a sale. However the advantage of the non-specialist breakers is they have no idea that the CD009 boxes are relatively rare and desirable compared to the earlier ones, so they charge about £300 less than you see them going for from Jap breakers on ebay, mine was £550 next day delivered for a 13k mile box. I saw some finished Ebay auctions where higher mileage boxes went for over a grand. So basically take a day off work (which is what I did, I have a nice boss and far to much unused holiday) sit at your pc with a phone and many, many cups of coffee, and you might get somewhere. It's amazing what's hidden back on page 25 of a google search. Hope that helps someone Now i just have to pay someone to fit it DB

Wow, props for actually making two such, erm, 'interesting looking' cars look pretty, but my god... Those panel gaps I think you could probably get into the car without opening the door on that Mantis! DB

just me for the light blue then? If it wasn't for the wheel nuts i'd say red, but the matching wheel nuts and calipers = DB

Pretty sure that's a cosworth. Certainly looks like the one i've got. DB

the standard brakes (by which i mean the brembos) get hot easily, cool slowly and fade pretty badly. I noticed my stock brakes starting to feel hot just on enthusiastic B-road driving. I now have DBAs all round and it really is a noticable difference. I did the bedding in procedure on sunday night (monday morning really) and even after 10 rapid repetitions of 70mph to 10mph threshold braking you could tell they'd warmed up but were still stopping just as well. I would have no confidence in saying the stock brakes would perform the same. DB

Ok due to numbers of people saying this it is added to list, also pads and discs changed, but, hopefully for the small cost i will keep the spacers unless they are detrimental to something else. Spacers will increase the scrub radius of your front wheels. Although the exact effects of this seem to be up for debate ( most suggest reduced high speed turn in response), most people believe it to be a bad thing. To be honest unless you're tracking the car it seems unlikely that you'd notice much, but they're not going to improve your handling if that's what you're thinking. DB