brillomaster

ah... the hybrid bit is providing about 700bhp isn't it! honestly, imagine having to drive around with 'only' 550bhp from the ICE - must be terrible! but then again, aren't the nissans close to 1000bhp?

Sweet! you could come over here - problem is its a bit of a faff trailing an extension lead out my flat window, and I have no outside hose so would have to be strictly a bucket affair... so maybe best I came to you! What you up to this weekend? Saturday afternoon looks tolerable for car washing, ready for the rain on sunday lol. I'll PM you

Best of luck dude!

good to see the Aston Martins have qualified well, heres hoping for champagne at work on Monday!

sheesh matey hope you get it all up and running in time for tomorrow! On the plus side weather round Leicester way tomorrow is a looking a lot better now

So, the new beemer looks nice, but paintwork is poor... even I, frequenter of the sainsburys automatic car wash, can see a multitude of swirl marks in the paint. What it really needs is a clay bar, and then a machine polish and wax I suspect. Anyone up to the job? Genuine enquiry, i'm in Leamington spa so somewhere round there. Willing to exchange real cash monies or crates of beer

sounds like a wheel bearing to me - jack the car up, wiggle the wheel from side to side and up and down. any play, replace the wheel bearing. Alternatively, how old are your front discs? mine was making a noise I could have sworn was a wheel bearing, turns ou the inside of my discs were really really worn and some rust build up was scuffing on the pads.

heres another essential first mod that isn't a modification - a full tank of super unleaded petrol if the previous owner wasn't already using it!

thing is, its so obviously not a Ferrari as a genuine 250 GTO will be worth many millions of pounds and unlikely to be ever seen on public roads. Anyone who knows cars would know its a kit car. Plus the real thing looks quite different to the kit, id say the kit was only based on the GTO rather than trying to be a replica, so could get away without having a 3litre V12 or whatever it had!

Hmmm Mallory should be interesting if you're not a fan of fast corners! The first corner Gerrards is very fast, and goes on for ages - and they allow overtaking round the outside, which I imagine you'd be doing a fair bit! other than that its pretty straightforward. Devils elbow is a nice corner, downhill left hander leading onto the start finish straight. Post up how the car performs on the new tyres if they're on!

Stubby aerial, exhaust, decent tyres. Job done IMO.

I dunno, I thought my mx5 sounded pretty nice with a sports exhaust on!

A friend of mine was interested in turning this: Into this: with the help of these guys - according to them it can be built for £4,000 including a donor vehicle. http://www.tributeautomotive.com/mx250.html

cool that sounds fair - yeah at rockingham we were running them 32psi front, 34psi rear when hot. generally stayed pretty consistent for 5-6 laps (unlike road tyres which fall off a cliff after 5 laps) we're running some slight stagger (245 front, 255 rear) and if anything we're getting a tiny bit of understeer, so if a bit more toe out at the front doesn't cure it, will try dropping the fronts by a psi or two. Also we normally start with cold tyres around the 25psi mark, which inevitably go a bit high when they warm up - we then come in and adjust down to our preferred hot values. that way we're never running on cold tyres at really low pressures!

Ah that's true - its changed from 'book early price' to 'spaces' but hasn't gone red yet, so that's a good sign. how were you getting on with the 595RSRs so far? you must have done a few days on them now?

you'll have to be quick, there aren't that many spaces left! hope you can make it, Donny really suits a car like an M3 - decent straights and fast sweeping corners - nothing too twisty that you need a lightweight for. Plus, it would be great to compare your M3 to our 328i, especially now that we're both running the same tyres

i thought donington was pretty good for noise, thought it was 98db drive by, which is massive! strange that donington has noise limits at all really, considering an aeroplane flies over every half hour!

I would love to try Anglesey, problem is its ruddy miles away, whereas Donington is just up the road and Donny has trees and bits of old bridges to look at as you drive round, always pleasant driving on parkland circuits (same with oulton park and Cadwell Park)

... in my opinion Yes, we've booked Donington Park in the beemer (new and massively improved with new tyres!) Saturday 18th July, Javelin trackdays - there are a few spaces left so get on board! If you haven't driven Donington yet, you really, really should! the craner curves are worth the price of admission alone, but the rest of the track is pretty awesome as well. Lets have a bit of a gathering and get a few cars out on track at the same time, we'll take on all challengers in our beemer!

don't go for hankook S1 Evo2s if you're looking for tread depth from new - seemed low even before I put them on! hankook V12 evos, on the other hand, could lose whole ships in their depth of tread

Woohoo we're back from Rockingham, good news is car and both drivers all in one piece, curse has been lifted! Will upload the vids and i think ken has the photos covered so will do a full write up, but in a nutshell... WOW. just wow. new tyres have made a HUGE difference

balls mate that looks terminal!

the most accurate of those two will be the horsepower at the wheels, since its quite hard to take the engine out and dyno it separately! I'd suspect that 465 at the fly is possibly optimistic if you're making 390 at the wheels, probably more like 440 at the fly. and don't forget that one dyno will over or under read compared to another, and that ambient temps can make a difference as well. i'd say conservatively 440 at the flywheel.

10hp is probably about right - would maybe expect a bit more if you had a plenum spacer as well. ... on a show-off note, i'm well looking forward to remapping my 335i and getting 60hp and 80lbft, with no other modifications

^