brillomaster

welcome the forum! the zed is a great car, bags of torque, sounds great with an aftermarket exhaust, looks great! had mine coming up to three years and the only maintenance its needed outside usual servicing, brakes and tyres is a wheel bearing, and some drop links. other than that faultless.

awesome cause, best of luck! will be following this thread with interest

http://www.carparts4less.co.uk/cp4l/p/////?130339010&0&cc5_179

+1 on ATE Super Blue, used that in our beemer the last year and a half with no problems. although watch who changes it, as they might object to the bright blue colour. although squidge sounds like it might brake hoses, do you have braided brake lines?

welcome to the forum - go easy in the wet, drive to the conditions. what tyres have you got on the rear? as even in the wet she's pretty planted when wearing decent boots.

what a numpty little while back I bought some cosmic black bmw paint for my cosmic black bmw, and... the colour matches perfectly. I put that blues-up down to user error!

sounds like there might be a small profit in it for you then?

That's not so bad! believe me, people have done a lot worse to their cars!

tell you what game I'm not playing any more... Forza Horizon 2 on the X360. bit of a let down to be honest, did the first half of the races with a tuned 370z then the second half of the races with a lambo huracan. I have no desire to go back and do each race again on each different class of car. much preferred Horizon one where each race had a class/style of car you had to use - forced you to build your garage up rather than just picking one car and using that. Also, with Horizon 2 even after completing all the races once, still only had about 400,000 credits, which is nowhere near enough for the expensive cars, whereas by the time I completed horizon 1, I had loads of expensive machines. still managed to trade it in for £30, so only lost a tenner on it from new. Bought Wolfenstein The New Order with the proceeds, so will see how we get on with that! Sniper Elite 3 is on the xmas list - have to say the original Sniper Elite on the PS2 and Sniper Elite V2 were two of my all time favourite games, so quite excited about SE3!

mismatched tyres on the other hand, I actually agree with... (flame suit on) my argument has always been that front and rear axles do fundamentally different things, I want ability to put power down on the rears, and then I want a tyre that has good cornering and change of direction characteristics on the front. for this reason I normally go for directional tyres on the front, and asymmetric tyres on the rear.

nah cant say I'm a fan to be honest... I think it just about works on a drag car, where one set of wheels are there to provide huge amounts of torque, and the others are just to prop the other end of the car up. but on a regular road car or even a track or drift car, same wheels front and back.

that sounds very much like a wheel bearing to me. when one went recently on an old bmw we have, it started as a slow pulsing, humming/whirring noise when driving in a straight line... kind of whhhhhhhhhhrrrrrrr.............wwwwwwhhhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrr........ wwwwwwhhhhhhrrrrrrr.... When we got the car on a ramp, there was very visible play on the wheel - left to right and top to bottom it had a good 5mm of play when rocked.

brim the tank, reset the mpg reading, then compare readout with actual consumption in a weeks time. I'm sure 4.5mpg is wrong, even track work wouldn't see it drop that low.

uprev - remap to a zed to gain more power from breathing mods. revup - type of engine in 2005 GT4 and 2006 zeds, produces slightly more power than a standard 2003-2005 DE engine, but less than the revised HR engine. an uprev wont make any difference to the amount of oil used. Revup engines are known to use more oil than DE and HR engines - but I don't know why that is!

none/very little oil used here... 53 plate DE engine, currently on 65k, doing about 10k a year. goes from max to 3/4 of max on dipstick over the course of a year.

id only import if you want a car that's not available domestically - and the only thing I can think of would be an S15 Silvia, rare as hens teeth over here. For a zed id definitely just get an unmolested UK car, that way all the dials are in English, indicators are the right way round, no problems with mph/kph conversions, and no added foglight switch or random card reader.

well done Lewis, a deserving winner. Huge shame that the title race was severely hampered by a mechanical failure for rosberg - it could have happened to either car, but thankfully for Hamilton fans it happened to rosberg. Shame really, as the only times they've really raced has been Bahrain... I suppose Monza and Austin were racing, but they weren't racing for very long.

sarah, if you're in leicester taking it to CS for servicing is a complete no brainer. top bloke is mitz! while you're there, get a cobra exhaust fitted, and maybe some spacers if you're into that kinda thing

just a thought, why don't drifters run V shaped wings? ie when looking at the car from above, the wing would make a V, rather than a straight line across the back of the car. That way, when a car is drifting at an angle of say 30 degrees, one half of the wing could be set up so its facing the air flow properly, and so provide a meaningful amount of downforce. or even, a wing that rotates to match the airflow... stranger things have happened in aviation...

Think about £18k would do it... problem is, as much as i'd love a M6, the running costs put me off somewhat... for example, front brake disc on a 650i is ~£60. front brake disc on an M6, ~£240, or 4 times the price... shudder to think how much items normally considered expensive are! I think if I were to get a 6-series, it would be a 650i first to see how I get on, can be had for half the price of an M6 and still has a fairly hefty 360bhp to push it around.

depends on the car the Wing and what your trying to do with them i guess, i dont think it works like the speed of sound where you get to a certain speed and you get a sonic boom or downforce I guess i should get to snet get someone to time a few laps wingless then put the wing on do some laps and see whats what would also depend on your definition of a significant difference! i'm sure even the smallest wing at the lowest speed will be doing something - it might be infinitesimally small though. I imagine on the boxster example, at around 75mph the shape of the car starts to generate lift, so a little wing deploys to reduce it. remember, most things on road cars are not wings, they're spoilers - they spoil the airflow to reduce lift, rather than actually produce downforce. I strongly suspect a lot of aero appendages are 80% for aesthetics... a proper wing needs huge end plates to keep the air flowing over the wing and not round the sides - most 'wings' on road cars do not have large end plates. Even wings on GT3 cars and the like don't actually produce a lot of downforce, its only when you get to F1 and LMP cars that you start getting real downforce.

I was lucky enough to go to a PH sunday service at Aston Martin, which was pretty nice... not so much of a car meet, but basically Aston Martin had opened bits of the factory to walk round, with some older Astons on display as well. got to sit in a V8 vantage and a DB9 convertible, which was nice. They also had the one off concept racer on display, and there was a One-77 parked outside. I think generally it very much depends on who's hosting it - when we were at aston we had a quick look round the other cars in the car park, but didn't speak to anyone else, only stayed about an hour.

like your thinking - its a win win situation... ... I really really hope Hamilton wins! my difficulty is i'm away this weekend, so not going to be able to watch the race until Monday evening at the earliest - going to be tricky to avoid finding out the result, going to have to shun all forms of media!

*hilarious

just wondering, did you put cats back on for the MOT test, or do you have a friendly MOT tester? Also, I get the engine oil needs changing every 2,500miles, am I right that the supercharger oil needs changing every 7,500miles, or is it just an annual change? I normally service yearly at around 10,000mile intervals.