James Junior

Now that the car is in such fine form I am gagging for a proper test drive so have booked to go to Oulton Park on Friday for a track day. It has been snowing today and given rain for Friday, so conditions may not be ideal unfortunately. However, having driven the Sustenpass balls to the wall in heavy rain with waterfalls cascading onto the road, wet weather driving holds less fear these days! Famous last words... I am also taking somebody with me as I have started dating a girl who is a bit of a petrolhead herself who is bringing her Cooper S to take on track too...that's right....I can confirm am dating a unicorn!

So, time for a proper update as it's been a while. Let's talk about adjustable camber arms! Since fitting the KW V3 coilovers the Z has been munching tyres for fun, wearing the tyres all round the inner edge due to the amount of negative camber. GIven that Michelin Pilot Super Sports cost around £250 a corner this has been an expensive habit! Marcus at MLM Motors has been fine tuning the suspension using laser wheel alignment to try to fix this issue. The spacers and KW V3s have been creating a lot of negative camber and we found that the stock camber arms just don't have sufficient adjustment to dial back in more positive camber to compensate for this. So it was time to invest in a full set of adjustable camber arms. I went for the Z1 Motorsport full front and rear kit, as recommended by Nic 'Nissanman' Hollingworth. Thanks mate! https://www.z1motors...age-p-4201.html The kit arrived a few weeks ago now and first impressions were very good. The arms are great quality and allow a lot more adjustment. When the old arms were removed we found that the bushes were goosed (see below) meaning the camber arms were a timely upgrade in this respect too. Once they were on the car the suspension geometry was thoroughly revised, with the toe, camber and castor painstakingly adjusted to work with the KWs and spacers. I actually took Marcus a full nine hours (!) to get the arms fitted and everything set up to his liking. Being the perfectionist he is this lead to him working on the car until nearly 9pm on a Friday! What a guy... So with the new camber arms fitted it was time to bed everything in. And over the course of a fortnight or so, the car felt....TERRIBLE! The steering became hyper sensitive, the ride was harsh and the car felt highly unstable at speed, with the steering wheel way of centre. I was pretty despondent as having spent a lot of money on suspension components and tuning I was worried I had taken myself down a rabbit warren... However, Marcus did say when he set everything up that it would drift out again a bit whilst everything bedded in and that we would need to make some final adjustments. I took the car back in to him and we got it back on the wheel alignment rig. What we found was almost comical! The wheels were all pointing in different directions and all the settings were waaaaay out! Marcus rolled his sleeves up and got to work adjusting and tweaking everything to bring it back into line. You can see the before and after print offs below. (Note that the toe on the 'after' print out was tweaked further to finalise) I left the workshop with a sense of major apprehension... And the results? Absolutely sublime! The car has never felt better. Ride quality has returned and high speed stability is amazing. Turn in is sharp and she feels absolutely nailed down and very confidence inspiring. It feels like it has tied everything together and has made the car feel almost brand new. At first I begrudged spending all this money on the camber arms as I didn't expect them to make any real differnence to how the car performs. I couldn't have been more wrong. They have made another huge improvement. If I was doing this all again then I would definitely fit camber arms and coilovers together. Despite the significant outlay, if I had done this sooner it would have saved me a fortune in fitting, adjustment and tyre wear. Hopefully this will be a useful primer for anyone having difficulties with tyre wear, suspension set ups and thinking about fitting camber arms. Pictures are below. If anyone reading this now or in the future has any questions just let me know.

Great photos! I bet that was a bit of a weapon. What did the numbers look like after fitting the supercharger?

Thank you so much! We are lucky to have some excellent driving road here in the south eastern corner of Australia, but we don't have much of the scenery you enjoy in Europe and the northern end of the UK. The pics really bring the stories to life for me. Cheers! Chris Thanks Chris, it's my pleasure to share it all with my fellow Zed heads!

Totally agree Nic. Hope you and Rikki are doing well. Will be sure to come down to the next BHP Breakfast event. If you're going fur drinks the night before I'll do an overnighter and come for a few beers. Not staying in that hellhole from last time though!

I don't really do New Years resolutions, but do set goals for myself each year. For 2017 I solemnly declared that this would be the year I cut back and saved up the rest of the deposit and stamp duty that I need to move to my 'forever house'. Me: 'This year we are going to be sensible and save money, maybe one holiday, but definitely no tours, or crazy mods for the car.' Inner monologue: 'Yeah but we could die tomorrow'. Me: ' Good point well made'. *Gets full camber arm kit set up, orders Stillen oil cooler kit **Books Geneva Motor Show and European Tour for July Three weeks into 2017 and things are not going well... Oh well YOLO etc etc. 'I am glad I had such a big house'. Said no-one on their death bed ever.

Okay!!! I just repaired a load of the photo links starting from post #163 so if anyone wants to go back and have a nosey they are all there. Will go back a bit further and see if I can root out any more that have disappeared. Does anyone know why the images stop working over time?

So today after a long session at my friends workshop (11am to 8:30pm ON A FRIDAY, what a guy) the camber arm kit is fitted all round and the whole set up fully tuned. Initial impressions are little short of revelatory. I'll post some photos and a proper write up when I have a bit more time. Thanks as ever for your interest everyone, I love sharing this stuff with you all. 😀â¤ï¸

*facepalm* You clearly didn't read my post. First paragraph clearly states points that are nothing to do with racing round mountain passes, but that are applicable to every day commute driving. Go and watch all of Reg Local's YT vids, you'll notice that he's not remotely racing anywhere at all, but rather takes a more IAM-based (well, ex-police pursuit really) viewpoint on driving. Everything he mentions there will improve every aspect of your driving far more than even 100bhp more will. His books are good as well, but the videos explain it rather better. If you can't see how any of that would assist you as a driver, then I don't know what will. Power is nothing without control. No need to be condescending Ekona. I agree with both you and Nub. Overall no doubt driver training is the best modification you can buy. It's the mod you can take with you to every car you own. It makes you faster and gives a deeper understanding and enjoyment to your driving. However equally if you're regular driving doesn't put you on roads where you can actually drive hard, it's pretty irrelevant in terms of enjoyment, even if overall it makes you a better and safer driver. For a car that is a commuter and rarely driven on roads where you can start moving the weight around properly, a bit more power and a nicer sounding engine note can hit the spot nicely and increase your enjoyment of the car. 👌ðŸ¼

Thanks Chris. The photo links are taken from my Facebook account and all are still live, so I don't know why they always seem to 'decay'. I've updated the links a couple of times but they always seem to break down which is a shame as I love sharing the content with you guys. When I have some time I'll spend it trying to repair them again. If you follow the thread hopefully you'll get a tip off when they're up and running again! 😀

Yeah I hear you - when you're daily driving and enjoying six to seven tenths style driving a bit of extra surge and a rorty exhaust note that makes you want to wind your window down on your commute hit the spot nicely! 😎

Back when I was running the HFCs with the other mods I dynoed at precisely 346 bhp and 300 ft lbs. After removing them and going back to stock cats, but keeping the other mods, the car dynoed bang on the manufacturer's numbers, 328 bhp and 260 ft lbs. I find it hard to believe that HFCs were giving a 40 ft lb hike in torque, but those are the figures. Two different dynos and two different days. Draw your own conclusions! What I have learnt from being on tour is that across most real world situations a marginal increase in power or torque is completely irrelevant. It is the suspension (KW V3) and the brakes (braided lines, better fluid and Endless pads) that actually give better real world performance over a distance. Being able to get on the brakes later and carry more speed through corner after corner is more effective than having another 20 or 30bhp. Ultimately however improving your skill and awareness through driver training are the most effective modifications that money can buy. I agree that the Z is not a particularly quick car. It could do with a bit more power and a bit less weight. That said, in a straight line there is little to separate it from a Cayman R or a newer Cayman GTS so its not that much of a slug. Some of the more exotic stuff meanwhile might leave it far behind on long straights and mountain ascents, but in the twisty stuff even their performance advantage starts to dwindle and the playing field starts to level. The Z is particularly good in tight and twisty situations in my experience as it has quite a short wheel base. If we are going up and over a mountain pass then some of the exotics will come past and gradually leave me behind on the ascent, especially when I overheat the oil trying to keep up! In those long ascents with hairpin after hairpin you really start to get frustrated by the Z's weight and lack of torque and need to switch the traction off otherwise the car just bogs down coming out of the hairpins. When we go down the other side of the pass however I often end up having to radio to go past some of them, as my braking set up is very fade resistant and gets better the hotter the brakes get. I got the bottom of St Bernadino one afternoon having passed four of my tour mates and I just gradually pulled further and further away by myself after miles of downhill hairpins and corkcrews. The brakes held up all the way to the bottom at which point they were hissing loudly they were that hot, so I just freewheeled through the towns for a few miles until I reached the bottom and parked up with the handbrake off. I can also remember a few drives in tighter country and forest roads last year where the Nissan wasstaying with some serious machines, having to switch places with an F430 on a few occasions and keeping a Mclaren 12c and a Gallardo honest through miles of twisting French countryside by using momentum and a healthy does of courage! The biggest determinent is ultimately the driver. I have seen guys with R8s and GT3s who just aren't confident and who start to fall behind, whilst on the other hand Pete and Dan our tour guides can outpace pretty much anything in their 235is they are that skillful. I am not saying I am a great driver, but have had some tuition which has definitely paid off. I have also got to know my car well over 30k miles and am a bit braver in chucking it in perhaps than some of the other drivers whose cars are worth substantially more! So my advice; spend the money on tuition rathert than power mods as trying to get more power out of an NA is an expensive effort in futility!

I did have one fitted, one of the first mods I did. Car felt so much quicker with it fitted Now that the 370 is up for sale I have removed it Might that be to put it on a new car that you might be taking delivery of by any chance???

P.S. you need to get yourself a GTR starter button. It adds at least 10bhp...

Parallel lives! Bizarre... Clearly it is a cupholder/ mascot slot.