The other day a reader wrote in, saying how he was disappointed with AutoSpeed. Amongst other things, he said that there were plenty more powerful modified cars around than those we are featuring – all we had to do was attend some dyno days and go to the drags.

That we are no longer particularly interested in featuring typical straight-line drag cars, and typical horsepower dyno hero cars, hadn’t occurred to him.

I told him in my reply that AutoSpeed was (and is) changing in editorial direction; if he liked the Australian magazine Street Machine (he’d said in a previous email he did) I thought it very unlikely that he would like AutoSpeed, both now and in the future. Therefore, it would seem best that he stop reading AutoSpeed, rather than just go on being frustrated with us.

[Incidentally, this idea that if you don’t like us, don’t read us, seems to offend people. But to me it makes perfect sense: what’s the alternative – I encourage those readers to persevere, even though I know they won’t like what is coming up? To me that seems completely hypocritical.]

Anyway, I was reflecting on the reader’s comments, especially in the implication that more power is good – and even more power is therefore better. As I’ve stated previously, I think that many modified cars in Australia are heading in completely the wrong direction – they’re huge, hugely heavy, and hugely powerful. But rather than put this so negatively, let’s look at the issue more proactively. What makes for a good modified car? (And so, one that we’d be delighted to feature?)

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Arguably the biggest driver of car engine technology over the last 40 years has been exhaust emissions legislation.

The original Californian Clean Air legislation introduced in 1967 hastened the advent of electronic fuel injection (the pictured Bosch D-type system has just celebrated its 40th anniversary – and only 5 years after introduction, it was being used by 18 car manufacturers) and the march of clean emissions progress has barely slowed since.

These days, of course, the shift in focus has been from oxides of nitrogen and carbon monoxide to CO2 outputs.

But what actually are the standards causing so many engineers to pull out their hair? The laws rumoured to have lead to the foreshadowed demise of Ford’s Australian engine factory (more on Australian car manufacturing in an upcoming blog post) and which are making it so difficult to sell diesels in the US over the next few years? You’d think that getting a handle on all the laws would be damn’ near impossible – but that’s not so.

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Over the years I have often seen requests for tests on oils. Which is the best oil? Or, are there in fact any significant differences in oils?

In my opinion the best way of answering that question with a specific engine (eg the engine in your car!) is to have the oil that you are using analysed on a regular basis. That proves clearly whether or not the oil is in fact of sufficient quality for the job it is meant to be doing. (Oil analysis laboratories are as close as the Yellow Pages.) 

An allied subject is the efficacy of greases. In most – but not all – applications, grease quality isn’t as critical. However, there are still massive variations in price – and presumably, quality – of greases.  

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As I write I’m getting over a cold. I am well enough to be mobile but not well enough to work. Well, that’s what I tell myself anyway.  

As many of you will know, I am becoming more and more interested in lightweight vehicles. One of my cars is a Honda Insight – amongst the lightest of all production cars on the road – and I find the downsides of its design usually quite minor. (If I need to carry more than two people, I take Frank the Falcon.)  

Now the Honda might be light, but it still has four wheels when surely three would be enough. Using a tadpole configuration (two front wheels and one rear) would also allow the car to be nicely streamlined, something that would be helped by a front mount engine and front wheel drive. That way, the classic teardrop shape for low aero drag would be much easier to implement.  

The starting point for such a car would be a FWD half-cut, say a Mira or Suzuki 660cc 3 cylinder turbo. Use the complete driveline, subframe, steering and front suspension and brakes, add on a tube frame chassis and then run the single rear wheel and suspension from a motorbike.  

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I write this after completing two 750-kilometre drives, each done in a day. The occasion was the wedding of some friends, and the location was the Rydges resort at Yeppoon, on the coast near Rockhampton in Queensland. My wife and son flew up from the Gold Coast where we live; I decided to drive.

The car was my 1-litre, three cylinder hybrid Honda Insight. But isn’t that a long drive for a little car? Perhaps – but so what? There’s plenty of cabin space (in fact, with the seat adjusted correctly, my left foot can barely reach the firewall) and I don’t have any problems with driving a low-powered car on the open road. In this era of very powerful base model Australian cars, people tend to forget that safety on the highway is much more dependent on driving skill than the acceleration available under the right foot. I didn’t have any problems overtaking a few semi-trailers or climbing hills at the speed limit – and I saw lots of very powerful cars that had near misses, simply through appalling driving.

The only changes I made to the car for the trip were to inflate the tyres to 37 psi (hot) and fill the tank with 98 octane fuel. I think as a result of one or both of these, fuel economy was even better than standard. Well, it would have been if I hadn’t run the air con for about 80 per cent of the time….

After resetting the trip computer fuel economy display at home, my first stop (the petrol station to fill the tank) showed a fuel economy of 2.2 litres/100km (most of the trip to the petrol station is downhill), followed by 2.7 litres/100km at the Gateway Bridge and 3.2 litres/100km at Gympie. Following that, I turned on the air and the road also became hillier: the consumption average then steadily rose to 3.5 litres/100km where it stayed for the rest of the trip, including the full return journey.

As I have said many times before of this car: that’s world’s best fuel economy.

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