It’s easy to think that vehicle aerodynamics is an esoteric topic not really relevant to typical modified cars. After all, goes the common refrain, if you’re not driving at 150 km/h, who cares? That viewpoint can be supported by some recent Australian cars which seem to be developed more with styling in mind rather than slipping cleanly through the air – the latest Mitsubishi Magna didn’t see the inside of a wind tunnel and HSV products are now developed without tunnel testing.

However, to take that view would be short-sighted – as car manufacturers chase increasingly better fuel economy, you can be sure that low-drag aero will start making a comeback. Of course, for many manufacturers, aero attention never went away…

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It’s been an exciting weekend.

Genuinely exciting.

I have been testing one of the projects from an electronics book I am doing with Silicon Chip Publications. I’ve been selling work to Silicon Chip, an Australian electronics magazine, for a long time – in fact something like a decade. Over that period I have written many articles about car electronic systems, in addition to covering topics as diverse as electric lighting technologies and washing machines.

But what I have been testing over the weekend is all about modified cars.

It began when about six months ago I had a discussion with the publisher of Silicon Chip, Leo Simpson. He asked: how would I like to come up with all sorts of ideas for electronics projects that could be applied to high performance cars? After I devised the concept, the magazine’s chief electronics designer – an unsung genius called John Clarke – would do the hard work (including building the prototype) and then I’d do the on-car testing. And after we’d got a bunch of projects together, they’d be published in a magazine-style book.

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It’s both a curse and also one of the reasons that so many people read this online magazine: cars stir passions in a way that few other mass-produced consumer goods do. The tactility, history and rewards available in cars inspire people to love and hate, engender loyalties and animosities, cause passion and dogmatism. And the journalists who write about those products can inspire almost equal strengths of view….

But back on the products. There’s one aspect I have always found very hard to understand: the blind loyalty to one manufacturer. Simply, I just don’t get it.

I think that I can empathise as strongly as anyone about the history of a marque: Mercedes Benz, the grandfather of them all and so unswerving in its integrity of research and development; BMW, who nearly went broke and pulled themselves out only by producing a fascinating small car; General Motors, responsible for so much of the technology that we now take for granted.

But that is a world away from believing that all GM products are good. Or that DaimlerChrysler never makes mistakes. In fact, to be honest, these notions of manufacturer infallibility strike me as ludicrous.

So when we recently (well, recently when I am writing this) ran a very critical story about the Nissan 350Z, I was slightly bemused by the nature of the widespread discussions that occurred on forums around the world. (It’s easy for me to see what people are saying: I simply follow our in-house referrers’ list that takes me straight to the discussion.) In that story I’d suggested that the 350Z – basically – handled like crap on bad roads, and that the Holden Special Vehicles Clubsport would be a much sweeter car in the same conditions. (To see the story go to “New Car Test – Nissan 350Z Track”.)

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Each week we get a large number of emails from our readers. The emails range from plaintive requests for technical specifications of cars we’ve never heard of, to specific criticisms and/or corrections of AutoSpeed articles, to suggestions about the editorial approach that we are taking. Many of the emails that we think may be of interest to other readers are published in our weekly Response column, while staffer Michael Knowling also responds directly to every email.

We ‘know’ some of the correspondents – simply because over the years we have received so many emails from them – but most are literally just names on the screen. One name that is familiar – mostly because this reader is lives in Israel, and so it has stuck in my mind – is Avner Bronfield.

A few months ago he wrote to us, saying in part:

I feel that for some times you have shifted the focus of the magazine from DIY stuff and articles on how can one modify his car (which is what drew me to the magazine in the first place), to new car tests, feature cars, new technology articles and product reviews. The products reviews (which can be for product sold in the AutoSpeed shop) can even be thought of as advertisements. I don’t mind you endorsing a product – since I value your judgment, but I do miss the “real” article that could have been published instead (I’m referring to the one about how I could turn my 200SX to a 400 BHP road/rally monster by utilising $50 and common workshop tools). It’s a shame, because the “new” type of article can be found in quite a few magazines, but few magazines if any can do the “old” type like you.

That said, AutoSpeed is still one of the best on my list.

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Score 10/10 for my local roads and 3/10 for the Nissan 350Z…

Be nice to me for a moment. Humour me, put up with my ramblings. I want to tell you where I live. Well, not the geographical address, but the roads that lead there.

I live in the Gold Coast hinterland of Australia, at a place called Mount Tamborine. There are four – maybe five – roads that travel to the top of the mountain, to the volcanic plateau 500 metres above sea level. One road is called ‘The Goat Track’. It is so narrow that only one-way traffic is permitted along part of its length; right in the middle of nowhere is a set of traffic lights, allowing traffic to safely negotiate the single car-width section of hairpins along its winding blacktop.

Another of the roads that leads through green farmland to the Mountain is from the outer Gold Coast suburb of Oxenford. It is the road that I mainly take, and I’ll come back to it in a moment. There’s also another route, somewhat romantically called Henri Roberts Drive. I don’t know who Henri was, but he sounds like he may have been a French explorer, so explaining my romanticism re travel, hope, the finding of new worlds, etc. Then there’s the road from a town on the inland side of the mountain. The hamlet is confusingly also called Tamborine – but dubbed Tamborine Village to differentiate it from Tamborine Mountain – and that road is a simply awesome sequence of tight and twisting, off-camber and no-guard-rail bends that stretches for kilometres.

The roads up the mountain are steep; so steep in fact that the company that did some of the development on the Mazda MX5 SP (the uniquely Australian turbo model of that wonderful car) used Henri Roberts Drive for testing the cooling performance of the standard radiator. On any of the roads, trucks grind up in ultra-low gear; the gradients are signposted at 12 and 13 and 14 per cent.

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On a recent trip to Melbourne I had interesting conversations with Terry Wilson of AVO, APS’s Peter Luxon and David Innal (yes, the latter of twin turbo four wheel drive Falcon fame), and Simon Gischus of Nizpro.

Without a doubt these men are fiercely competitive – in a small market they each want to be seen not just as pre-eminent but also the first choice of people modifying their cars. They know each other – if not personally then certainly by reputation – and you could expect them to have significantly differing views on not only the ways of achieving performance outcomes, but what those outcomes for a performance road car should be.

But on that last point you’d be wrong. For each of these men stated the same thing repeatedly, perhaps best summarised by “It’s not the peak power that counts, it’s the breadth of the torque curve.”

The reason that this came up in conversation is that each of these companies has recently purchased a BA Falcon Turbo and each is well down the path of developing performance parts for the car. And significantly, each man loves the new Falcon. Simon Gischus suggested he was thinking of buying another for family car duties. Peter Luxon said that the Falcon was the first Australian car that he would ever consider driving as one of his own cars. Terry Wilson complained about the build quality (kinked pressure regulator hose, missing dome light cover, window that falls down with a loud bang as he drives along – and we could all hear the front suspension clunk) but thought the car was a very good package.

To gain universal praise from such a disparate trio of modifiers is amazing.

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Got to drive an N1 R34 V-Spec II GT-R Skyline the other day. Yes, that’s the hottest factory version of one of the hottest factory cars ever released. Anywhere.

And with the drive scheduled for the next day, did I have trouble sleeping the night before? Nope. In fact, it filled me with – literally – about as much excitement as I would have had when facing the prospect of driving any car that’s new to me. Like a Hyundai Getz, for example.

Trouble is, you see, my experience of Nissan Skyline GT-Rs has been sufficiently negative that I don’t regard them as anywhere near as good a car as – apparently – millions of others do. Of course, I have actually owned one – something the vast majority of those millions haven’t. I bought an Australian-delivered R32 GT-R back when it was near brand new, having been a believer in the fiction that I had read about them. You know, best-handling car ever, unbelievably good four-wheel drive system, fastest six cylinder you can buy – fables like that.

What I subsequently learned was that the car had a stupid amount of power oversteer and was only really quick when launched hard. Oh yes, and it was wearing to drive, had seats that gave chronic back-ache, attracted all the wrong sorts of attention, had steering terribly prone to tramlining – you get the picture. I fixed the handling with an adjustable torque split controller but it was never a car I particularly liked.

Too much hype, not enough reality.

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Those of you who bother consulting the ‘About Us’ section on the menu to the left of this column will have realised that over the last four or so months there has been a number of changes in the roles of the editorial staffers.

After working as Editor for the last four years, I stepped down from that role to take over the editing of a proposed new Web Publications on-line technology magazine, The TechJournal. However, for a variety of reasons those staffing changes didn’t work out, so for the last month or so I have been back editing AutoSpeed full-time.

But things don’t stand still.

There are now going to be further changes, including an alteration in the publishing frequency of AutoSpeed. The proposal that AutoSpeed become a daily publication (an idea first mooted over 12 months ago) will now become a reality – in fact the change will occur within the next 6 weeks. Yes, that’s right – AutoSpeed will release a new article each day! Of course, if you’re happy looking at our new material on a weekly basis, you’ll be able to continue to do just that. Or, if you’d like a fill-up every day of the week – that’ll now be an option. Or anything in between.

That change in publishing frequency – and the resulting alteration in the way in which internal article production and organisation can be carried out – has meant that both Michael Knowling and I have moved to the roles of Major Contributors. Michael has also added to his list of responsibilities the task of answering your emails.

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The Reality and the Rest

AutoSpeed is now just on four years old.

Given that we devote nearly all of each issue to modified feature cars, technical stories – both OE and modification – and columns about car tweaking, it’s ironic that over those four years in many ways our greatest difficulties have been the result of our new car tests.

New car tests; they seem simple enough. Manufacturers have available fleets of press cars. These are loaned – one at a time – to motoring journalists who drive them for a week. Following that test, they write about the cars, highlighting the cars’ strengths and weaknesses, comparing them to their competition, and expressing these thoughts in clear and unambiguous prose. Depending on their current line-up, the car companies may get mostly good reviews, mostly bad reviews – or any mixture in between. But they cop it sweet, knowing that a journalist’s role is to represent their readers’ interests – the public good – and not to simply propagate the car company spin.

Believe all that? Well in that case you must also believe in fairies and the Loch Ness Monster… For nearly all motoring journalists – and so motoring publications as well – that above paragraph is absolute crap.

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