Over the years I have become increasingly confused. Why do motorcyclists think that their bikes are so fast? Sure, I know that they’re fast in a straight line – I have been to the street drags often enough to see the quickest factory stock standard bikes running in the Tens and Elevens over the standing quarter. That’s mind-bogglingly fast. But it’s not straightline performance that I am referring to. It’s real-world, on-road performance. Over the sort of country road that has tight corners, bumps, surfaces that vary, dips and humps.

On those roads, it seems to me that bikes are pathetically slow.

While I am happy writing provocative material, in this case it’s not my intention to create a flamewar of the sort that you often see between bike riders and car drivers in discussion groups and forums. Instead, it’s a genuine confusion.

I remember perhaps 12 years ago when I was pedalling my then newly bought Subaru Liberty RS down the old Adelaide Hills main road. The dual lane road was sinuous and tight – an ideal road for driving fast. Or, I thought, riding quickly. I was in the fast (ie righthand) lane and ahead of me was a bike. He must have thought he was quick, because although the slow lane was at times empty, he resolutely stuck to the right. Despite the fact that he was impeding my progress.

This went on for several kilometres as I – doing what I would have done with any vehicle hogging the fast lane – drew closer. Finally, he pulled over and I went sprinting past. Further down the hill the speed limit slowed and since by then the fun part of the road was over, I dropped back to a more conservative pace. The bike had been left hundreds of metres behind but took this opportunity to catch up. In fact the rider drew alongside me, turned his head and waved his fist.

• » Continue reading or Comments (18)

The other day I was in an automotive toyshop. There were cars with turbos, cars with superchargers, luxury cars, poverty-pack cars. I walked around, completely entranced. I spent perhaps half an hour there – but I could have spent hours. And if lots of test drives were available, perhaps a week. Now this is nothing unusual – most of us have had similar feelings in places selling cars. But what made this yard fascinating is that the pricing on the day I was there peaked at AUD$3,500.

Yep, not one car cost more than three-and-a-half grand.

The yard was full of grey market Japanese imports that were all more than 15 years old. In < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Australia, the ’15 year rule’ makes it much easier to get privately imported cars complied and registered. Often, in fact, just new seatbelts, non-concave exterior mirrors and door intrusion bars need to be fitted. In some cases, not even all of these.

And since in Japan these old cars are worth very little – the importer suggested that one car had cost him 12 cents – even when freight and import charges are taken into account, the local cost of the car is chickenfeed.

So what sort of cars could be found? My favourite was the Toyota Crown Royal wagon. Equipped with the 1G-GZE supercharged 2-litre six-cylinder, this car was once the height of Japanese family luxury. What with climate control, cruise, velour, fridges, a curtained sunroof, 4-speed auto, alloys – and a heap of other things I didn’t have time to identify – this was one nice package. Now I know what you’re saying – a Toyota Crown Wagon? WTF? But its very weirdness was fascinating. I already have a supercharged Japanese grey market import blown Crown, but imagine a wagon….

• » Continue reading or Comments (1)

Car modification goes in cycles, in trends of popularity and enthusiasm. Sometimes stupid ideas are abandoned; other times they’re fervently embraced.

When I first started writing about car modification – it would have been back in about 1987 or 1988 – almost no workshops had dynos. Back then, performance claims were largely the stuff of description. You know, this exhaust will give your car just fantastic power, mate.

Pradoxically, some of the first companies to use dynos to ‘prove’ power gains were the very same companies that had no power gains to prove. But they knew that with so few dynos around, and with knowledge of how to fudge dyno figures commensurately low, their advertised dyno improvements would have credibility.

For a while at least.

But now every serious workshop has a chassis dyno. Mods which give no power gains are still being widely sold (polished throttle bodies, restrictive aftermarket cold-air intakes, exhaust systems with no engine management changes) but for the inquisitive, finding the efficacy of the mods is only a few dyno runs away. One dyno run at the place selling the goods and another at an independent workshop.

• » Continue reading or Comments (1)

The other day I was reading about DaimlerChrysler’s recent concept car, the F 500 MIND. Amongst a plethora of interesting new technologies – including drive-by-wire steering, an instrument panel that can be configured to shows various displays, infrared night vision and a system that projects sound at individuals within the cabin, were some details on the driveline.

“During the F 500 project, the engineers at DaimlerChrysler developed the first hybrid engine for a research vehicle,” says the press release. “Under the hood, a 4-liter, V8 diesel engine with 184 kW and an electric motor with 50 kW provide a dynamic driving performance. Thanks to the skilful combination of the combustion engine and the electric motor — experts speak of a ‘P2 configuration’ — the individual torques are added together. As a result, drivers can take full advantage of an extremely powerful surge of acceleration when they pass another vehicle.”

• » Continue reading or Comments (1)

Australiais becoming bizarre. Yep, ‘bizarre’. The other day I bought a car – it’s a good condition 1988 model, with an immaculate interior and a very good body. It’s six-cylinder, rear-wheel drive, DOHC and supercharged.

Yes, factory supercharged.

Oh, and it’s also got climate control, electric everything and brilliant NVH suppression.

OK, currently it isn’t perfect. One of the internal climate control actuators makes a ‘click, click’ noise when that function is selected, all the hubcaps are missing, and also not present are two external trims – one on the top of the door and another on the lower panel of (another) door. But these are minor things, able to either be relatively easily fixed, sourced or ignored.

You want to know the price I paid for the car? Two thousand, two hundred Australian dollars. Yep, AUD$2,200.

• » Continue reading or Comments Comments Off on My new car – factory supercharged and DOHC!

Perhaps for many of you this it is the most esoteric of hair-splitting, but after spending a week in the AUD$207,000 Audi A8 4.2, I can say that the advantages of forking-out $200,000 on a car – as opposed to AUD$100,000 or even $150,000 – aren’t really there. Well, not if the Audi is indicative of the category, anyway.

AutoSpeed contributor Michael Knowling put it best: the Audi A8 4.2 is a $100,000 car with another $100,000 of gadgets installed in it. That’s not to say that the gadgets are unimpressive – with brilliant sound, cruise control and navigation systems, they’re actually very good indeed.

But the Audi as a car simply isn’t good enough for the money.

Some of you won’t believe me, but let me try to put it into some kind of context.

Whatever the figures say, a 5.7-litre Holden Caprice has far more effortless performance. (Oftentimes – and especially in hot weather – the 4.2-litre, 246kW A8 feels rather gutless.) The Audi has lotsa cams and a six-speed sequential shift auto with steering wheel paddles – but it all amounts to ‘so what?’ when you put your foot down and not much happens.

• » Continue reading or Comments (3)

It’s now a few years since we drove the Alfa 166 – a car that, overall, left us unimpressed. The resulting road test was cutting and the Alfa Romeo distributor in Australia, er, liked it so much that since they read it we haven’t received an Alfa (or Citroen, or Kia – they’re all imported into Australia by the same company) for road testing.

But there was one aspect of the 166 that I was enormously impressed by. What was that, you ask? The navigation system. The VDO Dayton system was the first in-car navigation system that I had experienced and its capability blew me away. No more struggling with a street directory – if in fact you even had the right book in the car in the first place. No more trying to orientate yourself in unfamiliar surroundings. No more swerves when turn-offs were sighted at the last minute. And it worked just as well in the dark as daylight.

In fact I thought the nav system so good that when I moved interstate, one of the first things I bought was a very similar VDO Dayton navigation system for my car… it was fitted to an Audi S4, then when I leased a Lexus LS400, I moved it across.

If you’re not familiar with in-car navigation you could assume from the discussions in the media and on web groups that it is pure wank – no-one, the argument goes, needs one. Unfortunately, that argument most often originates from those who actually have no need of a navigation system in the first place!

One media stunt springs to mind. A magazine decided to have a shootout between people in one car equipped with a street directory, and people in another car featuring nav. I can’t remember which car won the navigational race, but either way, it was a close thing. Therefore, went the story implication, why pay a heap of dollars for a navigation system when you can instead use a $35 book?

• » Continue reading or Comments (2)

Some months ago in Fan-Forcing Your Intercooler, Part 1 we covered the fitting of an intercooler fan – a device that forces air through the intercooler either when it is getting over-heated or when the car is moving slowly and so there is little outside air being pushed through it. It’s an especially effective approach for underbonnet intercoolers.

Making that particular design even better was the use of a very powerful centrifugal blower. The blower – salvaged from the tip – was a VW/Audi cabin ventilation fan from a Kombi. And it sure moved a helluva lot of air!

Unfortunately, despite my disassembling the motor and greasing the (plain) bearings before it was put into service, after a few months of hard work the blower failed. Delving inside it (again!) showed that the top bearing was completely stuffed – not only was the bearing surface badly worn, but the shaft was also pitted and scarred. Given the rubbish tip origin of the blower, perhaps it was already well on the way out – although I don’t remember there being much of a problem the first time I looked inside it.

Anyway, this particular unit needed to be retired. Or the electric motor part of it did, anyway. That thought prompted another – could I retain the compact centrifugal blower and its associated housing, but use a new electric motor? I tried a few different ones but none had the power of the original – not surprising, when that bugger drew no less than 15.5 amps!

But did the motive force even have to come from an electric motor? What about instead using another fan on the other end of a common shaft, and driving this second fan with a nozzle connected to a turbo boost source? Kind of like a mini turbo but using a bleed of boost off the plenum and spinning a fan that pulled air through the intercooler? Such a system would need no maintenance or control, and would increase in speed as boost also went up. The downside would be that it wouldn’t operate when the car was off-boost (say stopped at the traffic lights), but that was possibly not too great a downer, particularly if when on the boost the thing worked like a Trojan.

• » Continue reading or Comments (2)

Australia, while there has been talk about roadside sniffers and the like, unless you are a company selling a bolt-on upgrade package or you otherwise wish to stick very closely to the letter of the law, you can safely ignore emissions performance.

And so nearly everyone with a modified car does just that.

For example, none of my modified cars has ever been formally emissions tested – a full test cycle costs thousands of dollars and is simply not a requirement of a normal individual enthusiast. (There are some exceptions to this – say a major engine transplant, or other mods requiring engineer approval for registration.)

That’s not to say that I consider emissions performance irrelevant – not at all. At AutoSpeed we’re one of the few publications that’s actually had a good look at emissions testing procedures (see our Dirty Stuff series starting at Dirty Stuff – Part 1 and Emissions Testing). And personally I think those people who punch a hole through their cat converters are environmental vandals. But at the same time, I’ve never felt the need to check that my own cars meet emissions.

So when yesterday I found myself subjected to a Queensland Government Transport Onroad Vehicle Emissions Random Testing inspection, I was a bit taken aback. Especially given the car I was driving…

• » Continue reading or Comments (1)