S18 RSG

I'm running 18x8.5 ET30, with 225/40 tyres, and I'd be hard pushed to go much wider on the front without the tread being outside the arches (and therefore illegal). On the rear I could potentially go out another 5-10mm (so up to ET20) before reaching the outer limit of legality, but at that point I'd probably be catching kerbs a lot more often. On an 18x9.5 I assume you'll have to run quite a bit of stretch on the front to stay legal, which may mean running different tyre sizes front and back, which can cause the car to understeer more. You're on the limit I would say.

I'm surprised you guys haven't switched over to Discord. I never did get along much with Teamspeak, but Discord is great. I will add you on Steam when I get back home though, and I'll see if I can perhaps persuade my Blizzard contact to slip me a free copy, save having to pay for something I may not play.

I've been wanting to play Overwatch since I stopped playing League of Legends. Seems like a good FPS type substitute. I just hate playing multiplayer games alone, and nobody I know has it

I've been keeping up to date with it slowly, but given how much I actually play games these days, I'm not particularly interested in anything aside from Forza Horizon 3 and Battlefield 1. There have been some cool looking games (new Zelda, Mass Effect Andromeda, No Man's Sky and a few others), but I doubt I'll get around to playing them (perhaps with the exception of Mass Effect/No Man's Sky, but that comes down to the depth of the explorable universe on both counts).

Especially when you look at the leaked RX 480 benchmarks. A card that's rumoured to be under £200 on release, and benchmarks over an overclocked 980. Two in CF will likely be 90-95% of the performance of a 1080 for £200 less. Edit - Cancel that, just found a link that suggests that 2 RX480's in Crossfire actually outperforms a single 1080, same price difference.

I too rather enjoyed the latest episode. Bringing Chris Harris onto the big show was a great idea, long may that continue. I find Rory a little hit or miss, but he wasn't bad. I think he would suit a Youtube video review platform, but perhaps doesn't quite have the polish for TV. I don't mind him on Extra Gear, but he still comes across as a little "over-scripted". Almost like he reads the script word for word and lacks personality, but then tries to add personality in his voice. it's weird. Chris Evans could really do with a lesson in how NOT to be Jeremy Clarkson. His McLaren F1 LT film was a perfect example. Shouting and screaming "power" just like Clarkson did. It worked with JC, he had the personality for it, Chris Evans is just trying way too hard. If he calms down a little, leaves the driving up to the actual drivers, and sticks to presenting and interviewing he'll be ok. Matt did a far better job of presenting than Chris Evans ever could to be honest.

I love the idea, but that's the weekend after JAE I believe. After 4 or 5 days of camping that weekend, I'm not entirely sure I'll be in a rush to break out the tent again lol. Will see how it goes though. I assume it's fairly flexible as to when people say yes or no.

Luckily the GT86 has a lot of interior parts which would benefit a lot from some custom paintwork (dash trim pieces etc.). Be interested to see what you could do with them.

I have VW fitment wheels on my car, 3SDM's (very popular in the VAG scene). I bought a slight bigger centre bore wheel so I could get a reasonable spigot ring, however, I would argue that a spigot ring may not even be necessary for a 1mm difference. I'm sure a 0.5mm thick piece of plastic would be just as much use as nothing if it were to be needed anyway, plus, I'm sure most spigot rings have a little bit of play anyway, so I wouldn't be surprised if most people have 0.5mm of space around the centre of the wheel. Just run it without spigots at all, should be fine.

Cool looking wheels. Look a bit like Ferrari F40 wheels from memory. If you thought you would need spacers anyway, and you needed them redrilled, would it not have been cheaper to just buy hub adaptors? Kill two birds and all that.

If you have stock secondary cat you will fly MOT, even with a decatted manifold, so no worries there. You will get more noise going to a decat manifold, but in my experience the increase in noise is far less than that from the catback. If you have the money to change manifold before remap, it's 100% worth doing. I didn't, and after the remap was disappointed with how much worse the torque dip was (it improved with the remap, but because everywhere else was better, the torque dip became a real source of disappointment).

To be honest, manifold, filter and remap is by far the most cost effective way to change the car's performance. I think pretty much any other bolt on part will have a fairly poor cost to performance ratio, or will have various downsides, so you're probably best off leaving it at that, until of course you get to the point where forced induction in the next logical step.

I would possibly advise against the overpipe, unless you've changed every other part of the exhaust as well. If you've still got stock front pipe, you may as well stick with stock overpipe too, as you get basically zero gain from an overpipe alone. New plates are cool though. Would really benefit from debadging on the rear imo.

Adam, can you please stop selling things I want... If I buy the light off you, might look to do a deal with the top brace if you can find a seller for the triangle brace

PM me prices for 3rd light and parcel shelf, preferably as a package and individually please

Potentially interested in the parcel shelf and lower light pending pictures. Certainly interested in the lower light, will have to see the parcel shelf before deciding.

Is the diffuser being painted? (I assume so, but gotta ask). Looks very inconspicuous

Yeah, but surely just because it was, in effect, wrapped in a wet blanket because the material was more absorbent of fluids than metal. A titanium wrap won't absorb fluid, so shouldn't be any worse than an unwrapped manifold.

I agree with the guys, you may be surprised when you fit the exhaust just how loud these cars are with an unresonated exhaust. Mine had a centre silencer and a fairly large baffled back box and it's still loud. Look forward to hearing it though, certainly looks like a nice design.

Surely that only applies to the material wraps? There are some high quality titanium weave wraps available these days which do the same job, but being that they are mostly metal, would surely disintegrate no quicker than the manifold itself.

I think you're right now I've looked again. In that case, the first EL graph and the UEL graph are a reasonable comparison, suggesting that by choosing UEL rather than EL, you're losing out on 7hp and 6ftlb of torque, just to get the sound, especially given that there doesn't seem to be a huge difference in the torque curves between the two. As far as I'm aware it's been accepted for some time that there is very little difference (literally 2-3hp max) between EL and UEL, trebling that gap may be enough to start turning more people away (despite the fact that the differences would be minuscule when behind the wheel)

Neither chart is a good comparison. One started with 175hp, one started with 178hp, the UEL car started with under 170hp. Even so, they all ended up with the same, or very similar mods, yet the UEL car was 10hp down on the EL. I know EL is the way to go for ultimate numbers, but I'm surprised the difference is so vast. The Tomei systems were within 2 or 3hp peak, and similar with other equivalent systems. Therefore, the tests for TD's manifold are either not comparable, or the UEL truly is significantly worse off than EL.

Be interesting to see that setup on a car which dyno'd similar to Steve's. The stock car looks like it was 10hp down on Steve's, and subsequently after tune it's still 10hp down. Torque curve looks great though.

Righto then guys and girls, be prepared to take a look at the outcome of my afternoon in "work". I've designed a route for our weekend, incorporating as many of the best Welsh driving roads into one route, probably stretched over two days. This route will include the Evo Triangle, Llanberris pass, Elan Valley, some coastal roads, and of course the Black Mountain pass made so famous by Top Gear. All in all, this route accounts for around 320 miles of prime Welsh roads, clocking in at around 9 hours worth of driving. Taking into account stops for fuel, food, pictures and general socialising, I think we should be in for a decent few days of driving. The route: https://drive.google.com/open?id=10kiEJIMl6CDKEP58a-uUJNNoE6g&usp=sharing As far as I'm aware, Chris and a few of his friends will be staying in a hotel Friday night, and I'll be heading up Saturday morning. I assume we will grab some breakfast, then head off mid morning some time. Saturday night, I am yet to discuss with Chris. I don't know if he plans to head back to his hotel in North Wales, or stay in Aberystwyth as I had thought about. Either way, I assume the second day will be much the same, with the route ending in Brecon, I'm sure we can find a nice country pub for an afternoon lunch. As before, still not much set in stone, so if people are interested, it is probably best that I just give you a time to meet, and we'll just wing it as the day goes on. That being said, I have a question. Does anybody know how to export the map above (I have a KML and KMZ file) into a sat nav app? I can't get it to work on Google Maps, otherwise I could load it on Google Maps in my car and use it for navigation :/

13x7 mate