nerdstrike

Can anyone identify an adaptor mount if you choose not to go with Focal's drop-in fitment? There is a fairly common Toyota three-point mount but sadly the internet has not noticed the GT86. It seems there's a minor wiring issue with a passthrough on the tweeters to worry about as well.

It is important to get the right type of coolant. If you mix different kinds of corrosion inhibitors, you can end up with them creating sludge in the pipes. For a small top up you can reasonably use water, ideally distilled, boiled or deionised, as you're only diluting the mix by a tiny fraction. Colour of the coolant is often indicative - i.e. don't mix different colours, but that's not a 100% guarantee. Given the apparent trade secret that is subaru magic wonder coolant, I'd just bung a drop of distilled water in to bring the level up. I'd avoid tap water, given East Anglian water is chock full of limescale.

... but I might get a window next weekend. Thanks for all the recommendations!

Draw a line of chalk across the tyres, roll slowly over a flat surface, see where the chalk gets rubbed off to tell where the contact patch is. Over-inflation will leave chalk on the shoulders of the tyre with the middle bare. Under inflation will tend to rub the shoulders clean, but not the middle. Camber has an effect too, so you have to take that into account. It's a poor-man's wheel alignment test - far from perfect.

Eco friendly does include a long service life, and they sure are hard wearing. It seems the Eagle F1 is a soft tyre, so grip is great, but durability low. Load rating somewhat relates to side-wall stiffness, so the stiffer sidewall will improve efficiency a bit, but we're not talking transformation here. The changes will be dwarfed by variations in usage and tyre pressure, you'd only see an improvement over many months. It will also alter the ride quality a bit, sharper turn-in, bumpier ride.

It does sort of matter where you attach it, but you can adjust the length/diameter to suit the temperature of the gasses in that part of the system. The decompression into the muffler will drop gas temp, but most of the fall-off will happen by the time you get to the second cat position

Well, since it's the high output engine... Glad you found the issue

Your car has a lot of pace, and doesn't look like a handful in the bends. Impressive.

Got my hopes up there @rob275 - the map seems to point at the Hinxton red lion, rather than the one in Chelmsford!

So I got in the car this morning and found the rear view mirror glass on the passenger seat, leaving the adhesive on a shiny cellophane-like sheet on the mount. Note that this is not the windscreen attachment, but just the reflective glass bit. For at least a year I've noticed a little marking around the bottom edges a bit like corrosion or something. Must have been detaching glue! I can get by on wing mirrors for the short term, but I've never seen this happen before and I'm a bit surprised. Car only 3 years old. I presume the warranty claim will be fairly straightforward.

I look on with avarice and weep for the costs of getting married.

I did think of them... clearly price does not guarantee quality, but on the other hand, suspicious cheapness usually indicates that corners have been cut.

Hmm - the knock off exhaust copies I've seen for other cars have often lacked in quality control and long term resilience. Think uneven exhaust tips, baffles coming loose and rattling, excessive rusting and so on. Doesn't hit everyone but more often than I like to see. They can also sounded like a bag of nails, but that's what a lot of people like...

Besides swagger, you might get better lag behaviour because the pickup can be nearer the exhaust ports, i.e. short effective manifold length. I can't easily find a straight answer on whether two half capacity turbos will have lower rotating inertia versus one full capacity turbo. Thermal efficiency might be higher for the smaller turbines, i.e. less total heat from the compression... so maybe your charge arrives cooler.... it's too complex to estimate without some proper reading and data, but I'm thinking it's marginal.

I guess you won't notice until things get marginal, like brake overheat or down steep hills.

Interesting. It's a big unit what with the motor in the middle, but clever pass-through on power. Am I right in saying that you need a wastegate for two things? 1) Shedding excess boost at low RPMs where the turbo flows more than the engine needs 2) Blowing off pressure when throttle snaps closed but exhaust pressure is still up. The first point is nullified by having control over how much current goes to the motor, but I can't see how you can get round the second, i.e. lifting off at high RPM. I guess the scavenging turbine doesn't have to be as large as you would normally have for that amount of boost, and maybe you can apply much more drag to the motor as the pedal lifts to keep the pressure down. Obviously this clever setup is only making an ICE behave better and waste less energy, so in the end you can achieve more with by feeding electric power directly to the transmission, but that comes with more dramatic engineering costs.

Wow, they've worked hard on it. I suppose it's only recently we've been able to put enough battery in a small package to run a compressor like that. A novel idea with limited application. At some point you'll hit the threshold where you might as well have a full time turbo instead, because it needs so much juice from the engine to keep it topped up. It would suit the street-racer types for sure, possibly not track use when you're always up in the revs and the money might be better spent elsewhere.

There's barely room for the 1.8 and cooling, never mind running a turbo pipe back up to the intake. If that's the same unit that went in the some of the Elise and early Exige, then it's a really heavily tested combination. Probably detuned a bit too. You could after all, get to 190 hp with just VVTL. The car looks like a total hoot. I look forward to it appearing on motoring program of choice.

If you wanted to treat it like a nitrous system, push a button to go faster you could probably manage a relatively inexpensive system, but you need to bolt a reasonably large motor right into the power train without it getting in the way of anything else. If you just kept the motor engaged while the engine is working, it turns into a generator. That's fine to a point, but creates fairly generous parasitic losses, that is unless you have a clutch system to disengage it when it's neither charging nor discharging. Then you need to situate a couple of grand worth of batteries somewhere, and maybe there's managing the extra power so that it comes on and off smoothly and doesn't just VTEC yo' ass into trouble. You basically need two throttle maps on the same pedal, one for the engine and another for the motor which may or may not change depending on speed/gear. It's a lot of electronics and firmware programming I would think. Not really in the area of expertise of your typical petrol-head tuning developer, more the people that build custom ECUs. Simple systems have been built for bicycles which just provide assistance whenever they sense you pedalling, but cars are on a much bigger and more complicated scale. The expensive sports cars have taken great pains to blend the outputs of the engine and the two or more electric motors that drive various wheels. It's much more sophisticated than a traditional four-wheel drive system, up to and including negative power applied to individual wheels, and torque-fill that comes on at low RPMs or while turbos are still spooling. Much finesse and development time is required! These cars are forerunners of future sports cars more in our market segment I suspect. What is 100k now will enter the market in the £30-40k market in a few years time.

Trouble with batteries is that for meaningful electric driven torque, you need lots of current, which means you need lots of batteries - individual cells can only discharge so fast. The Tesla system pre-heats itself to get best battery output in Ludicrous mode, and the longer range Teslas have greater performance as well as range. Next consider the commercially affordable systems, like the range extender in the i3, and the hybrid drive in the Prius. The engine is not directly connected to the wheels and just spins a dynamo. Lexus has some hybrid vehicles that use something resembling a beefy starter motor, but I don't think those add performance so much as poodle power for low speeds. The only proper blended petrol-electric performance systems are currently found in £100000+ cars who have done the development to use the systems sympathetically - new NSX, Porsche 918, P1, i8 etc. Basically I'm saying that a "KERS" system would probably cost more than your car to build.

Very entertaining - some properly funny moments to be had. Ideally the presenters need to ease their lines a bit more when on auto-cue/delivering lines. They lack the instinctive timing for comedy, maybe it'll come with time? I certainly hope so, as the raw material is there.

Absolutely, were I to ever boost mine, I'd opt for a best engineered single turbo I could afford. I do admire the elegance though. Good use of space.

People wanted to get rid of the twin system in the late RX7s! Google the vacuum tubing diagram for a mere taste of the complexity! I suppose the advantage of two smaller turbos is to flow as well as a double capacity turbo with lower inertia. It will also have pretty prompt response off what I hope are very short exhaust headers, rather than collecting 4-1 first. It's nicely packaged for sure! Reddit points out no intercooler.

Indeed. Sports cars become as dull and frustrating if all you get to do is crawl in traffic. It takes is a bit of freedom to remind yourself why it's great. Or a really aggressive approach to commuting.

Fair point - tracks are often windy exposed places, so you can get pretty cold in spring, especially if you like hanging out at the pit wall. You can do most good by giving your car a healthcheck before going - tyre condition, no cracks etc., brake pad material reasonable, nuts done up to correct torque etc. My first trackday got red-flagged for ages after a 350Z lost a wheel, and I've seen someone who liked long stints burn through his pads to the metal too... These could probably have been avoided with pre-flight checks.