Category Archives: Cars

My pass.

I was given a pen and paper for my opinions on the new C.drive2 tyre.

We were fed a healthy lunch too.

After lunch and a short introductory talk we were broken up into groups to test the new tyre.

I was with the go2space guys and we were sent off to the peanut track. At this stage we were more distracted by the LFA on the main circuit (more on that later!). Hard to focus on 2 Hyundai’s when a super car is flying through turn 1!

Ian was our instructor. $10/cone you knock over. After my run I owed him $30.

That’s me in the blue car. The blue car was fitted with the C.drive2, the red car had OEM tyres.

We then hit the skid pan for slalom + a big circle exercise too (always fun).

I got an invite from Yokohama to attend one of their tyre test days. Preliminary for their dealer network but they had room for more and I was more than happy to check it out. There were 3 exercises to do in the cars, each involved 2 cars: One with the new Yokohama C.drive2 tyre (launching soon) and one with the standard OE tyres the car came with. The peanut track was used to test the cars out in some snaky figure eights in the dry and the skid pan was used to do a wet slalom, as well as a large circle where an instructor in the C.drive2 fitted car would try to catch the gap between you in the car with OE tyres (happy to say I managed to keep my distance from the guy albeit I had a lot more work to do with the steering wheel and accelerator inputs!).

I thought the big circle test was the best test of the lot as the difference between the C.drive2’s and the OE tyre were night and day. The OE tyre was squealing at all times and traction control would kick in if you tried too hard. Had to do a lot of steering to keep the speed up too but in the C.drive2 there was no squealing, you could almost just hold the wheel in the one spot and not once did traction control kick in either. Impressive.

Whilst the C.Drive was once marketed as more of a performance tyre (I had them on my MX-5 once and they were a blast on the race track, in fact in this video Canto is driving my car on C.Drives), but today the C.drive2 is marketed as an everyday tyre which focusses on safety. I thought it was amazing in the wet and it’s definitely a tyre I’d be happy to see my Mum and sister driving on.

Suga’s all done! Airbags at their lowest setting pictured above. New wheels coming soon. View high res files here.

Side profile. Front can go down a little more but I didn’t risk it.

Rear at it’s lowest setting.

Not set the preset settings yet so I was using the up and down on both right hand side buttons. 1, 2 and 3 will allow for all the way down setting for parking. 2 will be drivable setting and 3 will be for all the way up (can go a little higher than stock!).

All installed. Audio installation guy has been contacted, he will commence work on hiding all this gear this week.

Here’s a little video.

OK got to say I’m as excited as Christina is now! Just got back from TOP ONE and damn the system is AMAZING. It’s killer fast due to the fatter airlines we optioned for the kit. Just as fast going up as it is down, so fast it’s kinda scary! The compressor is loud, but not too loud, the sound of air releasing in the boot is pretty loud and freaky first time around as well.

I took it lower than Dedy had initially just to see how bad it was at the front, but the rub isn’t all that bad. A thinner tyre will fix it easy. Even with more aggressive offset and a stretched tyre it should be AOK (rim won’t touch, it’s all in the tyres). More soon!

Wiring mess.

SUGA is still at Top One Auto getting her air suspension installed. Great thing about the R32 Golf is that the battery is in the boot which makes all of this wiring potentially a little easier, and neater. The bad thing is that the rear boot is quite shallow in comparison to an ordinary MKV which means we’ll have to get an audio shop to design a raised cover of some sort to hide all the gear (huge aluminium air tank and compressor not pictured in the above shot).

She’ll be the very first R32 Golf to ever have air suspension in Australia. We won’t be sure of how low it’ll go straight off the bat, we won’t know how well the car will handle after the install too (whether it’ll be totally crap, or AOK). Unknown territory so it’s no wonder that the community is pretty excited about this install. More updates as they come!

Sierra Sierra Evo from the USA.

Hankook Evo.

Too many amazing cars to take photos of so I instead decided to bug people by yelling out their names and taking snaps of them as they turned around. “Charles!”

“Tendy!”

World Time Attack Challenge (WTAC) was on today. Perfect weather, bumped into lots of people, felt very much like I was at a rave! More pics here.