Category Archives: Cars

Due to last minute all over the place organisational skills, last night I had 2 forum meets on at the same time, in different locations. A VWGolf.net.au meet at Homebush and a JDMST meet in Blacktown.

I had intentions to attend the JDMST meet, but before driving out I thought I’d drop in to the VWG meet first, and perhaps make my way to Blacktown afterwards. I picked Christina up from work, got caught in killer traffic on the way to Eastwood (to get her car) and when we got to Homebush I got a call to warn me not to bother going to the JDMST meet as it was pitch black (no street lights) and no parking either.

Homebush was pretty packed out too, we had a big bunch, hung around for a while then drove to Rhodes to take photos of the cars in more light (at that stage I put the camera away and did the social thing instead!).

Many more photos here and photos from the JDMST meet (400 cars strong apparently!) here.

$200’s worth in this 40cc syringe.

Dave from Reflect Effect, working his magic.

Bonnet has never been this clean.

I’ve never been a fan of the concept of paying the premium for a new car, then being shoved into the little room with a sales person trying to drill you for even more cash for paint protection.

The outcome of this heated discussion got me a deal to review the Opti-Coat product on my own car to put my doubts to rest.

Opti-Coat claims to be the ultimate paint protection product on the market today. It’s basically a clearcoat like your stock clearcoat, only a lot stronger and longer lasting. A quick search on YouTube has people scratching at their Opti-Coated cars with steel wool with no ill effects, even paint thinners have no effect on it.

My full (and ongoing) review can be found here.

Finally twisted Dedy’s arm enough to get him to install my AeroCatch bonnet pins. A very fussy job in comparison to more conventional bonnet pins as the bonnet surface isn’t completely flat and you’ve got to cut the shape out of the bonnet (as opposed to simply drilling a hole in it). Perfect job though (as expected from Dedy and team at Top One Auto).

Ferrari 458 dash vs Honda’s new CR-Z dash.

I was just browsing the interior thread on JDMST, and did some googling, then I found this striking similarity and decided to photoshop both of the dashes next to each other in the same scale. Both look ugly as hell to me (spaceships!) but tut tut Honda. You were innovators once!

At Eastern Creek today. First I heard it (sounds like an F1 car). Then I saw it, gahhhhh so hot.

Neil Bates was at the wheel giving Lexus owners happy laps.

The closest I got to it was touching these wheels. Damn it!

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.