DrewII

no country in the world today would allow this car to be road registered. i'm sorry Ferrari. bragging that your stripped out non-road legal car beats a street-registered GTR in full trim is pretty lame. next...

looks hot unfortunately the front bar on the R34 is low as. its all part of the pain of owning a dumped car. i sold mine with duck tape wrapped around the lower lip of my car. after 2 years of constant scraping it, a part in the corner eventually completely snapped off. so i would do something about it sooner than later. if the car is lowered perhaps raise it to an acceptable level. you can still drop some stiffer coils inside if you're keen to see the track with it.

KU36 tyres offer very good dry weather grip for the money. terrible in the wet. semi slicks will provide you a further benefit, but they have different degrees of wear and can be costly. If your car is standard, i would go KU36 (roughly $200/corner for 17") + camber adjustments + thicker adjustable sway bars ($5-600 installed) FIRST. this will be the cheapest starting point. then start adding more if you feel you're still lacking traction.

Mickey T ETs FTW

all that you just mentioned. its not an easy job at all getting a RWD turbo that isn't set up for extra power to grip very well. you could adjust all the above, and you might still have issues with traction. depending on your engine setup. work through the list above, start with wheels, then start with camber/toe adjustments, then for track work possibly look into a better LSD. sway bars are also probably the first point of call and most benneficial bang for buck mod you can do to any car. by reducing overall body roll through corners, the wheels/tyres will stay closer to their wheel alignment settings. a stiffer rear sway bar will reduce roll in the rear and leave the front wheels more evenly loaded so there can be more available grip in the front. also helps with tyre wear. and when the lack of avilable grip finally starts to piss you off. get an AWD. i'v never looked back

exactly its a bullshiit myth that WRXs have weak/shiit gearboxes that break all the time. all user input. would happen to any car under the same abuse.

yeh like who do you know? this is what everyone says. even before i went to subaru this is all i ever heard. but after owning a couple and being active on the rex forums for a long time, i rarely hear of people blowing their boxes EVER. i have heard of some of the earlier classics pre 00 doing their boxes. but these cars were used for hill climbs and motor sport. the old rexies have had 10 years of hard launching from various young males. this is to be expected. extreme launching on startup time and time again will make any gearbox blow. whether it be ferrari, or evo or wrx. go on the evo forums and find out how their 10 year old gearboxes are going after so many years of launching abuse. they all share the same fate. like i said its user abuse over many many years and many many launches. not actually a design or manufacturing fault.

i agree. past experience WRX's like most japanese cars are mostly unbreakable. start feeding more power pound for pound evo engine can handle more. but lightly tuned they are unbreakable. earlier models i'm talking the classic rex 10 years ago had gearbox issues if launched too hard repeatedly. but EVOs have exactly the same issue with blowing trasfer casings in their gearboxes with hard launches. EVO 9's are famous for blowing gearboxes with repetitive hard launching. some guys have blown the transfer casing 3 times in an EVO through gearbox abuse. spend some time on the Oz EVO forums you will see the EVOs have their fare share of issues too if treated with no respect. recent models included. with either car. treat it well. and it will be good to you.

WRX = nicer interior, better day to day driveability (which makes it not as good as the EVO on the track), even with no mods the boxer engine purrs and sounds way better then the stock evo engine, rear seats split/fold 60 40 so can fit more luggage on long trips EVO = track monster, much harsher for mon-fri driving, interior compared to the WRX is shite, your wife wouldnt like it, rear seats don't fold/split

ouch

have you tried carmate.com.au yet? that is the fake 400R AU Spec version i had a proper jap version on my series 2. they do look different from the front. i had mine fitted before the car left japan. and in the two years i owned it i couldnt find one distributor in australia that sold it or a version that looked just like a real 400R front bar.

why has it been off the road for 3 months?

i convinced myself months ago and since then have been reaping the rewards and from my experience i suggest you do the same.

couldnt agree more. the understated looks are one of the best parts about the car. really underneath the car is a beast. i got over people staring and pointing in traffic. for a daily driver the only time i liked being noticed was on the weekends. mon-fri i just wanted to get to and from work ASAP without being noticed at all. you can't relax in bumper/bumper traffic with every car staring at you as they drive past you in peak hour traffic. its annoying and you wish you hard the darkest tints in the world to hide you from everyone.

i know where you are coming from. and you are correct. however i was spending my weekends fixing, driving around for spare parts etc etc stopped actually "enjoying" my car. and because it was a daily driver when it needed a part fixed that stopped me from driving it each day i obviously had to sort out that problem that weekend (which i may have had other shiit to do ie going out, functions, beach etc). and this is one of the reasons why i bought a brand new car. it does 0-100 in 5.3 seconds in standard trim. 0-400 in 13.4 seconds stock. and shoots around wakefield park in 1:12 stock, it performs as well in the wet as it does in the dry, sat nav, electric sunroof, full leather interior, blue tooth hands free, rear parking sensors literally all the latest technology and some nice toys to boot (Sti gear knob, sti shirt shift kit, sti front lip) and ALL FACTORY FITTED WITH 3 YEAR WARRANTY, a phenomenal AWD transmission and a fantastic engine, and they even chucked in 3 years 24/7 NRMA assist. and theyre still extremely cheap for what you get. they're japanese after all. the other biggest reason why i bought the car was for tax purposes. i construct a log book as i use my car daily to drive between sites (company accountant) so i calculated that after 4-5 years of ownership, as long as i sell the car and not give it away for nothing (and so long as my business kms are extremely high which they are and i can easily appropriate to the tax man) then after the tax savings and sale price. the car would have cost me virtually nothing to own in those 5 years of ownership. and the same goes with any car i choose to purchase in the future. under a hire purchase due to the fact you can claim depreciation on top of everything else once you sell the car its basically cost you hardly anything at all during the time of ownership (so long as your business usage is very high). obviously need to keep it for long enough to get a big enough tax saving but around 5 years and yeh. this was a massive factor for me. so it was a calculated purchase. but also one because i was sick of spending weekends fixing my car, and not even being able to drive it during the week as i needed it every day. the car had to go. i'm only 24 so i'm definitely still into my toys and will be for a very long time to come.