scathing

NA MR2s are slower than a wet week, and any mid-engined car is a pain in the backside to maintain. They look cool, though. Nothing wrong with a DE+T as long as you're not chasing big power/boost. NA internals won't ultimately be able to handle the same cylinder pressures as FI ones (even taking the compression ratio out of the equation) but, as above, you'll still be making a fair amount of power before that becomes an issue. At the same time the lower weight internals and higher compression is going to improve efficiency and response. Personally I'm all for a DE+T on a street car. On the street big power isn't usable that often, but being more fuel efficient and more responsive is something you can appreciate every day. If you're going to sink big bucks into it down the line to chase big power, even a stock DET is going to need to be cracked and brakes are going to require upgrades, so starting from a NA position becomes irrelevant. As people have said, it is a good path to work through. Start NA and work on supporting mods (handling, driveline) so you can get used to the car and how to drive it, as well as prepping it for a big power increase, and do that last. I had a MR2 that was built the other way (stock open diff, rubbish D2 coilovers, stock brakes, but big power) and the thing was exhilarating when you punched the throttle, but scary (in a bad way) when you tried to stop or turn. It's not something I care to repeat.

Not much new in that class, but there's a few used cars that would fit the bill. Even the 370Z is going to be short on available mods right now, and it's not that quick by modern standards. If you're talking a GTT type car, its hard to go past the XR6T (or F6) though. The BMW 1 Series M looks like a fantastic buy if you can stump up the $100K.

Now you're just shifting the goalposts. There was no timeline mentioned in your original definition for "adapt". "Adjusting to new conditions" (as per your supplied Definition 2) would include evolution. At any rate, my immune system example still applies. You start off without an immunity to a disease, and once infected you either die or that system adapts to deal with it. As does tanning. Europeans have only lived in Australia for approximately 225 years. The ones that came over on the First Fleet will be as pasty-white as the Poms that still live in the UK today, compared to Anglo Saxons that have lived here all their lives. Their body rapidly (compared to evolution) adjusted its skin tone to suit the local environment. Of course if you go and then redefine "rapid" down to talking about minutes (rather than your century timeline) then I guess I'd be wrong again.

Do you not have an immune system, or have you forgotten it exists? Are you and everyone around you albinos, where you don't tan in exposure to UV light? Has your body never had as a coccyx or an appendix? We might supplement these natural features with developments from our own intelligence, but to say the human body by itself has never adapted (either in the short term with things such as the immune system or melanin, or in the long term with vestigial features) is obviously false. The fact that we're not extinct is proof enough of that.

PROConcept is in Seven Hills these days. He's not a V-Series specialist, but he is a Nissan specialist (along with Hondas these days) with quite a few Z33 customers.

The PowerFC has been around for ages, so yes tuners know them pretty well but by the same token their features are pretty sparse compared to modern ECUs. My personal opinion is that they're fine for cars with just bolt-ons (or maybe a small snail upgrade) but that's it. If you've gone to all the expense of putting fancy aftermarket internals into an engine, then a more modern ECU is the way to go. As for what computer to choose, I'm with the advice above. Find some tuners you trust, and see what they like tuning on. Ask them what specific features of that ECU make it their preference (and do your own research), and then decide what features you want vs the service of the tuner. The best ECU in the world still needs a tuner, but some tuners might choose ECUs that don't have all the features you want because most of their customers don't ask for it. For example I want to run multiple maps I can switch between on the fly, which is something a PowerFC isn't going to offer. Some people might want a certain number of "extra" inputs or outputs, or telemetry, etc.

It shouldn't happen unless you want it to happen. FM cars have a lot of rear end grip. What tyres is it on? If the car's on the tyres it was complied with chances are they're cheap PoS' like Nankangs. Even then, my car doesn't really spin up on Nankangs unless I'm really aggressive on the throttle.

My favourite part of the club is that it is for NA Japanese cars, but none of the suggested "acceptable cars" are Hondas.

I ran RS-Rs on my SW20 and they were a great S-Comp.

They're LHD extractors. Get an extender bar and a hammer, and beat it out of the way. It should only need a few mm. That's what the workshop did with mine (after I spoke to a mate of mine with the same issue, and he recommended it as his solution). Follow the time-honoured tradition.

The aftermarket spring is shorter than the stock spring. The spring sits in the factory location with an adjustable spacer. So when you adjust the height in the rear you have to adjust both the spring and the damper.

A coilover design is where the spring coil is wound around (or "over", if you will) the damper body. It's the most common design used. The back of the FM platform doesn't use it, however. The coil spring sits next to the damper. Some places get rid of this setup and put a coilover in to where the damper resides. The spring bucket then sits empty, or some peoples will delete that entire component and replace it with an adjustable arm: If these are the HSD HR coilovers you're getting, then they're not a rear coilover. The damper and spring are kept separate. So it won't be a concern for you. I'm not sure how it'll affect the strength/weakness of a coilover conversion, but I'll give some other advice. As for doing the swaybars, set them soft and work your way up. I fitted my bars first and had them set to full stiff with the stock Z33 springs, which had the car nicely balanced. After fitting my Teins (12kg all round) the car wanted to slide everywhere. With your stiffer rear springs that effect is going to be even worse.

It shouldn't be a problem by now. Those Brant alarms were so f**king unreliable, and a dealer fit accessory, so I'd have thought that most of them would have been binned by now and a better immobiliser fitted instead. If not, budget it in with the purchase.

It must be from people who either bought their Mercs back in the 80's, or can't believe they spent so much on so little and delude themselves even further to think they're getting actual value (rather than just the perception of it). Modern Mercs are a shade of their former selves, BMWs have always had electrical issues, and VWs shit themselves on a regular basis too.

Given that its a daily, what about a Liberty? Either a 2.0L turbo GT (forget the B4) or a 3.0L NA one? Comfy, not an idiot/cop magnet, same underpinnings for tuning as the WRX. I found quite a few (not in Qld) on Carsales between $10K-$20K.

Found another op ed piece on the SMH regarding climate change, pointing out that there are idiots on both sides. http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-dangers-of-boneheaded-beliefs-20110602-1fijg.html

Daily driving its the seat of the pants. It will depend on road gradient, the speed limit, traffic speed, etc. On the track, in the lower gears I'll do it by feel/sound. In the higher gears I'll watch the tacho when I can hear the engine getting close to the cutout.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just get a custom spring made up at the desired rate / height, rather than converting to a coilover and having to reinforce the mounting points (or getting custom arms) since the load is now concentrated on one point rather than being spread out over 2? I've seen a pic of some people who've done it on off-street cars on a 350Z forum a few years ago, but searching Google comes up with no matches for information on how to do it. Having to figure it out for yourself seems like a pretty expensive job, for little appreciable gain. I'm pretty sure the companies that did it had to reinforce the damper mounting points to handle the extra pressure they'd be put under, and weren't designed for.

May I ask why? Converting the rear to a coilover arrangement takes a lot of work. I'm wondering what gains you hope to realise from doing so.

And the rear Brembos are quite small, so fitment is less of an issue than the fronts.

Stock Z33 17" wheels clear Brembos, so fitment shouldn't be that hard to find.

There's a dude in Qld doing an AWD conversion on his Z33, but if I remember correctly he's using R34 GT-R underpinnings. The AWD V35s are all auto, and he wanted a manual.

How come? Re-analysing data in light of new discoveries, or acknowledging mistakes in the past rather than dogmatically sticking to existing beliefs, is at the heart of scientific advancement. Agreeing with climate change as a principle doesn't necessarily mean supporting a specific political solution. I don't think a "carbon" tax is the solution, since it by itself does 4/5 of f**k all. Man's attempts to correct the imbalances it creates should be a holistic solution, not just one point. As an analogy, driving at ludicrous speed is going to get people killed. But the government's myopic focus on speeding under the banner of "road safety", while ignoring so many other factors that contribute to our road toll, has a negligible effect and the obvious flaws in "headlining" it just take away from the road safety message. Trying to fix climate change by just crapping on about carbon at the expense of everything else humans do is the same, in my opinion. No-one would argue that barreling down a suburban street at 120km/hr would be stupid, but pinging people doing it on a modern dual carriageway is a joke. By the same token, man-made climate is more than just carbon dioxide. I don't even know why it headlines as much as it does (potentially for some of the big business conspiracy theory reasons people bandy about). Pumping carbon dioxide in the air while deforesting the flora that converts it back into oxygen is something that humans are doing right now, and something that will f**k with the ecosystem. Deforestation by burning those forests and releasing carbon dioxide would just be putting the boot in. Charging a carbon tax on might reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being produced, but if we're still getting rid of so many plants then we're still going to see a net increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere that will end up messing with the ecosystem's balance. But, as another example, so does mass urbanisation. Approximately half the mass of concrete is water, and if you think about how many structures we're putting up (and developing nations are planning on building) that's a lot of water we're taking out of the water cycle. At least if we're drinking it, sticking it in our pools, or washing our cars, it just runs off or evaporates and just rejoins the water cycle at some point. The net effect is zero. But when we use it on large-scale chemical reactions we take that water out of the water cycle. So in the same way yes, we should do more to conserve water, but stopping us from washing our cars doesn't actually do anything as a long-term solution. Especially while we're not putting regulation on how construction companies use up water in a manner that never releases it back into the water cycle. At least with farmers the water is going in to crops and animals that will eventually die and release the water back into the water cycle (either naturally or after we've consumed it and passed it through our bodies). But do volcanoes billow gases all day, every day, for decades like human industry does? And if we were releasing too much water vapour into the atmosphere (which we might be, I haven't looked), scientists would be telling us to reduce that too. What does the "colourless" and "odourless" bits have to do with anything? It just seems like bringing up an irrelevant fact on its physical appearance to distract from its chemical properties. Did you know that, in rainforests, the most beautiful and sweetest smelling flora and fauna are inevitably the poisonous ones? Yes, trees love to feed off CO2. But in sufficient concentrations plants will die from CO2 poisoning. Plants still have a respiration system that requires oxygen as an input, with carbon dioxide as an output. And there's only so much they can convert. Any excess is still going to linger in the environment, and as we ramp up emissions while reducing the amount of flora due to urbanisation and desertification (the former undeniably man-made, the latter arguably) those concentrations are just going to get worse. You're taking the "everyone else is doing the wrong thing, so why can't I?" defence? Really? I think this demotivator is all the response needed: In the end it depends on if you want to be a leader, or a follower. Someone always has to be the first to do something, and if innovation in other sectors is any indication I suppose that will never be Australia. As a nation we always seem to be afraid to actually do things on our own. As for the concentrations, a Blood Alcohol Concentration level of 0.05 (i.e. our legal limit for driving) means that every litre of blood contains 0.00005% ethanol. Going to 0.00016% means being 3 times the legal limit, which would have the average person pretty smashed. Just because your percentage looks small in absolute terms doesn't mean it doesn't have noticable effects. And, to extrapolate that analogy further, having an occasional bender where you hit a >.16 BAC isn't going to reduce your life (length or quality of) by a noticable margin. But if you're doing it all day every day, medical research says that life expectancy and quality is going to be far lower. But hey, I'm not a medical practitioner. Ethanol is a flavourless and colourless liquid that's naturally occurring, which people around the world regularly enjoy. I'm assuming we can expect people who've "done their own research" while not being qualified in the field will be telling us that continuous and ever-increasing consumption of C2H5OH is going to have no ill effect on the ecosystem that is our bodies...

"Real" experts like Alan Jones? A man with no formal qualification in any sciences, and whose last public attempt to criticise the NBN technology as obsolete used evidence that actually endorses fixed-line networking? If this man's "wealth of experience compliments the basic science that is the Galileo Movement's core" then these people would know as much about basic science as the people criticising Galileo's assertions that the world is round since basic observation shows a flat surface. I found this op ed an interesting rebuttal to Jones and his Movement.

Cheaper, more compact, less cabin intrusion, lower drivetrain loss. In a passenger car where chassis balance and steering feel aren't prioritised, they're not bad things. Still, I'm surpised BMW is cheapening its brand this way by going bum dragging. Then again, they were always the NA car company that started building pretty good turbo cars. And the New Mini actually steers pretty damned well.