ADVANCED DRIVING TECHNIQUES

If it’s not smooth, it’s not pro.

That’s the first driving commandment, so to speak. I see all these punks on the freeway constantly redlining it then braking hard all the time, probably trying to impress everyone else at how much acceleration they’ve got, not knowing they’re exponentially stressing their engines, suspensions and brakes. Much like how good fighters never go out there looking for a fight, a good driver should be secure in his/her driving. Every maneuver should be smooth and premeditated, with the exception of those rare instances when the unexpected happens. And trust me, it will.

Like, I was running late for work yesterday morning. As usual the morning commuters were aggravatingly sluggish so I whipped around a bunch of them, trying to catch the green light to the 95. I was tearing down towards the intersection when the light turned amber so I floored it and, anticipating the 90-degree turn, heel-and-toed it down to third gear. I knew the light would’ve turned red by the time I crossed the intersection but I was still going for it, and almost did till I saw one of FCPD’s finest right there by the intersection.

Now, you know FCPD and yours truly don’t exactly see eye-to-eye, so I knew that right there was a ticket waiting for me. So I did the next best thing – I braked. Hard. The wheels locked and there was tire smoke everywhere. Instinctively I let up on the pedal, felt the wheels regain traction and pumped the pedal to a neck-snapping halt, all in what must’ve been 2 seconds at the most. Thank God for small mercies coz if it wasn’t for those slotted rotors, I would’ve found myself smack in the middle of the intersection and into one heck of a situation.

I was just lucky that time, and 5-0 just glared at me as he rolled by.

I only shared that story to get the point across that every good driver knows what his/her car is capable of and, more importantly, what it’s not capable of. Put your car to the test. Learn how fast it can go, how hard it can corner, how quickly it can stop, and all its little quirks. Familiarize yourself with it, be comfortable in it. Cut the music off from time to time and listen to it.

Learn and practice advanced driving techniques – they could save your life. For instance, abandon that old notion that you should hold the wheel with the ten-to-two grip. As the cars have evolved, so should your driving. Adopt the quarter-to-three grip, which is now proven to be the better one. Practice such techniques as:

- rev matching
- heel & toe
- counter-steering [if you ride a bike]
- understeer/oversteer corrective maneuvers
- slow in, fast out cornering

These and many more techniques separate the tots from the adults. Now, get out there and drive!

SLO-Z

This is an update on Project Slo-Z, as I like to call it. [Aptly named becoz the OZ is pretty slow.]

There’s no such thing as enough. The more I've got the more I want, it seems. More, as it turned out, isn’t such a bad thing.

My beloved Kenwood fizzled out on me. Luckily it didn’t just quit; it gave me subtle hints here and there that the end was nigh. At first the CDs needed some coaxing to eject. Then they needed serious coaxing to eject, and I knew our relationship was over when, on loading a CD, the display would read “Mechanical Error” and the CD would slide back out.

A day later found me online hunting for a worthy replacement. I’d almost given up and got just any old player when I stumbled across this feature-rich Pioneer at Circuit City.

This monster is off the chain, ladies and gentlemen. Not only does it have a built-in equalizer/sound processor, but it lets you equalize the pre-amps separately and that right there makes all the difference in the world. That way you can take all the bass out from the cabin speakers if you wish and let the bump come solely from the trunk just like I like it – highs high and lows low.

Inspection was due this month and my all-season Yokohamas were begging to be replaced and they squealed every time at my ministrations every time I pushed them, so I did some digging on some high performance tires and settled on some reasonably aggressive Kumho Ecstas. Great tires – stiff sidewalls, low road noise & a great tread design that minimizes hydroplaning, which is my nemesis. They’re 20mm wider than stock and so improve the Slo-Z’s stance.



Tune-ups, when it comes to vehicles, are as inevitable as rain over the weekends, and recently it was the OZ’s turn. NGK Iridium spark plugs are arguably the best so yours truly settled for those. Amazingly, they only cost a couple of bucks each which is great value considering I probably won’t have to worry about them for the next 75,000 or so miles of ordinary driving. [If my driving can be described as such!]


I had the sticker below on my first good car and decided to put it back on for effect, just to see if it would have the same effect on people. It still does. Takes a quick minute for them to figure out what it might mean tho.


Like I’d previously said, I’m done messing with the car, as in trying to make it go faster. I’d be a fool to anyway, since I can only squeeze so much performance out of it unless I laid out some mucho dinero which I don't have right now.

Well, there you have it. Keep it right here for Advanced Driving Techniques, next.

>All photos are property of whoever took them, except that last one. Don't jock my style, b*tches!<

FINE LINE

There is a fine line between guts and stupidity. Pick your battles folks, pick your battles. For those of us with a right foot that’s made of lead, please remember this:

I saw it on the news but my boy Steve-O saw it live, so I’ll tell you like he saw it. Better to trust an eye-witness, is it not?

I only work half the day Friday, every Friday. [Don’t ask why, just listen] Steve-O was headed home this past Friday and had just merged onto the highway when he heard a chorus of rapidly approaching sirens. Now, he’s practically half black and he definitely inherited the f*ck the police gene so his heart jumped to his mouth for an instant. One glance at the rearview assured him that he wasn’t the object of all this ‘unlove’ from FCPD. The boys-in-blue’s attention was focused on a different vehicle – a Lincoln Navigator. Apparently, this dude had been stopped by the boys in blue in a routine traffic stop.

Y’all know there’s no such thing as a ‘routine traffic stop,’ right? That’s lingo for ‘we’ve been watching his/her ass for some time and we have enough evidence to bring him/her in.’

This perp had some ‘snow,’ as Young Jeezy calls it, in the Navigator that was a little more than for personal use, so he panicked and fled. This is why I say the cops had planned the routine traffic stop – he only drove 15 miles on i95 and already had spike strips waiting for him. Now, for all y’all DC Metro area people, y’all know i95/495 is in a state of perpetual congestion. There is no way, lights glaring, siren screaming or not, that an FCPD cop who ‘happened’ to be in the neighborhood could ‘happen’ to have spikes in his car and deploy them in a matter of minutes… unless he was waiting for the eventuality.

In any case, according to Steve-O of course, this Navigator was roaring down i95, partly in the fast lane and partly in the left shoulder. They had already popped his tires coz he was riding on bare rims and there were sparks everywhere, visible even in broad daylight. On his ass were 5 or 6 FCPDs hot on his tail, close but respectful enough to give him the space of a few car-lengths; probably to lessen the possibility of a potentially disastrous high-speed pile-up.

As if that wasn’t enough, there was an FCPD chopper hovering over the melee, low enough to startle but high enough to clear the treetops & lampposts.

See anything wrong with this picture? Yeah? I’ll tell you anyway.

How’re you gonna run from 5 or 6 cops while in an SUV with busted tires?! Not to mention the chopper hovering overhead?! C'mon man! For one, a Nav with good tires on it tops out at about 110MPH, and by then it’s damn near uncontrollable. The average police cruiser can do 135MPH with ease. It was just a matter of time before the Nav died out and his ass got arrested, knowwhati’msayin’? Just pull over instead of racking up more charges like reckless endangerment or resisting arrest, damnit!

Shoot, the only time I’d ever contemplate running away from FCPD is if I were in my Nissan 350Z without a rev limiter or speed governor and rolling on runflats. *Dream* Them cruisers are fast as $hit tho, believe you me. I've been caught doing 100 and that doggone cruiser caught up like I was parked in the middle of the highway! Unless you’re in a car that can do 150MPH+ and are at least semi-pro, please pull over. It’s not worth it.

Needless to say, homeboy crashed and was arrested a few miles up the road.

RC Cars

RC [Radio Controlled] Car Racing is a growing trend here in the U.S. Before you dismiss it as a waste of time, it is a highly technical sport. Like any other racing, there is a lot of physics that goes into these amazing RC cars.

They come in many different sizes like 1/10 scale, 1/12, 1/18, 1/24 and so on. They can also be electric or gas-powered.

The electric models are cheaper but are much slower compared to the gas-powered models which can hit an excess of 60MPH. Yes, 60MPH! We're talking about speeds so fast you almost need to be in a chopper to keep up if you're trying to race it in a straight line! There have been incidences where the cars go so far so fast the FM transmitters [the controllers] go out of range and the cars just keep on going till they crash or run out of steam! Newer transmitters automatically cut the RC car's engine off right before the cars get out of range. That's why most, if not all, serious RC racers race in circuit tracks coz it's easier to see the cars and they never have to worry about them getting out of range.

You still think these are still man-toys? Not by a long shot. These cars have transmissions, [usually 2-speed] are all-wheel-drive, have functional suspensions, upgradeable parts like intakes and exhausts, have differentials, struts, chassis, fibreglass parts & bodies, tires, [chosen depending on the type of race] upgradeable engines..... and a lot of other parts that are in real everyday vehicles. There's even big money in the sport too these days.

Check out This Link about some RC cars being put through the motions. It's fascinating.

MY WHIP

I love cars. I always have & probably always will. There's something about them that brings me a peace that I can't find anyplace else.

Most of us, though, can't afford to drive the car they've always wanted or can't justify spending mega-dollars on a car. There are, however, a few subtle, and relatively inexpensive, things you can do to make your driving experience a lot better. I've probably spent more on cars than the average person but I could've saved myself a whole lot of money if I knew then what I know now about cars, which still isn't a whole lot but it's enough to get by.

I've owned quite a number of cars, though never more than one at any one time. The current one is the only one I've really messed with considerably coz the others simply couldn't take the punishment of my daily driving. Not that I abuse cars but I push them pretty hard.

Here's my car's spec sheet:
- 2003 Mitsubishi Lancer OZ Rally
- 2.0 Liter SOHC inline 4
- 120 hp @ 5500 rpm
- 130 lb-ft of torque @ 4250 rpm
- Front wheel drive

As you can see there isn't much going on over here, unlike its cousin the almighty Evo. I got the car brand-spanking-new because, for one, I had to have a car with a manual transmission. I liked its styling and the fact that you don't have to rev it to 6,000 rpm to get it going like the Honda Civic.

The first thing I did to it was yank out the OEM CD player and replace it with my trusty Kenwood MP3 XM-ready remote-controlled head unit. I did that the very next day after I bought it.



Next came the amplifier & subwoofers. I'm running a 600 Watt 2-channel Kenwood amp, thanks to Mose, connected to two Alpine type E woofers. One woofer is 10" and the other is 12" but both have identical power ratings. I did this for optimal frequency response coz the 10" handles high bass better and the 12" handles low bass better.




Next came the stainless steel high-flow catback. Not only does it free up a few horses but it sounds great too. In quick succession came the AEM cold air/short RAM intake. This freed up even more horses and gave the engine that 'bark'. Love it.



The stock shifter is OK but aftermarket parts are, for the most part, better. So I yanked the factory one out and put in this beautiful B&M short-throw shifter.



Something was out of sync while shifting but I figured it out and added these sport pedals.



The OEM headlight bulbs are OK but I needed more intensity so I went with 100W Xenon HID bulbs that are bright as $hit. They're not blue like every Tom, Dick & Harry's though; they're green-white. Nice. Hard to see during the day coz the color temp. is close to that of sunlight. [That's what they say anyway. Who knows]



I forgot - one of the first things I did was change the wheels from the 15"x6" factory ones to 18"x8" gunmetals.



They looked great but were too heavy and had considerable wheel-rub so I reverted back to the original wheels which are much lighter and have no wheel-rub. Performance first, right?

The car already came with nice gauges and interior and even had a functional [I hope] spoiler so I left those alone.



By now the whip was upwards of 135hp thanks to switching to higher-octane gas and using synthetic oil in addition to the other mods so I decided to invest in a brake kit. Not that I had that much power yet but hey, it never hurts to stop faster. I got some slotted rotors and high-performance brake pads. I chose the slotted over the cross-drilled rotors just so I don't have to worry about the structural integrity of the rotors coz drilled rotors are notorious for cracking. The difference in braking was phenomenal.



I'm rolling on all-season Yokohamas. They're OK but I'll soon get high-performance wet/dry ones.

The single greatest upgrade I did though was getting The Eibach Pro-Kit progressive lowering springs. They drastically improve handling and aerodynamics coz the car sits 1.5" lower. They're also compatible with stock shocks, though they work better with an Eibach damping kit. [I don't have that installed, though]



More enhancements, should I decide to install them, would be:

- A hi-flo catalytic converter
- performance headers
- high performance spark plugs and wires
- Stage one turbo kit....

The list is endless. I don't think I'll put anything else in it though coz I can only do so much with this car. If I ever get that Nissan 350Z maybe I can go all out but right now I have a nice, inexpensive, cheap to maintain ride that's fun and has decent punch.



Comments are always welcome.

INTRO

Hey. It's >d® again over here trying something new.

This blog right here is dedicated to all my people out there who love technology, cars & beautiful things in life in general. Not that I'm that tech-savvy - no. Just wanna share the little I know with y'all, hoping that you'll share with me what you know too.

Alright, here goes!