TRANSFORMERS

Alright, I give up. The blogging juices just don't flow anymore. Blame it on social media or whatever, but the motivation's really low these days.

But then I lay down one night, got up the next day, and realized that I'm still a geek, always been. So, why not talk about geek stuff? It is my blog, after all.

Keep it right here for the new and improved, I hope, content.

YE GADS!

There are few sounds on this planet as spine-tingling as the sound of the Subaru 2.5 Boxer engine. Though I'm a Mitsubishi guy, and Mitsu's been locked in a Japanese civil war for eons with Subaru, I gotta admit I love the Subie. The new '09 WRX comes with 265HP straight out the box.

The few $$ I've got left in my wallet beg to be Subaru's.

I mean, check this beaut out. With a few tweaks - i.e. soften the front and stiffen the rear to eliminate unholy understeer, throw in a short-shifter and swap in a proper race seat with a 4-point harness - the WRX could be the meanest whip in the streets.


If Subie decides to mass-produce this WRX STi below tho, I promise to live off water and air to cop one. Its apparent mega-horses notwithstanding, look at the size of that hood-scoop. [bonnet-scoop?] It looks mean enough to suck leaves up from the pavement, not to mention squirrels and small humans.

DRIVING 2.0

It was purely by accident that I stumbled across this amazing phenomenon popularly known as load transfer.

I was about to do the usual morning Scandinavian flick around my favorite curve when the idiot in front slowed to like 15MPH for the bend – keeping in mind I usually take it at 50-60MPH. I didn’t wanna risk bumping him so I hit the brake right before I hit the apex and yo, soon as I twisted the steering wheel to take the turn, the rear wheels broke loose and I was more sideways than I’d ever been before! Dude, I was shook that the rear would break loose just from braking and I almost lost it, but I pulled thru fine.

Apparently, during deceleration or acceleration, the weight of the car shifts front to back. Yeah, you already knew this, I know. But I never thought I could use that concept to my advantage, though I was already doing it with The Flick, which is basically shifting the load right and left.

Certain conditions must first apply though:

- You have to be decelerating – by braking or downshifting

- You must be moving fast enough. Too slow and the wheels will keep sticking, too fast and catastrophic understeer, or too much oversteer, will result

- The car has to have sufficient front-end grip.

- Stiffer springs, stickier rubber, sway and strut bars and more pressure in the rear tires will all help

- Don’t be silly. Only do it on public roads if you’re confident in your technique. Or better yet, don’t do it on public roads at all.

Needless to say, I’ve been perfecting the technique every day since. A combo of the Scandinavian flick and Load Transfer will make you Superman – or is that Ironman? [Great movie. Go see it.] – behind the wheel. You’ll make your car do things you never thought it could.

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.