Get your own Free Home PageThis is a site devoted to two of my favourite subjects. Performance cars and saving money. I'll get on to the cars just below, but first some administative details.
If anyone wants to email me I will have to include the obligatory hypertext email link
In addition I've also got an online
Bookstore.
This is an online bookstore
In Association with Amazon.com,
and includes reviews by the online Zine The Technocrat's Intellectual Review .
Although I do not actually have a car at the moment, (Time of writing, early 1999. This is now wrong as you will find below.) I am a car enthusiast. However, being a car enthusiast means different things to different people and so I’ll have to take a bit of time to explain what I mean.
There are those people who regard everything made after 1949 to be flimsy modern rubbish. Another group puts the cut off at around the introduction of unleaded petrol (whenever that may be, from country to country). I reject these viewpoints on the basis that they implicitly reject modern technology.
Some of these people don’t reject all modern technology, which is less consistent but more defensible position. The problem here is that they get a 1928 Ford, remake the panels in Fibreglass, put in a 1969 Chevrolet motor, with 1998 Pistons, valves, cams, manifolds and a 1990 copy of a 1978 model Carburettor. They then have custom made interior, 1999 wheels and tyres, 1977 Jaguar Suspension and a 1989 Toyota Gearbox. Which is fine, except they still claim to be driving a 1928 Ford! With this sort of custom made sports car, they naturally get very good performance, but they then use this as an example to claim that old cars are better than modern ones.
I’m an engineer, I work all day with advanced technology, and I see just how good the potential of it is, so I have little time for people who claim that old fashioned ways are better and long for the "good old days".
The next group of people who don’t share my vision of automotive bliss are the drag racers. As far as they are concerned one thing matters, and that is the acceleration from a standing start. I have a lot more sympathy for this group, I’ve been in fast cars and I know how much fun lots of acceleration can be. However I also have driven cars around corners, and sat in traffic, and cruised along a sunny beach, and travelled long distances on a highway. So I am convinced that the best cars will be ones that handle all those situations well too, even if it does mean some compromise on the drag racing ability.
Then we have the people who claim that newness is everything. That a brand new Hyundai is better than a 5 year old Porsche because the Porsche is "old". This is not such a common attitude in Australia because few Australians can afford to buy a new car every three years, because of our socialist system of government and its import restrictions. Nonetheless there are many who claim that a new Hyundai is better than a 10 year old Porsche, which I still reject out of hand.
And finally we have the pub racers. These are people who judge a cars worth, or even worse its speed, on the basis of its technical specifications. That is, on how many buzz words you can use when describing the car to your mates at the pub. Exhibit A here are the people who lover Hondas because of VTEC, and who would choose a VTEC 1999 Integra over a 1999 Corvette, because the Integra has "more technology". There are 3 things wrong with this attitude:
Firstly, such people only notice the big, promoted and easily understood technology. From the above result, the Corvette has 2 valves/cylinder, pushrods and fixed valve timing while the Integra has 4 valves/cylinder, twin overhead cams and variable valve timing, therefore the Integra has "more technology" right? Well no. The Corvette has reverse flow coolant, super low friction bearings, high flow heads, highly advanced metallurgy in the construction, high current platinum spark plugs and a highly advanced computer control system. These are very useful bits of high technology that the Integra doesn’t necessarily share, but because they don’t fit onto a sticker on the side of the car, the average Pub Racer doesn’t even know they exist. In fact Corvette USED to be available with four valves/cylinder and variable valve timing, and the current motor is an improvement on that. The 1999 Corvette motor is also a more modern design than the 1999 Integra’s, going into production only a couple of years ago while the Integra has been around for over a decade.
Then there are Pub racers who count the opposite of advanced technology, and claim that the Corvette is better than the Integra because the motor is bigger. This is perhaps true in the case of the Integra, but very misleading indeed if applied to the Nissan GTR.
Secondly, Pub racers ignore correct units and tend to measure performance in units of valves/cylinder, or cubic inches, or litres/100km. They ignore the matter of km/h. That’s right, there are people who reckon that any car with a big engine and lots of fuel consumption must be faster than a more efficient car, ignoring whatever the actual performance figures happen to be. Another common manifestation of this fallacy is in the issue of kW/litre. A 2 litre engine with 180 kW gives 90 kW/litre. While an 8 litre engine with 300 kW has only 37.5. Hence the 2 litre engine is better.
Who cares? What matters is how fast the car goes and how well it handles. And how much it costs. Where is your kW/litre gauge on the dashboard? How does kW/litre affect your driving? It doesn’t. You could be driving a 1.5 litre car or an 8 litre one it wouldn’t make any difference if they weighed the same and had the same power curves.
Thirdly, the Pub Racers tend to dominate the agenda of many automotive forums. Hence car companies all around the world are forced to install twin overhead cams and 4 valves/cylinder into all sorts of cars that would be far better off with a cheaper pushrod design, because the Pub racers have convinced everyone that without such valve gear a car is obsolete. There are also many magazines that deal with cars, and almost all of them subscribe to one of these "Pub Racer" views. Either a car is worthless without variable valve timing, or it is worthless without a huge capacity engine, or the magazine won’t accept anything that is not at least 8 cylinders, or nothing that has more than 4. One of the few magazines that escapes this is Autospeed
My first car was a 1973 Holden HQ Statesman. 
For those who do not know what this is, it is a
stretched, luxury,
limousine version of the Holden HQ model Kingswood, which was the biggest
selling
car in Australia during the early 1970s. Of course in 1973, luxury meant that
the car
came standard with a heater, radio and armrests on the door.
By today's standards it is pretty poor.
Another problem is that although the Statesman was available with any combination of gearbox and engine up to a 4 speed manual with a 350 Chev V8, mine was equipped with a 3.3 litre six and a 3 speed auto.
It is totally beyond me why anyone would specify that in a new car. I had very little option as I was buying 2nd hand and did not have a lot to choose from among cars of that price range.
Most of my friends also have cars. Without exception their cars are better than mine. This did not use to be the case but as time has gone on, everyone else has upgraded and I have not.
Note: My friends claim that I have always had the worst car but the fact that mine is still working while many of their's are dead speaks for itself.
An example of one of my friends cars is Mykl, who owned a Galant VR4. This is not a picture of his actual car but you get the idea. He managed not to destroy his Galant, but sold it just in time. To see what he replaced it with, you'd best check out his page.
One thing that a cheap and boring car is useful for is as a base for a series of projects. Some of these were quite sensible and some were better described as silly. These can be seen at these links.
Sensible Projects
Silly Projects
Eventually, the Statesman just got too old and I got myself a real job (and a haircut) and so I was able to get rid of it. Here are all the gory details of its demise.
And after getting rid of the Statesman, I set out to find a new and better vehicle.
Firstly I did a theoretical search, such as is recorded here
Then there was the practicable search. The records of this search is a damning indictment of the lies, deceit, and terrifying risk that are involved in anyone seeking to purchase a new car.
Having finally succeeded in the finding a new, bigger, faster, better car, I can now record the joys of owning it.
Naturally, this was not enough. So I had to hot it up too, and eventually wore it out.
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