1/30/12

To quote the late great Benny Hill, “Hory Makelor!” I am amazed at the difference that cold air kit made to Fiona's performance. The car feels lighter when I go to accelerate. I never would have believed it could make this much difference. I now believe the video from Seoulful Racing which showed an eighteen horsepower gain with the parts I just installed. Taking a 15% drivetrain loss into consideration, and assuming my car made the same improvement in wheel horsepower, I'm now looking at almost 336 horsepower at the crank! I just went in to the DLR Vehicle Inventory and changed the power to weight ratio using that number. The Chickenhawk still edges out Fiona by one tenth of a pound per horsepower… according to my math and assumptions. So, here’s what went down. I woke up at 0730 h Saturday morning. We had never set a time to meet, but I assumed 0800 h or thereabouts. I texted John and said, “Let me guess, you’re already at the shop and playing with springs.” He replied that he would be there in ten minutes… playing with springs. I got ready as fast as I could and hauled ass down there. I arrived to see he had already moved Lil' Wiggly out of the bay and was ready for me. I rolled Fiona in and we got to work. I asked if the “Disconnect negative battery cable” instruction was as much for resetting the ECU as it was for anything else. My thinking is, a fresh ECU reset otter make the butt-dyno feel a difference even if the CAI does nothing. Turns out, as I said before, there was no need to worry about that! We, mostly John, got the bumper cover off and the stock intake stuff removed. I got to work assembling the Injen stuff while John painted the fog light surrounds. I continued to assemble and install stuff while he disassembled the fog lights and surrounds. Well, as cool as those new surrounds would have been, they weren’t really very well designed as far as installation. I made the executone decision to open up the stock vents. Of course John took that matter into his own hands and did a bang-up job. He’s not happy with them but they look good to me. While I was finishing up the install of the washer bottle and CAI, he tinted the fog lights with the film I had bought for the black Versa before I found the Euro-stylee Angel Eye headlights for it. With the fogs tinted, he reinstalled them and the trimmed stock surrounds. He held it up and asked my opinion. I said it looked awesome but he was being a perfectionist and I don’t think he was ever really happy with it. Psh, it’s my car and I think they look good. I'll tell him to go soak his head if he keeps grinding on it. Anyhoo, we reassembled the bumper, again, John did most of the work, and hooked up the battery. I fired up the engine and the fog lights. Oh yeah! It looks and sounds great. Juan can just see the filter peeking out of the two oval holes John cut in the surround, but it isn’t obtrusive. Since it was still early-ish, and John was so impressed with the yellow film, he decided to do his fog lights as well. I set the ramps and he drove up on them. Then he got to work removing panels and stuff to get to the lights. With the lights out, he removed their surrounds and painted them flat black and tinted the lights. Eventually the paint was dry enough to install everything so he did. It looks good. When we were all done, we closed up and headed to… um, somewhere for lunch. Hang on, I'll think of it in a moment. Um, it was… we didn’t want buffet so the Indian place was vetoed. He’d had Mexican for dinner so that was out. Oh! We went to that Italian place at Hulen and Old Granbury that used to be a Dairy Queen. Calamari and Stromboli, it was quite tasty. From there I went to O’Reilley’s and bought a gallon of washer fluid to replace the stuff we dumped on the ground then went for a hoon. That was when I realized just how much of a difference the CAI made. Damn, that car is fast. I decided two things during that hoon: 1) Fiona needs a short shift kit, and b) people are either discovering FM5 on their own or they are reading this blog to learn about it. I choose to think it is the latter. There were several cars that looked like they were there to hoon “MY” road. Oh well, what are you going to do? Ok, I think I've said enough for today. I've already started tomorrow’s rant, but I'm going to save it for now. As a teaser, it involves another hoon and another epiphany.