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I thought it was about time I did an intro thread on here. First a bit about myself I guess. My name is Ben and I'm from Melbourne. I've had a few highly modified cars before and that's where my forum name comes from.
1NSANE was the plate sitting on my FG XR6 turbo. In it's final guise it had 455rwkw on E85 but I started getting really paranoid about police presence whenever I took it out of the driveway. That was problematic when it was my daily driver so I made the hard decision to sell it. I regret that decision as it was a wild ride. 1NSANE in it's first iteration can be seen below.
Once I got rid of that I was thinking what different daily I can buy. I thought I might go with a bit of euro prestige so I was looking at Audi A4's with the 3.2 engine and quattro, BMW 335's, and a few other prestige cars. Someone suggested the BMW X5 4.8is to me which I scoffed at until I read up on them. This was the precursor to the X5M so I decided to take a closer look. Long story short I ended up buying one because I figured it was like a fast wagon and I like wagons.
I sold it roughly 6 months later as it was killing my passion for cars. I didn't want to do anything to it, it couldn't decide if it wanted to be a sportscar or a cruiser, the transmission and the air strut broke during my short tenure and cost the BMW dealership $12000 to fix and led to me not trusting it anymore, plus I just wasn't bonding with it. On it's plus side is that it had the most glorious exhaust note of anything this side of a 63 AMG Mercedes. Real muscle car note.
Ok so the search was on again. This time I decided to get a weekend car and a DD. My choice of weekend car ended up being the venerable Mazda MX5. With it's open top motoring, rear wheel drive chassis and just general awesomeness it was an easy choice. Combined with the fact that I had one before and knew them inside out helped and it was cheap. Enter MEANMX.
I bought it lightly modified and then have modified it a lot lol. It will soon be turbocharged as well to add to the fun.
Weekend car done it was onto the DD. I wanted something practical but still fun so I started looking at a variety of different cars. I sort of settled on a Pirelli Golf GTI but while I was at a dealership looking at one the Octavia VRS caught my eye. Being a general sort of car guy I knew about them but not a huge amount so I started researching them and I liked what I saw. Took a 12 model out for a spin and I was impressed but I didn't want DSG as I've had enough of autos for the time being. Started looking around the for sales but manuals are hard to come by. I definitely wanted manual, wagon and preferably race blue. My options were 1 car for sale. It was an 09 with 93,000k's and $26,000 the owner claimed it was immaculate. My only other option was to get a brand new but my budget got eroded with the MX5. So I ummed and ahhed and looked at different cars then I was back on car sales plugging in my search criteria again. Again only this one car came up but it was now at $23,500. Thought it was worth checking out so I took my mate with me to have a look. It wasn't as immaculate as the owner was claiming. It was still a great car but not quite worth the asking price. I offered him 21k for it and then stuck to my guns. Lots of sms'ing back and forth and alot later that day he accepted the offer. This is what bought.
I love it. Smooth, powerful, practical, roomy, luxurious, but also high. Hmmmm need to fix that. I looked at the common coilover kits normally bought for these cars and didn't really like the fact that ride height couldn't be adjusted without altering your preload via the spring. I ended up finding out that BC makes a coilover for the Mk5 gti which should fit. I couldn't find much information about it except that on the UK BC site they list the skoda as using the same suspension. Bit the bullet and ordered them and put them in. They fit perfect but I feel that the BC's are a little harsh for DD duties so I might look at changing the springs to ones with a softer rate. Also the front is at the limit of it's adjustment without using the spring perch to lower it more. I'm ecstatic with the height thought and it looks a million bucks to me. I also got the windows tinted which is a necessity on my cars. This is how it is now. Although it is a bit lower now that it has settled.
I don't know if the 1NSANE plates will ever end up on this car but I'm going to try. I have the front splitter from the group buy coming. I'm also planning on painting the wheels an anthracite colour, painting the roof rack black, getting some spacers and then covering the bonnet and roof in gloss black vinyl. I'm spending too much time and money on the MX5 at the moment but the VRS will have it's day in the not too distant future
Sorry for the long post but I'm hoping when I pull my finger out this will be my build thread as well. Hope to meet some of you soon.
1NSANE was the plate sitting on my FG XR6 turbo. In it's final guise it had 455rwkw on E85 but I started getting really paranoid about police presence whenever I took it out of the driveway. That was problematic when it was my daily driver so I made the hard decision to sell it. I regret that decision as it was a wild ride. 1NSANE in it's first iteration can be seen below.
Once I got rid of that I was thinking what different daily I can buy. I thought I might go with a bit of euro prestige so I was looking at Audi A4's with the 3.2 engine and quattro, BMW 335's, and a few other prestige cars. Someone suggested the BMW X5 4.8is to me which I scoffed at until I read up on them. This was the precursor to the X5M so I decided to take a closer look. Long story short I ended up buying one because I figured it was like a fast wagon and I like wagons.
I sold it roughly 6 months later as it was killing my passion for cars. I didn't want to do anything to it, it couldn't decide if it wanted to be a sportscar or a cruiser, the transmission and the air strut broke during my short tenure and cost the BMW dealership $12000 to fix and led to me not trusting it anymore, plus I just wasn't bonding with it. On it's plus side is that it had the most glorious exhaust note of anything this side of a 63 AMG Mercedes. Real muscle car note.
Ok so the search was on again. This time I decided to get a weekend car and a DD. My choice of weekend car ended up being the venerable Mazda MX5. With it's open top motoring, rear wheel drive chassis and just general awesomeness it was an easy choice. Combined with the fact that I had one before and knew them inside out helped and it was cheap. Enter MEANMX.
I bought it lightly modified and then have modified it a lot lol. It will soon be turbocharged as well to add to the fun.
Weekend car done it was onto the DD. I wanted something practical but still fun so I started looking at a variety of different cars. I sort of settled on a Pirelli Golf GTI but while I was at a dealership looking at one the Octavia VRS caught my eye. Being a general sort of car guy I knew about them but not a huge amount so I started researching them and I liked what I saw. Took a 12 model out for a spin and I was impressed but I didn't want DSG as I've had enough of autos for the time being. Started looking around the for sales but manuals are hard to come by. I definitely wanted manual, wagon and preferably race blue. My options were 1 car for sale. It was an 09 with 93,000k's and $26,000 the owner claimed it was immaculate. My only other option was to get a brand new but my budget got eroded with the MX5. So I ummed and ahhed and looked at different cars then I was back on car sales plugging in my search criteria again. Again only this one car came up but it was now at $23,500. Thought it was worth checking out so I took my mate with me to have a look. It wasn't as immaculate as the owner was claiming. It was still a great car but not quite worth the asking price. I offered him 21k for it and then stuck to my guns. Lots of sms'ing back and forth and alot later that day he accepted the offer. This is what bought.
I love it. Smooth, powerful, practical, roomy, luxurious, but also high. Hmmmm need to fix that. I looked at the common coilover kits normally bought for these cars and didn't really like the fact that ride height couldn't be adjusted without altering your preload via the spring. I ended up finding out that BC makes a coilover for the Mk5 gti which should fit. I couldn't find much information about it except that on the UK BC site they list the skoda as using the same suspension. Bit the bullet and ordered them and put them in. They fit perfect but I feel that the BC's are a little harsh for DD duties so I might look at changing the springs to ones with a softer rate. Also the front is at the limit of it's adjustment without using the spring perch to lower it more. I'm ecstatic with the height thought and it looks a million bucks to me. I also got the windows tinted which is a necessity on my cars. This is how it is now. Although it is a bit lower now that it has settled.
I don't know if the 1NSANE plates will ever end up on this car but I'm going to try. I have the front splitter from the group buy coming. I'm also planning on painting the wheels an anthracite colour, painting the roof rack black, getting some spacers and then covering the bonnet and roof in gloss black vinyl. I'm spending too much time and money on the MX5 at the moment but the VRS will have it's day in the not too distant future
Sorry for the long post but I'm hoping when I pull my finger out this will be my build thread as well. Hope to meet some of you soon.
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