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Are we talking about how the brakes actually work, or just the pedal feel? If you're used to driving a car that has no slack in the pedal and that only takes the slightest touch to brake hard, then you get into one with more slack that takes more brake pressure, yeah, you're likely to have an...

If he does its odd his Clio doesn't appear in the entry lists, the TV coverage or the results as having either finished or DNF'd.

Had a good one here a little while back. Two buses belonging to the same company, so they were the same make and colour scheme, were travelling along the same route some distance apart. And they had similar number plates. So you can guess what happened. The computer calculated the average speed...

If you are travelling at a constant speed the satnav will be very very accurate. It will be within plus or minus 1 mph of your true speed. If you are accelerating or decelerating or your speed is varying up and down at all the satnav may be giving you an inaccurate reading because it doesn't...

Look at the alloy around where the wheel is bent. If the alloy is only bent there's a good chance a wheel repair expert can straighten it. But if there are any cracks in the alloy it can't be straightened.

Warmer air = better fuel atomisation = better specific fuel consumption = better economy. Colder air = more oxygen molecules = potentially more power, but you have to run richer to get it.

What a load of rubbish. Yes, nitrogen does have a benefit in extreme usage due to less temperature increase in the tyre carcass. By extreme usage I mean race driving, and loads approaching the limits the tyre can safely carry. But if you are encountering those situations in road use of a Clio...

To get the same track width with an ET45 wheel as you had with an ET37 wheel you need an 8 mm spacer. But on a 6.5" wide wheel a nominally 195 section tyre is actually 6 mm narrower across the bag than it is on a 7" wide wheel. So you can move the wheel a further 3 mm out before it rubs up...

The car would run, but with no load on the compressor side there's the risk you'd spin the turbo too fast and damage it. You could prevent that happening by driving slowly.

Some of us understand. A bigger TB will give "better" throttle response at small openings. But at higher throttle openings its not the TB that restricting the airflow, its other things in the intake tract. So you don't change your peak airflow/power by increasing the size of the TB, you just...

Have to agree. They seemed like a good idea when I bought the car. But I changed my mind one wet day when I was reversing out of a supermarket car space and nearly rammed another car because my foot slipped off the brake pedal.

Its not true. Using too low an octane fuel can cause damage. But the only damage from using fuel with a higher octane than your engine can actually use is to your bank balance.

Wrong. The resistance of the cable is higher the longer it is. So the longer the cable is the higher the combined resistance of the cable plus the starter motor is, and the less current flows. The fatter that cable back from the engine compartment to the battery in the boot is the lower its...

When they rate cars for their fuel consumption (and CO2 emissions) they use the car's power. If its got more power it has to accelerate harder through the standard test and use that power. Because that's how people really drive. If they've got more power, whether that's because its the more...

And, no, you can't tell whether its warm enough from the water termperature. That comes up pretty quickly. It seems to depend on something that takes significantly longer to come up to temperature, like oil. I noticed it the same when I was doing precise fuel consumption tests. I thought the...

Plenty of people are doing that. I looked at the possibility of setting up a business to collect and process used cooking fat, and found that someone was already doing it, and had the market pretty well locked up. It legal here (South Australia), but I understand there were or are legality...

With head work you get improvements from bigger valves, better and/or bigger porting and higher compression. There just isn't enough gain available in any of those areas on this particular engine to make it worth the cost, except perhaps as a last resort to get the last few extra horsepower to...

I believe in science, ie, evidence. And, this might surprise you, but the oil industry has been looking very seriously at precisely what happens when you expose hydrocarbons to strong magnetic fields in an attempt to reduce the amount of energy it takes to pump crude through pipelines. They've...

2"?

Fullrun isn't actually a tyre manufacturer. Its actually quite a small company, with only 50 employees, that imports raw materials for various Chinese tyre manufacturers. It has those manufacturers manufacture tyres with the Fullrun brand and others on them. And it exports those tyres and other...

Head or cams? Cams.

Most magazine tests I've seen quoted 7 or very high 6s for the 172. For the same weight vehicle it takes 27% more power to do a 0-60 time of 6.2 than of 7.0. Ie, if a 172 did it in 7.0, it'd have to have 219 ps to do it in 6.2.

Saw a supercharger installation that used a centrifugal blower. That is, the compressor end of a turbocharger. The blower was mounted about where the standard air cleaner is, so the intake plumbing was pretty simple. What was complicated was the drive to the blower. It appeared to be driven by...

Its pretty hard to gain 10 bhp with just an induction kit. So it should be just as hard to lose that much. There's a real chance that the induction kit had little or no effect, other than increasing noise levels, and something else caused most or all of the 10 bhp lower reading on the dyno run...

Lots of young guys think big diameter wheels must be better, and well, even if they aren't they look more like what a race car has on them. But race cars fit them for one and only one reason. So they can fit bigger diameter brakes inside them. If you're not going to do that you shouldn't go to...

Bigger disk. More RAM. Possibly a faster processor, but not a lot faster. No, laptops are relatively hard to upgrade.

This is the important question. If the cams have done good things to your torque curve and given you a strong mid-range that increase in bhp is reasonable. But if you haven't got much increase in torque that isn't a very impressive increase in bhp for what you've done.

When it comes to a measuring device, accuracy and repeatability are two completely different things. Repeatability means it gives a consistent result. If you keep measuring the same thing it keeps giving the same answer. Accuracy means that answer is the correct result. A measuring device...

Brakes only squeal for one reason. Because the pads aren't correctly installed. People can talk all they want about what makes the squealing occur. That its what happens when two surfaces are rubbed together, like a nail on a blackboard, and one's not smooth. But the fact is your brakes didn't...

We laugh here whenever someone finds an electric supercharger on eBay and asks "do these work". But it seems the serious car manufacturers are working on something pretty much along those lines. http://autospeed.drive.com.au/cms/A_108916/article.html Horsepower for horsepower turbocharged...