Any car enthusiasts here?

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They are usually WIDER. Get your terms straight!

talking suspension, here you go

^^^that thing should make short work of the busted pavement in my little town.

another thing i don't like about today's cars is the itty bitty windows they put in 'em, and in too many of 'em the windshield's optical path in particular cuts off the view of traffic lights for tall drivers. and the rear visibility is so bad now that back-up rear-view cameras had to be made mandatory. modern form is getting in the way of function. my car is old but at least it has near-360 outward visibility, no backup camera required.

^^You're right about those tiny windows.

I installed new headlamps on my 1996 four-banger Toyota just last Tuesday as the originals were faded to the point that the lights barely worked. I've had a few too many close calls with it (involving deer, road hazards, trucks, ditches, fences, etc.) to bother with repairing the old lamps so I bought the pack of lamp housings for the front, pulled the grill out and knocked out all the lights, and swapped them.

Today, I had a road trip, so I had to drive at night. I was going down a fairly rough highway (you'd hate the pavement) at about 55 to 60 miles an hour. Hey, it's an automatic Deluxe model Corolla. It wasn't meant to go fast. Driving at 70 in it is possible but absolutely nerve-wracking if the road is narrow (it bounces a lot.)

A deer was grazing by the road and nearly stepped out in front. I spotted it and was able to slow down and blow the horn causing it to jump back into the woods, out of harm's way. Turning on high beam lights I was able to see a herd of bigger deer a little further down so I went past them.

Later, I spotted a cardboard box in the road and was able to miss it. With the old lights it would've gone under the car and possibly damaged the fuel tank--a 7th-gen Corolla has a fuel tank very easily damaged if you drive over something.

Then I was going up a steep hill, crossing the top of a bridge at about 45 to 50 mph, when I spotted (in full detail) a black cat jumping out of the side of the road and trotting across right into the path of the machine. I love cats. So I locked the brakes up, causing the car to skid--laid on the horn--and Kitty missed the auto by just inches as the Corolla has terrible brakes and does not stop quickly, but it sure enough slowed it down. Had I not seen kitty when I did and gotten onto the brake pedal I am sure the car would have run right over him.

So installing a set of headlamps managed to save a cute kitty cat, a $300 gasoline tank, a deer, an iconic 1990s car, and possibly my life.

Got any mods planned for your vehicles?

^^^great move if i had the duckie$ i'd dynamat [NOT dynamite ] my car to quiet down the raucous din in the interior. i'd also fix the busted reflector on my right front bumper. pay a mechanical guy [NOT a mechanic unless he also happens to be one] to install a seat height adjuster for the driver's and passenger's front seats and install lumbar adjustments. possibly install a semi-truck's ride-cushioned seats. recharge the a/c. install an MP3 player with USB power. install the drive train from a 2006 honda CRV [40 more ponies and a fifth gear + lockup and better gas mileage to boot].

I really like F-1 races, Moto GP, and Tuff Truck (check this one out at 18:55 is the most hilarious):

i like the brutal spectacle of tractor pulls, there is something "old-roman" about it.

Tractor pulls are fun, but I like watching the ones where they use ancient heavy tractors and just let torque do the work.

This one was a 1917 Holt 120. There are some old nineteenth-century steam traction engines doing a bit of pulling but I figured this is at least an internal-combustion thread. I love early machinery--

Sounds like an awesome custom car if you could pull that off. I think an A/C recharge could be done at home & installing some sort of aftermarket audio is possible. Reflectors could come from a scrap yard.

Dynamat is great--I know what it is; it's peace and quiet on a roll. I ought to do the old Corolla with something like that but I have gotten to rather enjoy the noise it makes. It's not super loud anyway.

A Honda CRV drivetrain could be a neat swap into your car--is your car a smaller, lighter one? It might be fun to see the bigger motor in a smaller car. I can't swap the Corolla without major modification and the engine only has 241K on the meter so no big deal. But horsepower is fun--I love it when people let me drive a V6 or V8 car.

I used to have a V6 Audi. The engine had a short stroke, so it did not have much torque (So it was easy to stall), but it would rev its socks off! Wow could it go!

Manual or automatic? Sounds like a fun little car.
In America the Audi is stereotyped as the chosen vehicle of the entitled rich cad, right next to the BMW. I'm glad to hear that you had a lot of fun with yours and are enjoying it for the awesome little car it is.

It was a 1993 Audi 80 2.6 E front wheel drive petrol V6 with a manual 5 speed gearbox and it had sports suspension with the Audi A4 floorpan (The last few Audi 80's had the A4 floorpan so had immaculate handling. Later curved nosed Audi A4's handling was compromized as they changed it to be softer and it didn't match the floorpans design).

It would take 90 degree corners at 70 mph without even drifting an inch. It was soo good and the revs? Well. Topspeed was limited to 155mph. I knew the rev limiter came in at 35mph in 1st and somewhere about 68 to 69mph in second. (A fraction under 70). I wanted to know what third gear would be like, so very early one morning on my way to work, I chose an uphill stretch of straight road with no houses other then about two farm tracks...The gradient was about 1 in 6 or a tad steeper in short places. I chose the hill becase even though the car could stop in a very short space, going uphill will allow me to stop even quicker if anything went wrong... (I stopped from 60mph in about the length of a bus once during emergency braking and that was part on gravel)
At the curve at the bottom of the hill I was doing the then legal speed of 60mph. I put my foot down while in third gear... The car quickly acdelerated and a few seconds later I hit just over 100mph and the rev limiter still hadn't come in. I put on the brakes and went back down to 60mph before I came to the houses further on. I would say it dis this 60 to 100 and back to 60 in about the length of six UK football pitches?

I part excanged the car because I had the sense that the Audi dealer was taking advantage. I had a brand new disc fitted which was part of the hub. This needed to be changed because one of the wheelbolt threads had given up. This cost me close to £200 for the part, let alone the labour. Six months later, I was told all four disc needed changing as all four of them were worn out. I questioned it but apparently the new one had worn out too. That was £800 in just parts to get it through its next MOT.
I part exchanged it with full service history from myself and the last owner, and had another secondhand car. The secondhand car dealer took the car through the MOT before selling it to the next owner and it passed first time and the discs were said to be ok.
But to be honest, the car was so immaculate in its handling, it was boring to drive. There was no challenge. You headed for the next bend way too fast and just turned and you were round it with no fuss. I once had a BMW 3 series try to follow me and he had to break as no way could he make the bends in his little car. I believe it was an M3 as it had plenty of go on the straights.. Just the corners it had to slow down for. I had front wheel drive so I was foot down and powrring through the corners!

so what would be the HP/torque figures for that engine?

isn't an audi basically a fancy vw?

AUDI R8 is the baddest Audi

i still remember my dad's '75 mercedes 300D, that thing was a bank vault on wheels, as tight as a tick, drive over raised railroad tracks at speed and it would float over 'em, you could barely even tell there were raised railroad tracks there. why can't amuuuricans make anything that solid?