speedy

You are welcome. There will probably be another post on this guide at the weekend along the lines of 'How to try and stop your Carbotech pads from squeeling loudly enough to wake the dead'..

More than 12 months ago I used to see a Red one and a White one between Farnham and Odiham in the mornings. These days I see another orange one in Ash (it's got the black stripes on it), heading towards Aldershot every morning.

Pros : They stop the car very quickly and they have loads of initial bite. No problems when they are cold. For braking purposes they score a 10/10. Cons : They squeal like a pig (might be fixable, need some time in the daylight to have another look at them). From previous experience they should generate a bit more dust than OEM, but I haven't really noticed. Heel & Toeing now requires a bit more finesse because there is so much more braking power available.

IIRC there is an impass between Subaru and Toyota on the engineering side about the Cabrio. Toyota have said that it can be done, Subaru say that it can't. There is significant strength in the roof, and the chassis isn't designed to work as a Cabrio. I guess it would be a totally different body-in-white, which would make it much more complex. Plus, you know, people don't seem to be buying them anyway for whatever reason. Why Toyota haven't got one in BTCC or some kind of motorsport I don't know.

Er, nope. Toyota. You'll have to take the brake disc off to see it though.

Replacement front pads for comparison

Old pads which were removed - front on top, rear below. They were done.

Rear brakes showing the internal handbrake mechanism :

I used to run them on my old mk1 mr2 SC (aka the 'supernail'). They were great from cold, and resisted the heat really very well. I remember them being quite hard on the discs though. We'll see how they go. From bedding them in yesterday, I can confirm that they stop the car. Quickly I have no idea when we'll next be on track at the moment. All of the wet weather down here has left us with some house problems which need sorting first.

Carbotech XP8s, front and rear, standard discs. (£170+vat for the fronts, £140+vat for the rears), although they gave me some kind of discount so it was slightly cheaper.

Love the tunes and the video faith

Yeah, I know i'm missing the point of owning a sports car vs something more frugal. It's more the question of doing 20k a year in it. TBH, £1000 spread over 20,000 is what, like 5p a mile or something extra.

Ok, so the 95 was just a price (because i'm mostly driving a Fiesta at the moment, and that is what it drinks). Using 135 instead of 129 makes it £4.8k vs £3.6k. It's still ~£1k. There is of course a difference between auto and manual, so it's not quite an apples for apples comparison because of the higher gearing. Toyota themselves say that the auto is ~10% better for fuel economy than the manual (39.8mpg vs 36.2mpg).

Also, unrelated to the numbers - what happened? Did you buy the house in the end?

I know i'm kind of missing the point here, but some back-of-the-envelope calculations for doing 20k in a modified GT86 vs standard GT86. So, say 20k @ 25.5mpg is 784 gallons of fuel. Google reckons that is 3564 litres. At 129p per litre (lets say standard 95ron fuel from my local tescos) that works out to ~£4597. 20k @ 34mpg (which is what I did at the weekend with a reasonably quick run to Manchester and back) - thats 588 gallons of fuel or 2673 litres. At the same 129p/l price, that works out to ~£3448, so roughly about £1000 cheaper to run the standard car over 20k. I'm guessing, but does the ECUTek require fuel > 95ron? If so, that does bump the numbers up higher.

Would be interesting. I remember reading something similar many years ago with McRae and a Touring car driver of the time (John Cleland perhaps?) - anyway, point was that although McRae could get to a really decent lap time quickly, he was much much harder on the tyres than the Touring car driver.

Yeah, had a good read through this yesterday to see what they had done to the cars to make them more trackable. Interesting that the engine is standard mechanically, but they have altered the sump and remapped the ECU with EcuTek. Much love for those brakes as well Hope they have another feature of them being used in anger.

Happy New year all, you never know, I might even turn up to a meet in 2014

Yeah, Lauren has hit the nail on the heat. The old circuit had corners which used to flow into each other. Screw one up and you'd be in trouble for the next. The new circuit is great fun, but it just doesn't have anything which is a patch on the old School / Abbotts corners. More YouTube of the old layout :

Would be several times cheaper just to go to the ring

If Santa holds up his end of the bargain, then i'll join you

http://www.pistonheads.com/news/default.asp?storyId=29081 Yes please

BLASPHEMY!!!!!!! (yeah, fair enough)