Just be real with it

A gen­uine car enthu­si­ast is hard to come by nowa­days. Even harder to find is an enthu­si­ast who cares more about per­for­mance than looks. Not all jun­kees are cre­ated equal, and this video by Drive very effec­tively — though unin­ten­tion­ally — high­lights this inequal­ity. There is a sub­cul­ture within the per­for­mance car world which tries to daz­zle their way to more stares and nods by passer­bys. This sub­cul­ture is liken to indi­vid­u­als who wear thick-​framed glasses with no lenses — showy and pointless.

In the video, the swapped blue RS owned by James, is a prime exam­ple of this sub­cul­ture obsessed with gain­ing unwar­ranted respect. His mods (or lack thereof) speak miles about his per­son­al­ity and auto­mo­tive pri­or­i­ties; although one look at his hip­ster style can tell you just as much. Drop­ping in an STi engine into an RS and leav­ing the rest of the pow­er­train untouched is lazy and neglect­ful, you are ask­ing the com­po­nents to han­dle nearly twice as much power as they were designed for. That is only the begin­ning of what’s head shak­ingly wrong with his mods. Though he has a nice set of coilovers, they are strictly for a ‘stanced’ look; they clearly serve no other pur­pose since they are set so low and soft, the fend­ers rub even on slow cor­ners. When Matt Farah puts the car through its paces, the facade crum­bles as it strug­gles through the canyon road.

The gray RS illus­trates what hap­pens when you mod­ify a car prop­erly. The dif­fer­ence in per­for­mance between the two rivals is night and day, with the setup in the gray RS allow­ing for a proper mashing.

This video shows that entrance into the tuner scene doesn’t require zero wheel gap, exces­sive cam­ber, and car­bon fiber body parts; it requires you to check your need for atten­tion at the door and focus on the jour­ney to learn­ing more about your car and max­i­miz­ing its performance.

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