Looks much better now, once a new grill is installed and all the mechanical refresh work is done it should be a fun weekend toy

 

Been daily driving the S a lot, fixed the leaks etc and will be doing major items soon. It's a REALLY fun little thing to drive and not give an F about lol! The manual and straight piped V8 is comically fun if not a little childish but I was always too serious so I'm having fun with a car for once

 

A V8 with a manual can be anything but boring

The BIG question is........
Will it burn rubber or at least chirp the tires?

 

Yes, if I feel like testing if I will send the engine into the hood (not joking, it needs mounts BAD) and do a 5000 rpm clutch drop it burns all 4 for a second!

 

Still driving well, looks better with the paint cleaned up now. I am surprised buy how small the tank is and how short ranged it is though, very annoying to only get 250-300 miles out of it.


Small tank.

 

250-300 miles driving like your drive isn’t bad at all.

 

Well this car has a nickname on my group of friends as "the carbon fiber $#!%box" and today it truly earned it. I decided the best activity for a day off is to go to the shop and pull the front end off to do headlights/all lights etc plus put all the trim back exactly how it should be.

Turns out someone has for sure been in here and weren't qualified at all, my crash bar was retained (not attached so I'm not saying held etc) by a pair of 5mm Allen keys just dropped into the frame crash extensions. Over half of every bolt/nut was missing and the whole bumper had ZERO of the main nuts that hold it down below the ends of the headlights/near wheel wells.

Like holy hell you took it apart so wtf were you thinking putting it back like this?!?!? I still don't have the main bolts since I don't just have those laying around as I tend to put those back on Audis I work on.

I'm just stunned the bumper held on during paint correction and at 155!


Flicker flicker my Chinese generic HID....


I'm impressed in a bad way.....


Got everything reconnected properly and working 100% other than the main bolts

 

haha for real 300 miles is about the most i'll get out of my W211 tank of 21 gal, and that's averaging 17-18 mpg over the course of the tank which for that engine at least isn't too bad

on select few occasions i've gotten over 500 miles out of a single LS 400 tank, but that's only after long trips of almost entirely interstate driving... usually i'm at like 22-25 mpg average by the end of a tank, which of course includes the occasional 4th gear pull to 100+

 

Oh dang, well I didn't realize that's normal for cars like this....I'm getting shockingly bad MPG as well but within what the car is supposed to hit/what users see. Averaging 17.1 making it the second worst after the Jeep lol!

I got used to 500+ in the other cars

 

Dang....only $2.93 for 93-octane premium V-power Shell. Regular 87 in my area costs more than that.....between $3.00 and $3.50. Premium can run signifcantly above $4.00.

 

Yeah it's nice here for prices! Gas got stupid cheap for political reasons not too long ago, it makes me kinda sad since I was really looking forward to my diesel.

The station nearest my shop has diesel for cheaper than 87 so I was planning on a tank where I intentionally go for the cheapest I've ever paid for a given distance

Now there is almost no point with how cheap gas is

 

Going to be making a long update post soon with all the repairs the car has needed, so far though it's been very good.

It's also convinced me I love manual cars, it's amazingly fun to manually control everything and just awesome to rev match up and down etc. Going forward I think I'll make an extra effort to have as many sticks as possible for the daily drivers and all the fast cars. R8 quest now has a 6 MT as a required option

 

Those seem to hold value pretty well, from this spring.

 

Very clean car. An even cleaner looking 4.2L. Congrats!

 

I have to stop by and see what @Striker223 is up to.

Any new cars in the works or the shopping list? 🔑

Ps, my wife said she never noticed so many Volkswagens as on the highway today. Now that she knows what they look like she sees lots of them.