Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2017 i Fast Car

NICHE FORGED SERIES, From £POA Having just added yet more sweet designs to their 45 (yes FORTY FIVE) strong Forged Series, it’s become downright impossible not to find a set of Niche hoops perfect for your pride and joy. To be fair, there are enough options from the American wheel giant to make your noodle explode in spectacular style. We look at this stuff for a living and we’re having enough trouble getting our heads around it… and we’re only actually talking about their forged wheels here! Niche manufacture literally hundreds of other Sport Series, Racing Series, Competition Series and Track Series wheel too. So, if you’re the sort of bloke who has trouble choosing between the Big Mac and McChicken Sandwich (or both – Jules), you simply don’t stand…

Rocker IROK+ BMXs, from £139 These bat-shit bonkers BMXs may be mere pint-sized versions of the 20-inch pro BMX bikes. But, with their hardcore sport tyres and big bars, they’ve been designed specifically to take serious amounts of adult-sized abuse both on the street and in the skate park. Clown bikes they ain’t! Kicking off one of the latest crazes for stunters in the US and UK (just search Rocker BMX on Youtube), these entry-level IROK bikes are available for everyone aged 4-40 and offer by far the best compromise of performance, quality and affordability for anyone starting out in the miniBMX sport. There’s currently 20 entry-level IROK bikes to choose from including plenty of mental colour schemes and quite a few limited editions. This month we’ll mostly be rocking…

“In the tidied and smooth engine bay, resides the greatest inline-six engine ever built” Let’s not beat around the bush here, the idea of running a Rocket Bunny kit or the likes is starting to get a little bit stale. There was a time, which feels like an eternity ago, when we would have first spied these amazing wide arched cars from Japan on the internet and completely lost our collective shit. Their almost crude riveted-on panels were the perfect rebellion against the smooth bodywork that had come to be the norm. Today, I’m sure you’ve already scrolled past countless examples on your social media feeds, without even as much as a second look. The problem is that so many of these builds lack substance. Sure, they look good, but…

The sound of Ginpei-San’s F1 sounding, onikyan-style Ferrari 348 reverberating off the buildings as he approached my hotel had been my alarm clock for the past two days. Today will be the last day of my trip. Wanting to show me all of Kitami, a small city on the island of Hokkaido, had to offer, he’d made arrangements for us to take part in a Sunday morning cruise and BBQ event. The only thing Ginpei-San had told me before picking me up was that the meet was going to be specifically a USDM car meet. Similarly to how people in the US lust after JDM parts and right-handed vehicles, the opposite is going on in Japan, with people wanting USDM parts or importing left-handed vehicles. As we pulled up to…

Every once in a while you lay eyes on a car that just looks right, from each and every angle. More often than not these cars tend to be greater than the sum of their components. And they’re often the result of their builder’s almost fanatical levels of commitment to the cause. In fact an owner’s single, bloody-minded determination to grind out a project car can be the deciding factor, the thing that makes the difference between a show stopping feature car like the Datsun you see here, and (an all-too often sight) a partially finished project being sold by a tired, beaten and disgruntled owner on eBay. The Datsun 260Z you see before you more than fits the bill. First and foremost, there’s not a single angle it doesn’t…

We’ve been going to the Breakfast Club for years, and have watched it grow and evolve, but we’ve never seen as much buzz around one of these meets as there was around this year’s Hot Hatch Sunday. It was insane! The chatter on the event’s Facebook page saw a massive groundswell of people clamouring for the coveted pre-approved paddock passes - which never even used to be a thing, you’d just turn up and go where you were told; prime grid slots went to people who got up earliest, but now? It’s like Players or something, everyone wants to be there to be seen. This is an interesting change of pace, as Goodwood events are always, by their very nature, about enthusiasts wanting to get up close to oodles of…

“Mikey’s motor is a proper smack in the chops to the establishment” Iwasn’t even a twinkle in my daddy’s nutsack when the legendary Porsche 935 won Le Mans (it was in 1979, in case you were wondering). I do however understand the significance of its radical Flachbau, or ‘flat nose’, styling. Initially conceived to exploit a loophole in the FIA regulations on headlight height and fender modifications, the 935 racecars were given bumper-mounted lights and vented wings to reduce drag and increase downforce. It worked rather nicely too, many a trophy was lifted and many a driver was immortalised in the history books. Ze Germans came, they saw and they conquered. And it was all down to a reasonably straightforward nose job. What’s important here though, is that the Slant…

“I knew I wanted to paint the EVO an eye-catching colour” It’s funny what immediately draws your eye when you first spot a certain car. Often what you opt to focus on says a lot about what you find most interesting about cars in general – and perhaps, more often than not, your preconceptions as to what a specific car should and shouldn’t have done to it. This Evo VIII you see here is a fine example. Built over the last five months by Rich Colbeck (we’ll get to that in a moment), there are almost certainly two things about it that catch your eye: the lack of the trademark rear wing, and the colour – Renault Liquid Yellow. “I’d always wanted an Evo and always fancied painting a car…

HÜB DESIGN V.20, FROM £212 (EACH) When it comes to building the larger Bavarian bruisers out there, you just can’t beat a classically restrained wheel design like this new split 10-spoker from luxury brand Hüb Design. Available in staggered 19 and 20 inch sizes, and in PCDs for the metal of the VAG, Mercedes or BMW persuasion, there can’t be a single model from the fatherland that wouldn’t look slick on a set of these industrial-looking puppies. Provided you can actually cram such monsters under the arches of course. Extra Germanic, extra girthy and with extra, erm, umlauts. Das ist bloody marvellous! www.hub-design.co.uk FAST FACTS • Sizes: 8.5 and 9.5x19-inch, 8.5 and 10x20-inch • PCDs: 5x112, 5x120 • Offset: ET25-48 • Finishes: Hyper Silver, Polished BAER GRIZZLY BRAKES, £3,800 Big…

Features • 150 watts • 4.7mm shank • Variable speed • 90-degree adjustable handle The trouble with tools is that you seem to need a lot of ’em for any random task. And this comes from a bloke with a tool chest bigger than most cars. All the gear and no idea, right? My point is that, very often, you require a load of different specialist items to carry out all the stages of one job. I mean, you can’t fit a set of coilovers with nothing but a 10mm spanner can you? Not unless you happen to be a cross between Handy Andy and The A-Team. If you’re obsessive enough, collecting all these random ‘essentials’ can get pretty expensive and that’s probably why multi-tools have become so popular. In…

Organised by the same team that run Ultimate Dubs (incidentally, the first show of the year) and at the same venue in the Telford International Centre – it’s easy to see why Ultimate Stance is so hotly anticipated. If you didn’t already know, unlike the VAG-focused Dubs show, Ultimate Stance caters for every make and model (and even a boat. Yes, a boat) and boasts the best of the best from the UK and further afield. Before the public entered the main hall arena, they were given a taste of what to expect when they walked through the big doors, with a few cars parked pride of place at the ticket stand. Once inside, other than the mass amounts of super-clean show cars, there was an RC track laid out…

If you fancy a Golf GTI but also need plenty of bootspace for dumping bodies in the woods, the Octavia vRS is the obvious answer. It’s effectively a Golf GTI, it’s just a foot longer. Same engine, same chassis, same switchgear, the works. Oh, and it’s usefully cheaper. Skoda’s vRS line has become a bit of a legend, and the Mk2 Octavia variant is one of the best. Launched in 2005, it came stuffed with the same 200bhp 2.0-litre TFSI motor you’d find in the Mk5 Golf GTI, along with that super-slick six-speed manual ’box. It had lower, stiffer suspension, 18-inch alloys and – yay! – green brake callipers, liberally sprinkling a load of hooligan mischief over the sensible Octavia platform. This, in essence, is a car that can pootle…

The thing about the USA is that it’s fookin’ massive. I mean, just think about it, to fly from the UK to New York takes about 6-hours, but nearly the same again to get from there to the Southwest. It’s bloody huge and, to fit it all in, all the maps have to be tiny. It really messes you up that, especially after a few heavy nights in Vegas. You start looking at routes and they seem reasonably short. Suddenly the automotive Mecca that is the Bonneville Salt Flats starts looking closer than you thought… and surely LA can’t be all that far off either. After all it’s only a couple of little lines on the map, and American petrol is dirt cheap, right? Well, yeah and that’s exactly how…

“I kind of fell in love with the brand. The next thing I knew, I was sat in my local Audi dealership…” Carl Sagan, the eminent astronomer and cosmologist, once came out with this mind-bending quote: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” [Despite him being one of my favourite people, this is not accurate. All you need to do is wait for an apple pie to fluctuate into existence in accordance with Boltzmann and the principles of entropy – Initial G]. It’s a troubling notion for anyone of a creative persuasion (as you all surely are), as it effectively strikes the concept of true originality firmly off the board. What he was getting at is that everything who exists is…

KENWOOD DDX4017DAB Happy 2017 from all at FC and welcome to this month’s Kenwood show! It’s good news only today, lucky reader, as we’ve managed to scoop some exclusives for you. The first of these dashboard game changers comes in the form of the mighty-fine Kenwood DDX4017DAB. Looks wise, we’re sure you’ll agree she’s an absolute peach, with a futuristic aesthetic that will bring your car’s interior bang up to date in a flash. The DDX4017DAB offers music playback compatibility for your iPhone or Android device. Once connected, your smartphone can be controlled using the super-clear 6.2-inch clear resistive touchscreen. We’re a big fan of Spotify at FC Towers and this new Kenwood product has seriously cool integration for one of our fave apps. A Spotify icon on the GUI…

“No one had put air suspension on a DC5 yet. Someone had to do it…” If you haven’t heard of Ben Parker, chances are you probably haven’t got your finger on the pulse of the UK’s pumping Honda tuning scene. Not only does he form one half of the new-yet-already-growing Parker Brothers YouTube channel alongside bro Tom, and has just bought an old school NSX that is guaranteed to allow himself to break the internet once again in the not-so-distant future. But he’s also the face behind the awesome yet undeniably controversial EK9 Civic Type R on hydros we featured in FC a few years ago (yes, that one). Bit of a VTEC nut, then, you’re no doubt thinking. And you probably won’t be massively surprised to hear that when…

NATASHA’S BEETLE FC says : We’re absolutely loving this second-gen (A5) Beetle. Owner Natasha says it’s one of the most modified in Ireland and with Vossen wheels, the latest Air Lift suspension and a sweet boot build who are we to argue? Natasha hasn’t finished yet, either. She has loads of plans for 2017 including a Revo remap, which will hopefully help her go one better than her Dubshed 2016 Runners-Up trophy! SPEC: BEETLE SPORT MAIN MODS Full interior retrim; 19in Vossen CVT alloys; Air Lift Performance 3P with XL Slam kit; ABT front and rear eyelids; tinted windows; sunstrip; yellow fogs; yellow callipers; vinyl roof; other vinyl aesthetics. SIMON BOYLE’S CORSA VXR FC says: It has been said before and it’ll be said again. The Corsa VXR is…