Quote:
Originally Posted by 1slow370
Everyone i know with an automatic Z wishes they had a real manual trans at least a few times.
|
I don't, and you kinda know me now
Quote:
|
You want the auto day today or when you are at the strip, but you bought an enthusiast car and didn't order the option that is the most fun
|
Who gets to define fun here? I find carving corners to be fun, and you can do that in any car. The Z happens to be a nice car to do it in, but the transmission choice doesn't really affect that. More likely than not, someday I'll spin this car into a tire wall or have a catastrophic mechanical failure, and I'll have some hard choices to make about repairing it back the way it was, dropping in a completely different drivetrain, or scrapping it and eventually starting a new track-car project. While all that's going on, I'll probably pick up a cheap used 90's Spec Miata or something to take to track events so I can keep having fun while I sort out the Z situation. At the end of the day it's just driving, and any sporty car is fun to drive (even a manual!
)
$1300 cheaper.
Quote:
|
and you don't need to throw $6k at to get it to hold 500hp.
|
Doing a track-reliable/driveable 500hp FI build of this car is going to cost you so much time and money (on top of all the time and money everyone sinks into an NA track car) that a $6K trans upgrade on top isn't a big factor. I wouldn't go down that road to begin with though, because I'm not rich enough to afford to be able to do it right.
Sure you can buy a cheap turbo kit for $6-8K, but making a car like that reliable enough to flog the crap out of it all weekend 8-12 times a year (or more!) and not have it spend 3/4 of it's life sitting in shop after shop trying to fix it back up after the latest failure... you're gonna have to pay people that really know what they're doing a lot of money over a long time one way or another.
$6K for trans upgrades? I think I spent $6K just on my coilovers and BBK (actually, more
). Hell I've spent way more than $6K on just tires, wheels, and brake pads over the past few years.
At some point down the magical road to a track-prepped, reliable 500HP VQ, you'd probably realize it would've been way cheaper, more reliable, and more fun to have just bought yourself a used 2009 ZR1 'vette (or hell, even a new 2013). It's about the same base weight before you start gutting things, and they're out in the 650+ hp range bone stock. Not that all decisions have to be pragmatic. Feel free to go build an expensive unicorn, it sounds fun. But I'm just saying, don't bring the pragmatism of the cost of upgrading a 7AT into this...
Quote:
|
Edit: everyone who does a forced induction or track build on an auto gets to sit there and wonder how much power and abuse will it take before it goes to **** an needs to be sent to a dealer to replace because the tcm is coded to the ecu, and wont work in another car, and is inside the transmission.
|
My track build is still kicking. The car's 5 years old now with somewhere north of 40K miles on it. I haven't tried to sort out the math from the era when it used to be street-driven and my log of past events, but I'd ballpark that at this point at least 5K of those are track miles. Track miles are hard on any car, they add up quick. Even on the ridiculously expensive but awesome Nismo RC version of our car, the recommended replace/rebuild interval on the engine is 10K track miles, IIRC.
The transmission has bugs (I should probably check for flash updates at the dealer for my 2009 TCM actually, it might solve a few bugs), but it's still kicking *** in spite of all the track abuse. It's not that hard to go ask a dealer to reprogram TCM stuff to mate a new trans if you had to. Honestly, I probably wouldn't, though. I'd either have a good AT shop rebuild mine and make it stronger and better, or I'd think about replacing the whole drivetrain (or the whole car!) with something else.