I've got 2. At the moment, I'm still driving my winter car
VW Golf. Not that it isn't a fun car, but I'm TRYING to be patient till the other one gets back from the shop, what with all this nice weather. The other car is a'94 Mitsu 3000GT VR-4 modded for neutral handling and high speed drift. Right now, it's at the shop,... well a buddy's garage anyway, getting the engine rebuilt to put in new rods, forged pistons etc. etc. It'll take a little while, step by step, but when it's all done. It should be in the 600 hp range.
Doesn't take much hp to have fun and drift on a downhill. Unfortunately, that require hills. When I moved here to Michigan. Imagine my suprise in finding out just how flat this place is!
The thing that sucks though is I'm putting in all that because I was forced to rebuild the engine. There's a lesson in here about trusting regular shops with a tuned/modified high hp car. I took the car to a shop to have the lower control arm and outer tie rod end replaced 'cuz I didn't have the tools to do it myself and while the car was at the shop, someone there thrashed it while taking it out for a spin. They ended up spinning a rod bearing and the damn thing is the shop says, "Oh, we don't do that with customer's cars. We didn't do it, it was probably a pre-existing problem." and it's difficult for me to prove it. But damn, I know that car and how else do you explain the fact that there was NOTHING wrong with the engine when I took it in and when I went to pick it up, starting the car made the engine rattle!(rod knock)
I know my car and I recorded the mileage and gas before taking it in. While at the shop, they went through a 1/4 tank of gas and put 18 miles on the tach. There is no way to burn that much gas in 18 miles unless you have your foot to the floor. The car has a 20 gallon tank! That's 5 gallons in 18 miles or roughly 3.6 mpg. The only time the car burns gas like that is when the throttle is to the floor. You know what the shop owner's response was when I pointed this out? "Oh,.... well... er... we occasionally leave the engine running while we're fixing a car." What!!! why the hell would you leave the engine running while fixing the car? While it was at the shop, I also had them put in new gaskets. There's no reason to run the engine while changing control arms and the outer tie rod, and you definitely don't want the engine running when you change the gaskets! What a bunch of bull!!!
Suffice it to say, I am taking legal action against the shop, but it's taking a while and like I said, it's difficult to prove that the shop did it. My advice to anyone with a high performance car is, either take your car ONLY to someone you know for a fact you can trust with it (There are no import tuner shops in hicksville Kalamazoo, MI), or get a damn datalogger with timecode so you can take it to court if you need to and say, "Hah!!! Look here, the date and time shows it was under your care when the engine was overreved repeatedly and the datalogger shows, maximum throttle position here, here, here and here..."
P.S. sorry for ranting, but this has been quite a sore spot for me recently