exactly, i don’t want the review of my car to be “it’s shit”, i want to know why it’s shit
5 Likes
that’s… one way to put it…
I’m going to try to be nice here, because even though I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, had a huge fucking spider crawl over my feet in the shower, and haven’t eaten yet at 9:30-ish in the morning, I don’t feel I should open-fire with weapons-grade hatred right away.
So, forgive me if what I say sounds a little bit out of tune, because I really couldn’t give a shit right now.
abg7, stop being a fucking pest. Yes, everyone’s bouncing in their seat waiting for the reviews. This happens every time there’s multi-part reviews. Now, because some of us have been doing this for several fucking rounds, we’ve learned the difference between being a total asshole and being funny.
The thing is, you’ve run out your ‘funny’ chances long ago. We’re all fucking sick of it. So, from the bottom of my cold, icy heart, I say these words.
Shut The Fuck Up.
Seriously. Learn what’s appropriate to the community, quit playing Captain Fucking Obvious, quit ego-boosting by comparing everything to what you’ve done, and learn how to be a part of the damn community or get the fuck out.
2 Likes
I get it now. I will now have to post sparingly - without being an annoyance to others.
thats the spirit
1 Like
Well, that was spicy! Let’s resume with normal programming.
Unfortunately I have still been unable to finish all the cars, but I cut out half of the next lot again, so I’ll definitely have it all done by tomorrow.
##Cacend MERs
(Note: ME30 pictured)
After the excitement (read: back pain) from the ride in the Lightning had somewhat abated, it was time for something a little more plush. Like a sport wagon. A giant, 1.9 ton sport wagon.
“Do you think somebody is trying to suggest something?” Kai mused, looking at all the cargo and passenger space.
“Like what?” Strop frowned.
Kai spread his arms. “Like GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY,” he proclaimed, punctuated with vigorous hip thrusting.
“Ah, mental image, mental image,” Strop made a show of clutching his head and writhing around in apparent agony, only for Kai to clamp him in a headlock “I’ll show you a real headache! NOOGIE.”
The Cacend MERs was frankly boring on the outside. The inside was a little more interesting for the 6.5L V8 under the hood. It looked like some kind of American equivalent of an AMG estate, without the heating in the seats. Or the PDK box. What it did have, however, was some crazy low ride, really skinny front tyres (Strop winced at just how much weight they’d have to support), crazy wide rear tyres, and suspiciously undersized brakes. He was quite sure that his old Civic had the same sized brakes, even if they weren’t vented. Then again it also wasn’t a 700bhp 1.9ton estate wagon.
It was easy to forget about all that once inside. The doors were so large that the format may have been 2 + 2 but it was almost practical to clamber into the back seats. With typical insulating powers of a bus of a car, their new world was leather and fake wood trim and the strange feeling that once they started the car, they would be an unstoppable force. Maybe even literally.
The burble of the V8 was barely audible when Kai pushed the START button. The engine was muffled so well and the cabin insulated that even revving the motor hard enough to shake the car produced barely more than a hum. A quiet achiever, perhaps? Kai had one of those pensive frowns, as if not unsure of the car’s capabilities, so couldn’t resist the temptation to stamp hard on the gas on the road to the track. The tyres chirped some, but then the wagon shot forward far faster than it had any business doing, which made Kai frown some more, particularly as now the pit wall was fast approaching and he hadn’t yet tested the brakes. Mercifully, with a lurch, the brakes proved adequate for a road car… at least on the first test.
The Cacend was at its most comfortable on highways at Autobahn speeds. Perfectly flat highways, and also preferably, perfectly straight ones. This was in principle the idea of the outside velodrome ring of the Gryphon Gear test track, but the moment Kai tried to venture inside, that’s when the nineteen hundred kilograms really declared itself as a ballistic missile. A hundred to zero was doable, but from three hundred, the brakes rapidly overheated on the second stop, and the skinny front tyres scrubbed sideways, unable to shed much speed or change direction. The suspension, for its part, did its very best to detract from the road feel, leaving Kai with very little feedback through the steering wheel and on several occasions, tempting him to rip the whole thing off and toss it out the window in a barrage of expletives. On tighter sections and bumpy roads, the problems got even worse: Kai and Strop were subjected to a horrendous spine-chilling grinding noise every time they navigated a bend on an incline, and realised that the low ride height did more than just look cool, it also gave the undertray and bumper a good bitumen scrubbing.
Then about twenty minutes of hard driving later, Kai noticed he had burnt through a good sixty something liters. In addition, the brake pedal felt so spongy it was like stomping on a giant marshmallow, and the front tyres were so worn the steering feel was somewhat akin to trying to sprint when your feet were numb.
“This American is so fat it needs surgery,” Kai spat as he emerged from a session in which the sole source of satisfaction was running the car into the ground. Going fast in a straight line was one thing, but being so incompetent at stopping and turning was a travesty. Plain as it was, Kai couldn’t even find it in him to think of a way to ‘improve’ the car (cosmetically).
##Black Label Brutus
“OKAY OKAY SHOVE OVER,” Sam had clearly had enough of sitting on the sidelines, and he made his intention known by barging Strop aside with his shoulder even barely as Strop had emerged from the Cacend. “TIME FOR A REAL MAN’S CAR.”
“Oi nah fuck off ya c___”, Strop protested in Sam’s native dialect, jostling back, and the two of them promptly engaged in a rowdy reenactment of an AFL ruck. Sam’s excitement was amplified by the fact that the next item on the list was the single most stupid mad (read: awesome) car in the lot: the Black Label Brutus. It was everything its name promised to be: Black, Black Label, and Brutal. Harsh angular lines and slabs of panel fairly screamed 'MURICA, yet in a rare exception to the rule, Kai was not disgusted, but intrigued. Intrigued because for all its patriotism, this was a car whose excesses traded in menace, not indulgence. It also traded in the most excessive of excesses, too, since it refused to drink any less than top shelf 100RON, and that was just the aperitif.
“This is a movie villain car,” Kai proclaimed. “Could I have a poster of this one too?”
Seeing that nobody was there to hear his question, he got in the car and started it. And that was when he got the first surprise: it was the rasp of a flatplane V8, and not the burble of a crossplane, that greeted him. A rasp that was liberally punctuated by pops and crackles as it burnt rich and the occasional flame blew out the exhaust. Reminded him of the Nightfury Turbo X prototype. Sure, it was beefier, heavier, but he knew an overblown turbo setup when he saw one, and this one had the absolute works. It was going to be a nuke when it got there. So he put the car in gear, and rolled out the lot looking in the mirrors to see when the two idiots would realise.
Finally noticing the car trundle off without them, Strop and Sam gave chase all the while shoving each other. Sam, having had more AFL experience, won the contest, took the disposal, handed it off and kicked a goal from beyond the fifty before giving a mighty guarana-fuelled burst and diving into the car headfirst. It took him most of the drive to pit lane to right himself, and most of pit lane to get strapped in, but he got there eventually, rubbing his hands with glee as a helmet was pointedly plonked on his head. “Showtime.”
Kai said nothing, just dialled in the launch control, and hit the loud pedal.
A giant hand of God picked them up, crushed them into a fine dust, and gave them an almighty shove. Once the ultra sticky race tyres bit, the traction control and throttle management system went into overdrive, delivering the absolute maximum, no more, no less, power to the wheels needed to go as fast as possible. Acceleration was brutal, easily as brutal as Mephisto, close to even Mercury. By Thor it had something really fancy going on underneath to even move without promptly bursting into flames! And that was without even getting to the corners, where even with automatic throttle blipping and ABS, disciplined application was required to keep the car on the straight and narrow. The g-forces were insane for sixteen hundred kilograms, in no small part due to the massive aerodynamic work, and more than once, Kai found his helmet pressing against the B pillar. The response was tight, all the way up to the edge of grip, where the rear end intimated to wanting to step out if not for the stability metrics preempting it and vectoring the torque just so to prevent a disaster of nuclear proportions. And it took patience, so much patience to wait for the apex to hit the gas again, barely feathering the throttle a few millimeters while keeping the revs in the narrow powerband, until the steering unwound and then easing the gas on again. And that was with all the driving aids on. Few cars could yield so much shove for so little throttle.
“Aha!” Kai did a double take as the dash started lighting up like a Christmas tree. Next to him, Sam had been fiddling with the console, and had finally figured out, mostly though random trial and error, how to disable the stability control.
Two seconds later, in a familiar refrain, the Brutus shot off the road and spun into the fields in a spectacular plume of smoke and grass. The cabin promptly filled with said smoke and grass, and the world turned into a pastoral chaos.
Once the car had finally come to a standstill, Kai booted the door open. Eventually confirming that he was still the right way up, he unclipped and stumbled out of the car, waving aside more smoke and dust. His helmet clacked against something hard, another helmet, and he realised he had bumped into Sam, who had also been stumbling through the local storm of their making.
Without missing a beat, he smacked Sam’s helmet. “Thanks asshole!”
Sam smacked him back, “You’re welcome! Since you were being too much of a wuss to turn the stability control off, somebody had to remind you how to be a real man!”
Still waving the smoke aside, Kai jabbed a finger at Sam. “All you remind me is how every time I see you, you fuck something up!”
Wounded, Sam spread his arms wide. “Mate, you’re fucked in the head. That’s just sad, you sad man. Since when did you get so uptight?”
“Maybe I wanted to see what it could actually do! Maybe this was the only fat American I’ve really enjoyed!” He crossed his arms and huffed. “Thanks, you butt.”
“Well, if you don’t want to drive it anymore, then I will!” Sam said, clambering into the driver’s seat and fiddling with the seat position. Wiping at the console, he peered at the instruments. Just like a proper V8 racing car, this was. Recycling the fuel lines, he activated the pumps and hit the ignition.
The LCD display squawked at him, and sent him a wall of text. “Error Code 14: clutch temperature warning. Error Code 22: check wing hydraulics. Error Code 43: flap jam. Critical fuel warning.” Probably all the grass and pebbles and dirt and shit got blown into the bodywork from their little off and stuffed up all the fancy active aero. Looks like he wasn’t about to go anywhere in a hurry. What a shame.
“Guess we’re done for now Kai,” he announced, to no response. “Kai?” He looked up, to find Kai blazing a trail across the field. On foot.
Then he looked the other direction and saw why. The wrath of deities clouding her visage, Hannah sprung from the tow truck and set upon him with a furious screech.
##JHW Cypher
With Sam temporarily relegated to the office infirmary, normal programming resumed with something from the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Brute was replaced with elegance, squares and blocks with sleek lines, and excess with minimalism. The Cypher had quite the… interesting body shell.
“Something I might have drawn,” Kai joked. Which wasn’t saying much, because Kai may have been able to do a few things more than he let on, but drawing was not one of them. The shape was the main distinctive feature about the car at that, everything else was made deliberately as plain as plain could be.
Popping the hood raised a few eyebrows. An eco car it may have looked but the engine gently suggested otherwise: a V6, where normally one would see maybe a four banger or three or even A BIG BATTERY. Then again, the car was also quite long and large, and the interior was set up like a freaking home theater.
Strop already knew this was hardly going to be the ride of his life, so crawled over the front seats and esconced himself in the roomy rear with the Dolby 10.whatever it had going on there, and immediately started watching Star Wars. The headroom was a bit low due to the ridiculous slope of the cabin, but he made up for that by slouching. Meanwhile, Kai was sitting in the driver’s seat, trying to make sense of the setup. Was it an eco car of the future? It still had a manual transmission!
There was no substitute to put expectations and preconceptions to the test than to start the car and take it for a spin.
The first thing both Strop and Kai noticed was that it wasn’t dreadfully slow. The second was that it wasn’t dreadfully quick. In fact, once the turbos kicked in, they kept applying boost well after the engine itself started wheezing. The end effect was a torque curve that dropped linearly after the turbos finished spooling, creating constant power through the powerband. It wasn’t even a powerband, in fact, for a manual transmission, the acceleration was ridiculously smooth. Hayden Christensen’s face had more drama than this.
That would be simply another among many apparent contradictions that was the Cypher. The sound system was really quite enjoyable, coupled with the body that cut through air to produce virtually no wind noise. Yet the gearing was a close-ratio seven speed with a top speed of just 258km/h… pretty soon it was banging off the rev limiter and the car probably a good 60 or 70 left in it. Yet with such a long wheel base, the car was better off in long sweeping corners and struggled with the shorter ones, but the steering balance was very sharp, with no gradation into understeer at all. Then, once again, in the bumpy hairpins section, already a weakness for a car as deceptively large as this, the dreaded scraping began again. The Cypher had a serious ride height issue generally reserved for supercars with giant splitters and at least twice as much power.
In the end, this was a car that could very easily be directly compared to its sports sedan counterparts. It just happened to be much more slippery and therefore despite its considerable 1600kg kerb weight, it scored a better fuel economy. It was also much less of a sporty number in the Go department, moreso in the Oh-God-Can-I-Make-It-Over-This-Speed Hump and the Getting In The Driveway Diagonally Is Impossible Because It’s Too Freaking Long departments, which was not a great feature. Somebody who was looking at the other hatches and sedans might be drawn to a car like this for its distinctive shape, but first, it had to finish making up its mind about what it really was.
##Cisalpina Scattante
Kai immediately stopped dead when he laid eyes on the perky little number that was fairly dwarfed by most of the other entrants. The carbon fiber pattern was visible through the thin veneer of the pain, and every sculpted line, every fold punctuating curve, down to the oversized wing jutting backwards from the rear, loudly and proudly declared this car a pocket rocket.
“This… is appealing.” Kai managed, arms folding and covering his mouth slightly, in some subconsciously self-conscious attempt to mask a certain growing arousal.
The Scattante was a strange beast. It was the size of a Suzuki Cappucino yet had the stature of a Zonda. Yet it eschewed almost everything ancillary to the direct feel of driving, and despite the presence of two powerful turbos, it was to be as analog and naked an experience as the likes of the Ferrari F40 and the MacLaren F1. Being so lightweight, it didn’t even bother with power steering. In true nostalgic Italian style, the interior trim had ‘character’, the features scant, and dated. The ABS, traction control and stability controls, much like the sound system, seemed like an obligatory afterthought. It was a supercar, one that promised to be extraordinarily quick, and yet aside from its carbon monocoque chassis, it was made almost entirely from parts and components no more specialised than could be found in a mass produced factory. So its price tag, of 190000, seemed both at once like spare change, yet also significant, considering it approached the value of a 911 Carrera S. Yet by that same token, it was far more valuable still, with an annual production of just 12 units making it as rare as hens teeth, and rarer even than a GG production model.
And that was just on paper. Lacking that Grand Tourer and supplement-overdosed Muscle appeal, Sam declared he probably wouldn’t even fit before bowing to the sidelines for this one. Barely more than jockey-sized, Kai slid in easily. Strop found it a much tighter squeeze, reminding him of the early MX-5s, where he once closed the door in the wrong manner and trapped his leg behind the steering wheel. And once he was in, he was effectively cocooned in carbon fiber skin, with very little else in the way of space or insulation from the outside world. And everything around them, people, cars, were so tall, and big! It certainly wasn’t the kind of car that one would drive for a feeling of safety or security, not when everybody else was fully invested in the arms race that was the upsizing SUVs, crossovers, and Toorak tractors. No, this was more akin to the motorcycle rider who could slip between lanes of traffic with ease, carving through danger in defiant, impish glee.
And boy did it zip about. In a rare unspoken mutual agreement, Kai turned all the driving aids off, as they should, and off they went. Strongly reminiscient of the long gestation period in an F40, the turbo took a couple of seconds to kick in, but then when it did, 1.39 bar of boost flooded the gates, the Scattante entered BEAST MODE and the rear end lit up! Wheelspinning well through second, with such little weight and so much power to make up a staggering 650bhp per ton, it dispensed with the ratios rapidly, and just as suddenly as they had begun, they were topping three hundred. With so little car and so close to the ground, it might as well have been warp speed.
The little car that could had many more aces up its sleeve owing to its diminutive dimensions. On premium sport tyres, it could corner as hard and stop as short than what the all-out race cars could do with their ultra sticky race tyres and ceramic brake pads, and it could do it all day. It was gut churning, pinned to the seat, racing fun in this crazy pure sense that was thought to be extinct.
Crawling out of the car after how long they didn’t know, Kai pulled his helmet off to reveal a giddy grin. Sure the car had some rough edges (a lot, actually). It was hardly the most economical despite being the smallest and that boost was ludicrous, the redline was high enough that it was definitely not great for the engine, and it also had that ear grinding spine chilling scrapage problem. But context mattered. Suddenly being a proper Italian car owner made sense. Suddenly calling flaws “character” made sense. And the strange part was, there was yet more room to move. Making the car more streetable was anywhere from as simple as adjusting the turbo wastegate to swapping them out for something smaller and raising the ride height. Going the other direction, there was a host of aftermarket wheels, springs, shocks, brakes pads and rotors, wings, splitters, ECU and just about everything in the engine that was ready to go to break the limits of a car that could already keep pace with a 488. Strange, because with the price tag the people one would think to afford such a car would expect everything handed to them on a platter. As a statement of purity, this was the enthusiast choice for them. But for the true tuners, this was a wet dream.
##Kron K3SL
The Cisalpina being even more fun than it looked, by the time the car was back in the lot, it was well past one in the arvo and everybody was hungry again, so out came the lunchboxes and in came the pizza. The starchy, carbohydrate rich dump that was takeout picnic food to feed the masses washed down with a liberal dose of sugar had the expected soporific effect, and so it was in that air of lethargy that they came to something rather more… normal.
The Kron K3SL was that normalcy, a mildly hot, very Germanic hatch. It also happened to be the first four banger in the lot, even if it was a turbo. There were two main odd things with it, the first being, in a crop of submissions from the last manufacturing year, Kron had sent in something from three years ago.
“Is it a demo model?” Kai wondered aloud, speculating on why a hopeful would send in what appeared to be a very… normal car in a trim that hadn’t been refreshed for so long. That being said, aside from being odd, there was nothing wrong with that. At any rate, after several more seconds of studying it, he found he had nothing more to say about it, so simply got in the car.
Inside was quite similar to the outside: everything that one expected a mildly hot, extremely Germanic hatch to be. It had absolutely no misconceptions or pretensions about being anything else, with the exception of that second odd thing: it was all wheel drive, which made it a bit of a Subaru wannabe. This was a bit of a conceptual mindfuck, because insofar as the world of compacts was concerned, sure there were AWD hot hatches, but Subaru did Subaru and everybody else did everybody else. And the AWD hot hatches were the likes of the A45 AMG and the Focus RS, both of which had at least a hundred extra horses. So what was Kron’s schtick?
Turns out that being heavy was at least part of it. Tipping the scales at 1500kg, it was heavier than any hatch had business being. As a result, while it wasn’t at all incompetent, it was also not a particular trailblazer, the nose sitting heavily into the corners whereupon the stability control would nip it back into line. It certainly had sporty aspirations from the firm ride, but that turned out to be a bit more of a disguise than a completed vision.
Ultimately, the car was just like the stomach full of pizza. It was best to treat it smoothly, and lull oneself into a state of zen-like cruising, even if it was a brisk cruise with sweeping corners. Never too hard or fast, else the car get a stitch. With that rule respected, the gravitas of the Kron became more of a reassurance than a burden, and before long both Strop and Kai were nodding away to the radio with a vacant half smile on their face. It wasn’t until Strop actually did fall asleep and bang his head on the dash that he came back to.
“Hey, Kai.”
“Mmm.”
“So, what do you think of this car.”
“It’s nice.”
Strop tried again. “Do you think it looks sexy.”
There was a long pause. “For a Kia Cerato it is I guess.”
It was at this point that Strop knew that as pleasant a drive the K3SL would be in whatever condition, it was definitely getting The Douche makeover if Kai actually bought one.
##Pearlite Visceral V12
For his part, Strop about wet himself when he read the product statement. All wheel drive, V12 twin turbo Grand Tourer retailing for 80 grand. Six hundred and forty horses. It sounded like the kind of thing the original Skyline BNR32 could have evolved into if it weren’t missing half its cylinders. The big brother to an Audi Quattro. And where purists decried the travesty of ruining the heavenly exhaust note of a V12 with a turbo, Strop was always one to say fuck the haters, it was time to realise all that WASTED POTENTIAL. Which was why the engineering division was working on another V12 twin turbo for more extensive release right there and then.
Encountering the Visceral V12 in the flesh, Strop’s eyes went wide and he felt a little bit of pee come out. Kai’s reaction was similar: a drawn breath, that went “Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” though it was unclear whether he also suffered a bladder malfunction. It was the old made new. The rise of the import invoking the spirit of weird Japanese magic under the bonnet. It was grandaddy to the Silvia, 240SX, Soarer, and Skyline all in one and reborn generations later.
Kai had a different way of putting it. He jabbed his finger at the car, and exclaimed: “Tron car! Tron car!”
Strop’s imaginative masturbation evaporated. “What? Really?”
“Yeah, obvs. I mean, it’d look so good with neon and LEDs.”
“Yeah, well, I guess…?” Strop trailed off. Sometimes he didn’t understand what went through Kai’s brain. He should have been used to that by now, but Kai had that special talent of being just that bit more off-kilter when you didn’t expect it.
At any rate, less talky, more drivey! Getting in the car, the first thing that was immediately obvious was a Lack of Bullshit. Well, the seven speed manual was a bit, because juggling seven ratios when six was enough for several decades was just odd. That aside, the other weird thing was when Kai started the car, behaved just long enough to get the car on the track, then really opened the taps.
There was no traction control. At all.
Not that the car actually needed it, they found. Kai frowned. The tyres weren’t that fat. And they definitely weren’t fancy. But surely a published six hundred and forty horses would produce a bit more drama than that? This time he dialed in a good seven kay and dumped the clutch.
The tyres chirped, before the car rocketed forward with a inexorable, glorious pull. There was simply virtually no wheelspin to be had, except for at the very top end of first. Kai’s expression made it very clear he was not sure what to think of this, because on one hand, no burnouts, so sad, but on the other, what manner of magical balancing act was afoot here.
Just like its imagined inheritance, the Visceral V12 handled itself beautifully, better than expected in every corner. Even at 1600kg and slightly nose heavy, the suspension was matched perfectly for the most direct feel and feedback. Every imperfection in the road was conveyed through the traditional links and springs without excess busyness, and the steering was exquisitely balanced. The main criticism that could be levelled at it was the inevitable: 1600kg was still a lot so linking tight technical sections together without confusing the chassis was a challenge, and that was why the car still came with stability control.
The philosophy of making the most out of less shone through, except for in the engine, where there was a lot of more. Not that the car was lacking for torque from the low end either. As engaging as the car was at its limits, it was also a pleasant cruiser. Perhaps for its price tag it wasn’t as plush as many of the more modern philosophies on show in the hot hatch and sport sedan sectors, but such creature comforts beyond ‘adequate’ were of secondary concern in a GG world.
There was no denying that this, too, was a car for the enthusiast, built upon the same basic parts that afforded it great potential for tuning and modding. What one could do when the car’s insides were this accessible, and the car already so capable, made Kai drool a little (but not visibly). There would of course be those haters who would balk at the notion of tuning up a V12, but those people could go fuck themselves too.
This was a car that had everything that mattered in spades. It achieved a fantastic all around balance, its main drawback being a bit on the large and porky side, and Kai being mysteriously drawn to decking it out in neon. Yet it was still economical, reliable and plenty tinkerable, a real sweet spot.
12 Likes
Damn! I knew the K3 would be too German xD
I even warned you! 
Then again, you know your car’s gonna end up looking like this a lot:
Itz fully sik bruh.
In retrospect, we probably should have gone with the downsized variant of the Visceral’s body. But after Sillyworld and I were done designing it, it just looked too good to do all over again 
Totally worth it, just so I can say that we made strop wet himself (twice) and use the words “imaginative masturbation” 
Twice? But he only peed himself once…
Once when reading the product statement and once when seeing it in the flesh, if I read correctly
Wow, some really nice cars here!
I feel like the Cisalpina Scattante and the Pearlite Visceral V12 are both very well designed, both mechanically and visually. (Of course I am going off what Strop has written for the mechanical part)
Personally I’m rooting for the Visceral!
Oh, I used an expression. I contracted it from “just about” to “about”, meaning “almost”.
I can’t even remember what I just wrote, I thought that I’d implied that Strop then jizzed himself after. Wait. I think that was probably in the review of the Scattante…
God dermit, that is some beautiful writing, loving the writeup so far! And of course my car is in the last batch of writing, guess it’ll be another tense night waiting for it 
Appreciate the effort you have put into this, not easy at all to keep writing them!
2 Likes
on one end, i’m sort of glad that my car didn’t get reviewed this time.
on another, it’s another day of anxiety to finally see the results.
another love-hate feeling… nnnggggghhhhhhhhhhh
i got the feeling that Cacend is trying to one up my mobile orgy car from a few rounds back 
i can’t shake this out of my mind about the tuning of the visceral
there’s also a bit of a nudge about the tuning of a v12 there…
i wonder now… 
forgot to say.
another beautiful writing
and
you really know how to keep the tensions up don’t you? 
1 Like
well, i can take solace in that my car wasn’t the worst. it handled well and blasted the cHoOnZ. but i was super conflicted with the gearing, and in the end chose wrong.
comin acha fro the left field tho 
Very pleased that strop understood every single of the design choices I made! I don’t think I’ll win this as my car is just not crazy enough and maybe there’s still an excellent everyday car coming. But I’m very happy to have the Cisalpina around the top contenders and to have escaped any too vulgar review, as the car is not meant to be vulgar, too. I just noted that there’s only one sentence of direct speech (“This is… appealing”), so they must have spent the rest of the time doing what the car was made for.
Looking forward to the rest of the cars and the wrap-up!
Oh man, @strop this just keeps getting better and better! I really think the whole format works so well having properly fleshed out characters just add so much extra fun.
This was a really diverse set of vehicles this time. But the Cisalpina was the standout for me I mean just in terms of design it achieves such a distinctive yet alluring shape. All with minimal excess and use of very standard fixture components. Nice work @Der_Bayer!
Looks like I also haven’t made it into this batch of reviews which as @koolkei and @Puffster mentioned is both super tense! But is also somewhat of a relief since our vehicles currently exist in a sort of Schrödinger’s cat state of being simultaneously discarded and still in the running.
Come what may, I’m really looking forward to reading the final reviews!
Counting again, so far there’s only 3-ish car that has non conventional colors. (Im not sure about the solo, is that grey or silver?)
I think, i unexpectedly submitted a curveball. One of the only two? 4 bangers here
The Cacend did what it was meant to then, be a comfortable, unsuspecting cruiser (and I thought that 255s were big for fronts although it does run I think 305s or 325s in the rear with 20s or 21s in terms of rims.