06/09/2007: Summer is here to stay

It has been a while since I updated the website. The past few months were uneventful. I did trade my daily driven Mazda 6S for a 350z. The Mazda 6s is decent car but it seems that things that never worked right are the Ford parts used to build the car. A good example is the drive by wire throttle body. I have never driven a car so unresponsive until the Mazda6s. It literally takes it a second to catch up when you depress the throttle to accelerate. Mazda/Ford never admitted anything faulty by design. Although they have four iterations of that part to date. Although the car was designed with spirited driving in mind, it falls short with some of the crucial components like the clutch. The pressure plate on the v6 model is so horrible, it started losing grip and slipping at about 50000 miles. Granted that is when the warranty ended and so I had to endure 26 hours of manual labor slaving over that clutch replacement. I wish I had taken some picture of the swap but I didn't.

So, yes I did trade that car for a 03 350z Track edition. Two doors car do suit me better. It's a Le Man sunset orange color which by the way is a very hard color to paint match. I fitted a Nismo body kit on the car. It looks sweet with the new wheels and 2 inches drop lowering springs. There are gazzillion parts available for the Z but I am done for the time being.

This is how it was when I picked it up from the dealer. It's very stock 03 350z track edition. It has all the Brembo brakes and the forged Ray Engineering wheels. Yes! it's my first set of forged wheels and it will quickly be repalced by cheaper immitation nismo wheels.

Here is a link to the semi formal photo shoot of the car by the lake after my minor personalization.

This is how the car looked after I finished with it last weekend. You can see that the color on the bumper, side skirts and rear skirts are slightly off. I am not going to complain about it too much since I only spent 90 dollars on paint and material. I did have to make several trips to the paint store for paint matching.