Another New Spangly Part & First Day on the Road
Today I had my first drives in the Arosa on the road since I brought it back from London in December, and obviously, a fair bit has changed since then!
The BMC CDA has really opened up the mid-range, stamp on the throttle in any gear and it just takes a vast gulp of air and picks up very nicely
Being so much lighter now also improves the acceleration and obviously, braking too.. overall the car even on the standard suspension feels more planted and you get alot more feedback from the road (and noise!). The Momo steering wheel is nice and chunky and really inspires you to chuck the car into bends with more confidence. After my first drive in the car since before I stripped it out and started working on this project, I returned home in order to fit this:
My nice new 22mm JabbaSport rear ARB, chosen after reading up on peoples experiences of other ARBs and the positive comments about this one. Once fitted my aim was to then head back out to guage what effect this would have had on the cars handling. It's certainly bloody heavy, but reassuringly solid.. all I had to do was brave the icy winds and get the fella fitted:
During my first drive, I did a fair bit of circling local roundabouts and found the car to understeer quite substantially when attacking the corners (my A2 was certainly miles better), but then, that is why I had invested in the rear ARB.. I was a little sceptical, would I suffer as many people do when modding, from a placebo effect and imagine things to be much better when in reality little has changed...?
Answer: No f***ing chance! The rear ARB has absolutely transformed the handling.. using the same roundabouts as before I tested the car in the same way, with the ARB I was able to not only travel at higher speeds, but it has almost totally eradicated the understeer that was present before.. now the weak link is the tyres as the chassis just holds on. The transformation is quite simply amazing; but that's not all, with the ARB fitted understeer has been replaced by the ability to produce nice levels of entertaining oversteer when desired.
If you have an Arosa/Lupo and haven't fitted one of these ARB's, go and order one now.. it'll be amongst the best £200 you could spend on your car.. No joke.
I think you get the picture, I like it
Something else I like is my new tax disc holder, a quality eBay special but the logo on it looks totally genuine. I had to get rid of the crappy vinyl one and put my new tax disc in something more in keeping with the look of the car:
I wonder if anyone would like to take a guess at how my project's going to end up looking...
This coming week will be a busy one:
Monday - Full service and cambelt change
Tuesday - Coding of new remote key (I only have one key atm)
Friday AM - 4-2-1 exhaust manifold fitting, de-cat and mid-box removal
Friday PM - Trip to Stealth Racing (
http://www.stealthracing.co.uk) for a run on the rollers and depending upon what gets revealed, some possible custom ECU remapping with track use in mind
Additionally, my KW Variant 1's should turn up as they have now been despatched, my OMP cage should find it's way to SCN's Stu so that he can start to adapt it and finally (for those in the know) my bloody seats might actually materialise (fingers and toes crossed), although I won't hold my breath :wacko:
That's all for now folks, thanks for reading