New Owner of the Powervehicle’s Supplied Sexy Knights Rx7, Steve Neophytou of Redline Magazine in the UK, shares his importing experience in this guest Blog….

 
Although roll-on roll-off shipping is safe and I have done it in the past, for such a special car I thought it was wisest to spend the extra on container shipping, and got the container delivered direct to our workshop…

We opened the container and this was the first glimpse of the car after its 6000mile+ journey to the UK. Any worries about the car was immediately extinguished as it was exactly as described and even started and ran perfectly. Straight away we rolled it in to the workshop and set to work…

As well as the usual servicing and cleaning, I made a few modifications to the car. I happened to have these Cobra Suzuka bucket seats and five point harnesses kicking around from the JZX81 so it would be rude not to have fitted them. While I was at it I fitted water injection for extra safety; intercoolers don’t work as well when sideways and rotaries don’t like det!

I’m a writer for Redline Magazine in the UK and because of that the cars first proper outing was to be on the Redline stand at the TRAX show at Silverstone Circuit. It made it there and back no worries but sitting there on display isn’t my idea of fun, I’ll leave hard parking to others, it was time to go drifting…

Less than a week after its hard parking debut at TRAX I hit the track with a few of the Touge Heroes  guys for the first practice session in the new car. Running stock road tyres on the front, Advan A048s on the rear, and in a car with zero rear camber for maximum grip, I didn’t exactly make it easy for myself in this first practice, but it went well, very well.

The car is very unforgiving that’s for sure, punishing you with a spin for any mistakes, but I wouldn’t change a thing, it is awesome. The car is so precise it’s unbelievable, more than any other car I’ve experienced. It’s very nimble too thanks to the light weight, but the best thing is how quickly it picks up speed while drifting compared to other cars; I can see this thing being perfect for overtaking or pulling away from your opponent when twin drifting.

Six days after the first drift day I attended a (DWYB) Drift What You Brung event at SantaPod Raceway where they use the full EDC competition track, which is a very fast track but unfortunately I don’t have pictures of that, but the week after I attended a SouthWest Drift event at Westonzoyland. This was a far smaller track, but for the FC at least, the most difficult yet. Needing 3 different gears to complete a short flying lap it was frantic, and with zero runoff a lot of cars went home on the back of recovery trucks, but it taught me a lot about the car and it survived the day with no mechanical damage.
As you can see from the intro pic it shoots massive flames on the over-run…  they seem to be this cars party piece; as soon as the cars hot is is throwing them almost constantly, which is always entertaining, though this car is such a handful you are concentrating too much on the driving to notice until you see the pics afterwards!

Stavs been adding some of his own touches since the car arrived, such as this new intake setup.

 
From a drifting point of view the car is ideal, it handles like a dream and has huge amounts of grip front and rear; you can see why it won some D1SL and MSC competitions in Japan, but as it’s also my fun road car I may still make a few changes just to scare me a little more in a straight line.
The plans are a little more power, maybe 400bhp, replacing the side and rear windows with plastic replacements, and removing some metal from the doors. With that lot the car should be around 400bhp per ton; enough to see off most supercars in a straight line while still being responsive and reliable.
Aside from the above though, the car is perfect, built by some of the best around, exported by best, leaving me to enjoy using it without needing to spend loads of time and effort modifying it when I could be driving it.
And on that note, it’s time to get the car ready, see if I can manage to attend four drift days in the space of four weeks…

Cheers

Stav

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 5:05 am and is filed under Feature Cars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.