Some days I feel like I have a major illness.
I have been growing more and more disillusioned with the fuel economy of my Explorer Sport. The lifetime average was sitting at 15.7 MPG which is pretty terrible, albeit better than the 13.2 I got with the Ecoboost F150. I had been looking semi-actively at Subarus, and the new WRX was growing on me for its value and the obvious improvements over the last gen. After a talk with the bank, it was a definite non-starter. Apparently you can't swap new vehicles five times in three years without raising some eyebrows and accruing some monster negative equity. Who knew?
Instead, after making a sizable down payment (way too much IMO) to pay off the negative equity I became the proud new daddy to a 2014 BMW M235i with a proper manual transmission!
I haven't had an opportunity to properly photograph it, but here is a quick driveway snap from the delivery day:
I also decided that it was in our best interests to pull away from one of the toys and put the Mazdaspeed Miata up for sale. I have far too much money invested in the car just to make all the go fast stuff play nice (bigger turbo and Haltech standalone EMS), but I figure it can't hurt to get a little cash and lose one payment when we just bought a house.
I couldn't send her off without getting some kind of performance metric on such a modified car, so I waited until a suitable track day presented itself. I went to an F body club track rental last weekend after getting rained out twice and ripped off a few runs. I seem to have spooked a couple of LS guys as well, because by the end of my day most of my runs were against weird stuff like the 3.8 swapped, sprayed convertible Cavalier and a couple of diesel trucks. Still I ran a damn respectable [email protected] MPH. My goal for the car ultimately was a 12.9 so I was definitely fairly impressed with this little guy! There is probably a 12.5@110 in it with a better intake manifold and some more tuning but I will have to see if I end up keeping it over the winter before I rip into it again and throw more money into it.
A couple pics and the slip:
I have been growing more and more disillusioned with the fuel economy of my Explorer Sport. The lifetime average was sitting at 15.7 MPG which is pretty terrible, albeit better than the 13.2 I got with the Ecoboost F150. I had been looking semi-actively at Subarus, and the new WRX was growing on me for its value and the obvious improvements over the last gen. After a talk with the bank, it was a definite non-starter. Apparently you can't swap new vehicles five times in three years without raising some eyebrows and accruing some monster negative equity. Who knew?
Instead, after making a sizable down payment (way too much IMO) to pay off the negative equity I became the proud new daddy to a 2014 BMW M235i with a proper manual transmission!
I haven't had an opportunity to properly photograph it, but here is a quick driveway snap from the delivery day:
I also decided that it was in our best interests to pull away from one of the toys and put the Mazdaspeed Miata up for sale. I have far too much money invested in the car just to make all the go fast stuff play nice (bigger turbo and Haltech standalone EMS), but I figure it can't hurt to get a little cash and lose one payment when we just bought a house.
I couldn't send her off without getting some kind of performance metric on such a modified car, so I waited until a suitable track day presented itself. I went to an F body club track rental last weekend after getting rained out twice and ripped off a few runs. I seem to have spooked a couple of LS guys as well, because by the end of my day most of my runs were against weird stuff like the 3.8 swapped, sprayed convertible Cavalier and a couple of diesel trucks. Still I ran a damn respectable [email protected] MPH. My goal for the car ultimately was a 12.9 so I was definitely fairly impressed with this little guy! There is probably a 12.5@110 in it with a better intake manifold and some more tuning but I will have to see if I end up keeping it over the winter before I rip into it again and throw more money into it.
A couple pics and the slip:
