corozin

No. You need a MkII fitment. I was lucky enough to get a Trimsport one a few years ago but I don't think they're available anymore. If you're more concerned with the effect rather than the aesthetics of a front brace, my advice would be to seek out an adjustable item (like a Sparco) to be sure it fits. You also need to be careful of clearances around the back of the engine, as the measurements are slightly different on Corrado/Golf regardless of which engine you're running and not all MkII devices will fit a Corrado cleanly. Ideally you want one which bends "back" a bit to clear round the throttle assembly rather than a "straight across" type. I'm fortunate to have a VSR which I think contributes to getting the clearance I need for a straight across type (as the angle of the throttle is very different to a stock VR6). If It's a VR6 then it's also worth considering making up a small plate (maybe 3"-5") with which to re-mount the expansion tank & bring it forward so you can access the cap without removing the brace. A small trick but worthwhile to do. Good luck - it's definately a modification worth doing if you like to press on a bit.

I ran 205/40/17 on 8J rims on an old Corrado. With an 8" rim a 205 section tyre will give you a fairly decent stretch already, but the car should drive well. I would personally not go as wide as 8½" as I would worry about overstretching them and compromising safety. An 8½" rim is correct for a 225-235 section tyre but there's no way you'll get those on without modifying the arches. Indeed even when I ran 8" rims with stretched 205s I needed to have the front arch lips trimmed back to prevent arch fouling (although the car was also lowered 80mm) and the rears a lesser amount too. It's possibly also worth mentioning that I think every Corrado I've seen running 9" or wider has only done so with modified arches front & back. Indeed even some 7½" wheel designs (e.g. BBS RKII) grind the arch linings away so be a bit careful.

If you run 40 profile on 16" wheels your car will be undergeared. Good for acceleration, but bad for fuel economy plus your speedo will underead your speed by around 4%

It is indeed Steve's old car. I helped him buy the thing in 2000 so I should know it when I see it. Frankly it makes quite a few of the other VR6's on PH look very expensive indeed.

I think the OP must have had his leg pulled by the garage. £35k in a single year is scarecely believable, unless it's engine has been blown up 7 times, or had his the bodywork restoration done by Chip Foose. I heard rumours years ago that the 'Burgundy' Mk2 Golf that Steve Denton built & showed at Inters in 2001 had over £40k invested in it, but at least that had gold wheels and engine! If this Corrado really has that kinda spend then it should be really something. But frankly if I had £35k burning a hole in my pocket right now I'd be spending it on something a lot nicer and quicker than an elderly Corrado. That kind of money buys you a good 2007-registered M3 in the current market

I kinda like it. Plenty of attitude in a "Mad Max" kind of way. And let's face it - who's going to park close to it in a car park? Or steal it? :D

The guy's post was a bit daft. Now the thief (or thieves) will have a much better idea what they've nicked, what's fitted to it, and which parts will sell for the most money. I have sympathy but amongst all the crazy modifying parts he put on the car the one that is missing is a Tracker. Let's hope he disclosed all those modifications to his insurer, because if he didn't the evidence to invalidate his claim has also now been posted all over the internet.

Yeah apparently when questioned Ronaldo complained to the Police that the wall wasn't 10 yards back :D

I just thought it was a clever chassis with a large firework strapped on the back? :lol: Make that 2 large fireworks! :D Technically Thrust SSC is a rear wheel steer chassis with a couple of bloody great Spey 205 Jet engines attached. Not a firework in sight.

The BTCC rear wheel drive cars carry a weight penalty simply because in the hands of a good racing driver a RWD car can be driven more quickly in most conditions than a FWD car can. But as most manufacturers build FWD cars these days (for reasons of cost & packaging) they need to make the two types equivalent. With a RWD car front end does less work because the front tyres don't have to deal with the stresses of engine torque as well as braking and turning. The overall work of the car is shared more evenly between the axles. In addition a RWD car carries a better natural weight balance because of the rear drivetrain weight. Conversely a FWD car has better mechanical grip to the driven wheels because the engine is pushing down on them, but it's a simple advantage. If you are trying to get grip on a limited grip surface this works very well, but if you are trying to obtain pure maximum acceleration in good grip then RWD is better because the COG of the car moves rearwards in those situations. That's why top dragsters are all RWD but also why RWD cars fall all over the place in icy car-parks. On a racetrack very different styles of driving are required as you can see when you watch the BTCC, and particularly with regard to how kerbs are handled. FWD 'pulls' a car over kerbs and so can be driven very aggressively were the RWD cars have to be more careful (in a BTCCC sense) because kerbs upset the balance of the car more. But RWD cars can be more aggressive when trail braked, and indeed can be left-foot braked more effectively to gain ground in the hands of an experienced driver. It's also a easier to adjust the drift angle RWD car. But these are small differences to people like you & I. You need to know what you are doing to get the advantage out of RWD, and would probably be a bit of an idiot to drive that fast on public roads to find out. The performance of a FWD car can be exploited more easily and safely to it's limit. That suits me as an everyday driving experience, but I am now yearning more and more for RWD - if only for the change of driving style that would require.

I test drove a 330Ci cabrio just before Christmas. It's amazing how old fashioned it made my VR6 feel... must have been the TV ! Hard to admit on a Corrado-enthusiasts forum but I enjoyed the car a lot and it gave me food for thought. Seriously though it's a sensible choice of car. They're well built, nicely styled, reliable, comfortable, quick enough to get into trouble (although obviously not as insanely fast as the M3) and with lots of toys like the electric memory seats. The only mild criticism I'd throw at it is that it doesn't have quite as much rear legroom as I expected. Did you get a manual or the SSG model?

I'm with MonkeyVR6. F-Type every time

It sounds like you've answered your own question :) Gather a sensible budget, get all the bits fixed. Better the devil you know and all that. You are frankly unlikely to get into the situation I did but I wish you the best of luck with it anyway. If we were all concerned about reliability and low running costs we'd all be driving Toyotas wouldn't we?

Trust me I'm no more qualified on this simply because of the different scale of costs I incurred; we're all agreeing on this. The bear-trap we've all hit is to accept a big bill on the car despite it's (now) modest value in the expectation that those types of bills only come along once in a while. The truth is that when you're running a 15 year old performance car these bills can strike at any time (or not at all) and sometimes in quick succession as in my case. I was fortunate to be able to continue funding my calamity. Others may not be so fortunate. The last thing I would want to see happen would for Dancing Fish to fork out perhaps £1200-£1500 for serious work, and then for (example) his gearbox to lunch itself next month, thus effectively wasting his existing spend unless he can find even more to keep the car going. My excuse was that I'm daft and Corrado loopy. :clown: It's good fun, but stressful and leaves you poor!

This really is a tough question, and one I feel able to contribute an opinion towards. As background I've endured a string of "this should be the last big bill" costs since May 2007 (head rebuild) through Aug-Dec 2007 (full engine rebuild) through Jan 2008 (oil loss causing bottom end failure and further engine rebuild) and most recently a gearbox rebuild in October 2008. Every single one of these involved the kind of costs to sort out which in all honesty raise the question of cost vs benefit on what is (in my case) a 15 year old car. The trap you can (and I have) fallen into is the one where you can convince yourself to keep on fixing stuff not because you just want to keep the car, but because you have already spent so much already that failing to keep on fixing it whatever the cost would be a waste of what you have spent before. I suspect the question going through your head is one of 'surely if I fix this one thing then the car will be fine because I've fixed everything else' but that really isn't the way you should evaluate it. Thinking like that has left me with a Corrado which is now fabulous mechanically (but which still incidentally looks like a total shed because I used my bodyshop budget up fixing all that stuff) but in actual fact cost over 18 months something like 3½ times the actual value of the car (and around 4x what I expected to spend) to resolve. Honestly if I had known at the start of it all what it would eventually have cost then I would have abandoned the car and moved on. I now have a £3k car that I spend £11k putting right, and while I love it to bits it's really one of the stupidest things I've ever done financially. I can understand your dilemma but at the same time I wouldn't want you to go through what I have, albeit on a smaller scale. My recommendation to you (given the other problems you've listed) is to scrap the car on your drive for as much value as you can pull off it, and then look for a cheap Seat Ibiza/Leon (or something else that works). Probably no romance involved in that decision I admit, but at least you'll have something resembling a bank balance at the end of it. [sub:2h9m3xeo]alternatively if you want a working Corrado I'll take £10k for mine, you won't be disappointed, LOL[/sub:2h9m3xeo]

Could be a worn driveshaft spline. I had a similar "clunk" when reverse was engaged a while back and that was the root cause. Best get it checked over because if it fails you'll require a tow. The 'clunk' comes from the shaft splines shifting inside the hub splines.

| understand what you say but seriously if you had the money to buy any one of these cars who here would honestly have anything other than the Lamborghini? It's so much more of a statement as well as being a stupendously fast car. For all it's accomplishments the GTR will always be just a Nissan, and however fast it is will never be a supercar in the way that the Gallardo clearly is. The only reason to buy the GTR would be if you didn't have the money to buy the Lambo, although frankly if I had only £60k to spend then I'd be looking at a low mileage 2-3 year old Gallardo instead of a GTR.

I'm in a similar position to yourself and test drove a 330Ci Cabriolet 2 weeks ago. The car itself was comfy, very refined, quick enough to get into trouble (with 231bhp) and really got me thinking about moving on altogether. There are cheapy 330Ci coupe's everywhere on the market right now as they're common lease-car fodder but you should (in my view) try and hold out for one with the optional TV/SatNav system fitted. A hard top is available for the Cab model and quite a few on the market will have these available. My only reservation about them are the number of cars with the SSG gearbox, which I found to be a little slow on kickdown and is an unknown to me as far as reliability is concerned. I would probably track down one with the 6-speed manual instead personally. The dilemma for me as I potentially move into new work in 2009 is whether to buy something like the 330Ci at less money and work out whether to run that with the Corrado, or alternatively dump the Corrado altogether in favour of running either an E46 M3 or E39 M5 - both of which are available at around the 10k-12k mark. I do love my Corrado, and have owned three of them during the past 11 years, but frankly with prices of M3/M5 now where they are I'm fighting the common sense option to switch and own something which clearly performs at the next level compared to a VR6. There's also the age, comfort, boot-space, luxury toys, build quality and a whole other bunch of reasons to finally move on. But coming back to your original question I think you should try the 330i/Ci as these reportedly obtain 30mpg quite easily (even with the SSG box) and I don't think BMW diesels give quite the mpg benefit that you might at first think is there. If you really do want a diesel though I would also suggest checking out the 5-series diesel models because with secondhand BMW's you can pretty much have the equivalent 3 series or 5 series for similar money right now, and in my view why would you want a 3 when you can have the more substantial 5 instead? If you want to keep it in thge VAG family then MkIV R32s and various Seat Leon (petrol & diesel) are also in your price range now. My "surprise" suggestion would be to look at a diesel Mercedes ML. You'd be surprised at the prices these ML's are going for in the trade right now and the 280CDi model can return almost 30mpg on a run (according to my brother who is now on this third one) and has more toys on it than you'd believe. It's worth investigating at least because they're great cars despite the "chelsea tractor" image problem. HTH, John p.s. for what it's worth I wouldn't worry too much about the retrospective VED duty issue in future. I think it's probably safe to say that the Government are going to kick the idea of applying increases in VED restrospectively (for cars registered 2001-2007 ) well into the weeds now, although they are likely to retain it for new cars.

Not wishing to sound defeatist Ben but how far is Dave Walker's workshop from your folks' place? Short of going through the whole loom all over again merely to end up wondering if it's something in the config of the ECU triggering it might be sensible to get it booked in anyhow (you can cancel later if you do find the fault) JD pointed me at your post last night so he's seen your plight. Might it also be worth a cheeky post on Club GTi? There must surely be a few more people with R32/K3 experience on there (and DIY to boot) with brains to pick? Big J

WIth those custom grooves in the head I'd be surprised if you were able to drive it out of the garage without it blowing up. What appalling engineering. It's actually a shame to see a perfectly good engine mullered by morons like that.

The thing about the TT is that whilst it may seem like a great idea, it's reaching the kind of mileage where stuff is going to start falling off and breaking as various componants reach the limits of thier design lives over the next couple of years. Obviously the Corrado is well past that point now but it does have advantages in that at least it's possible to do a lot of work on the car yourself. An Audi TT is quite a different proposition to the DIY'er and far more jobs require diagnostic equipment, and specialist tools to carry out. If I were you I would ring around for more opinions on the cost of doing the 1.8T conversion. I really don't believe that the costs of that vs buying a TT are comparable, although I appreciate you would get something for your Corrado shell to offset some of the cost. Obviously everyone has thier own circumstances to cope with, but I would say it's worth a few extra calls to places like The Phirm or Jabbasport etc to check the costs out. Finally let's face it TT's are owned by girls and puddle-jumpers. They're looking so 1990's already IMHO. If you really do want a more contemporary & powerful 4WD car then look at an Audi S3 or S4. If you really just want to go quick a secondhand Evo6 is a much better choice than a TT and doesn't come with the effeminate image issue. [/i'll get my coat...]

Not "That" Rare John, There's another Raod on them, A Vento and a Polo that I know of, and I'm not a "Scene Whore" Doesn't matter though, because they suit Vicks car bang on! Fow shure :) I almost can't imagine a Polo sporting a set of those.

Not quite unique - Jay got the idea for Corvette wheels having seen a MkIV sitting on a set of them at one of the european shows, but certainly it was unique in the UK. The need to have a set of one-off adapters CNC'd to allow the fitment (which Jay specc'd and designed on Autocad himself) will ensure that they remain a very rare sight though. I also want to say that it's good to hear that the car is now in the hands of someone who'll be able to look after it. I hope Jay has still got those adapter designs saved on his PC, LOL.

I'm kinda with you there. Certainly the aircooled guys have the best shows. Stanford Hall, Stoner Park & BVF are all much better shows than anything watercooled - at least in the UK. On the other hand I'm more in love with the idea of a Beetle than I am with the thought of owning and driving one. Give me a VR6 anyday.

"Is your Corrado the most unreliable car you've ever owned?" - Yes. But I love it despite it's faults, and forgive it because it's elderly and because I drive it too hard when it is running :(