dr_mat

The rear axle bushes are the flex you feel when you push the car hard into a corner. It doesn't so much feel like the back end is about to step out (I don't think so anyway), just that it's bending a bit.. don't forget it's also quite probable that you've only got the outside wheel touching the ground at those times.. :) You just don't notice it at any other time though unless they're so far gone the back end is slopping about, and it would never pass an MOT like that! I have to say I've never been scared by a Corrado, it's always been ultimately forgiving when you do something stupid. And winding up fishtailing under heavy braking from 90 on a wet, bumpy, narrow and curved road on the first test drive I think it's fair to say I know how forgiving they can be.. (That corner just wasn't visible till it was too late, and you know how it is on test drives.. you're not in your home turf..) The trick is to push it at sensible speeds in the wet at times when you have plenty of space and see what happens, this will give you more confidence in it. The steering (and your arse) will tell you immediately when it's about to lose grip, and even then it'll only slide a bit, they NEVER snap out, and as long as you remember the golden rule of FWD cars - open the throttle for more stability - you can escape from anything. I've had full-opposite-lock-omigod-I-ran-out-of-steering-rack moments that I was never ever going to recover if I hadn't dropped it into 2nd gear and booted it to pull the front end round. A brilliantly controllable car! :D

The passive rear steering just uses the flex in the axle bushes to allow the whole axle to shift slightly, it's quite simplistic really. A mechanically sound Corrado is what they call "well balanced" - i.e. under heavy cornering it will understeer, four-wheel-drift, or oversteer pretty much at your whim. Even if you do provoke some oversteer it's not twitchy though - the tall tyre sidewalls, flexible bushes and long suspension arms ensure that it will regrab the road and hang onto it as soon as it can, so it's rare to find yourself ditch-finding. Also, if you do find the car nudging towards oversteer just apply a bit more throttle and you'll shift the car's balance back towards understeer, it's generally quite controllable. Of course, if you've got crappy mismatched tyres, or one (or more) bad shock absorbers, or rotten bushes or springs, or you just plain hit a patch of oil or something, no amount of chassis design can get you grip where there isn't any..

Actually more overlap means more top end, and a less smooth idle. Lower lift means slightly less aggressive, however. They probably perform similarly but if anything the Schricks would probably be more torquey.

I guess you were unlucky .. parts fail, that much is true. Fact is a refurb should be just as good as a new one, if it's done right. Sad fact is it rarely is done right, or so it seems..

Vince at Stealth put a recon rack on my VR for £125+VAT, part was from GSF. It doesn't surprise me that VW have pumped the price of the replacement parts (they'd rather the Corrado didn't exist, since it makes the new Scirocco look like a poof..), but there are parts from golfs that are cheap and compatible.

Sounds like a faulty steering rack...

The Corrado VR6 is known to suffer from this when you fit *any* after-market clutch. No matter the quality, they just aren't quite right somehow. Buy a VW one.

You heard correctly. If there's nothing majorly wrong with your engine it'll probably just run a bit rich for a while until it adapts properly. There's a thread out there with a description of the training sequence though, or maybe it's on the wiki, or something..

Description of the problem sound a bit like you're describing pinking, which can occur on heavy throttle at low revs when you have bad fuel/air mix or are running exceptionally lean, which *does* point back towards the lambda ..

..but it is a *good* noise on a VR6.. :)

Petrol (and/or E85 and/or some other hydrocarbon-based fuel) is, as I said, the right way to get energy to the vehicle, I agree. How you use it once it's there is another matter and making the car more efficient really means it should be burning fuel only to generate electricity which is then stored in batteries and drives traction motors. This is one of the few ways that might improve the still-pathetic 40% energy efficiency of a modern petrol engine. I agree that switching to hybrid petrol/diesel-electric systems and traction motors isn't viable for all the existing cars on the road, but new cars really should be going that way. Bread prices have risen in the last five years because of the increasing use of land for biofuel instead of wheat, aswell as the more immediate recent Russian problems. Rice is suffering the same consequences. We don't notice cos it's 10p on the price of a kilo, but in poorer economies these small fractions make a huge difference to the affordability. e.g. http://www.irri.org/publications/today/ ... /36-37.pdf

I have one, and found it generally no better than no charger at all. At its best it'll just about cover the battery drain when it's in full sun. If you've a cloudy day or the charger is in shade you won't even cover the normal battery drain, let alone actually *charging* the battery aswell. So best case scenario is it'll buy you some more time before the battery goes flat, that's all. (Unless you buy a really big one and live in a strangely sunny climate of course..!) I'd love to say it's a solution, but it's not. Use a wired trickle charger, that's the only solution that works.

Weekends only. Work is 18 minutes walk, or 7 minutes cycle away and parking is a nightmare. Taking the Corrado would be stoooopid. The battery remains connected, but I use an Optimate trickle charger to keep it topped up, otherwise there's no way it would last. Lead acid batteries die prematurely if you let them drop charge levels for long periods of time. Typical Corrado battery drain will flatten a good battery in one month, ish, so you need to get the battery topped up at least weekly to prevent long term damage. The car itself doesn't seem to suffer from longer term lack of use, though. Ok the tappets go a bit noisy, but that goes away quickly enough.

Yeah, and look what happened to the price of bread and rice already, and it's only really impacting a tiny proportion of cars on the road at the moment. The best solution is some sort of hybrid - hydrocarbons are the single best method of getting the energy to the car in the first place, but once it's there you should burn it only to generate electricity to a) charge your short-range batteries and/or b) propel the car directly using its electric traction motor.

I like the diesel-electric combo idea.. I've said that before as a far more efficient way of turning oil into propulsion.. Maybe we're at the point where the necessary hardware can be made small enough and light enough to be worthwhile in a passenger car, not just the huge trains where it's been so effective for the last 50+ years. Yes I'd miss the VR6 noise, but hey, it's a bit pointless (not even thinking of environmentals) to lose a few hundred lbft torque AND spend ten times as much on fuel just to hear that noise ... As for bioethanol .. I remain sceptical about the viability of sourcing the necessary quantities without impacting food supply in this world. We've already seen that farmers will sow the crops that make them the most money regardless.. (Unless the government basically steps in and pays them the price difference, which is what the EU farming subsidies are all about.)

And using genuine VW ones helps a lot in the smoothness stakes.. Maybe not for ultimate stiffness but they are better at damping the vibrations.

It'll only have an effect if there was something wrong with the previous adaptation! In principle the ecu is supposed to adapt to the engine all the time, and will hone its tuning every time the crank turns. It will learn more quickly by doing the basic settings procedure, but it's only usually worthwhile when you have made major changes to the engine in a short period of time.

Mine has 139,000 miles on it, fwiw, and has never been apart. I expect clatters and knocks ..

My own observations after 7 years of (ageing) Corrado VR6 ownership are pretty much this: - idle is lumpy when the engine is "hot". (Stuck in traffic in the summer, kinda thing) - idle is lumpy when the engine has done a lot of short journeys - idle is lumpier when fully adapted, than when you reset the ECU and it's running rich About the only times it'll idle butter-smooth are after a good long cruise where you're able to drive the car gently to temperature and heat soak doesn't settle in, or when you've just started it cold and it's chucking so much fuel in the exhaust fumes would kill you in one go. As for the clatter .. they all seem to do that, to some extent. You've had all the right bits done, (well, you missed out the oil pump drive gears, but depending on who did the work they might have done that at the same time). And no, it'll never be as smooth as a modern v6... :)

Don't drive the Corrado much these days, but every time I get chance to take it out on a reasonably open country road.. The smile spreads, the speed picks up, the revs climb, the car just once again feels "right".. I'm hooked, I admit it. Third gear gets me every time ...

If you just want a battery that starts the car, just buy a battery that fits, and has at least 55Ah. Ish. Then keep it charged. If you need a battery that'll run banging choons for three hours in a field, you might need to look a bit harder... :)

I think so, the rolling radiuses would be different, the tyre belts would have to be asymetrical too, and the handling would be really weird.. I think it's just a bit of a fantasy idea, and I really can't see it catching on or even really being viable let alone delivering on any of the promises they're making..

If you're losing oil and it's not going in the water then yes, you're burning it. The consensus seems to be that if you get a puff of blue smoke when you start the car after standing for a while then it's likely the valve stem seals dribbling down into the cylinders. If you get a puff of smoke when you go back on the throttle after a period on the overrun, chances are it's bore wear. But either way there *will* be tell-tale blue smoke. Just a question of if there's enough you'd be able to notice it when you're in the car..

Well, ignore the headline on this one, physics tells you it's nothing to do with fuel economy, but thought a few people might be interested to see cambered tyres on the horizon.. the aim is you can run heavy camber forever and it'll not wear the tyre so quickly. I do question if this "development" wouldn't just make the car handle worse, in all circumstances, but we'll wait and see, huh? http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/08/16/0213238/Cambered-Tires-Can-Improve-Fuel-Economy Also very weird, and mostly depressing, seeing the slashdot crowd doing an article about cars... They can pontificate knowledgably on computers all day long, but this is just embarrassing ...

It's the fine line between constant paranoia and blithe ignorance resulting in destitution! All engines have silent failure modes, the VR6 isn't alone in this ...