Scare the crap out of back seat drivers! Manual transmission Step 1. Find your straight line through the rear window. Fix your eyes on a spot in the distance, this should keep you on course. Step 2. Pop it into reverse and floor the throttle. Step 3. At around 25-30mph take your foot off the accelerator. This doesn’t need to be a pretty or smooth manoeuvre but it does need to be quick as the idea is to unbalance the rear suspension. Step 4. With your hand on the steering wheel at seven to nine o’clock throw the steering wheel away to the right. This now unbalances the front end and the car will automatically fly straight round. If it’s a good J-turn the rear wheels will stay virtually still as the front wheels spin around to the front. Step 5. Look forward, clutch down and into first gear. Drive away. How hard is that? For automatics the final step is even easier as you don’t use the clutch. Step 5. (Automatic) Look forward, change from reverse into drive and away you go. Taken from the book How to Drive a Tank, more stunt driving techniques can be found here: www.frankcoles.com If you’re interested in receiving a free Kindle/ebook edition, just drop me a line either in the comments below. Learn these skills for yourself at www.stuntdriveuk.com

Had my R33 for nearly a year. Everything was learnt from level zero. Recently I have decided to put adjustable suspensions in and learnt a few things I thought I would share with some ‘rookies’ like myself who hasn’t done this before. I found infomation on ajustable suspensions online isn’t as easy to find as I thought. Especially the ‘how-to’ info. A few months ago I decide to get my adjustable suspensions. So I did my research for different brands etc, and took a long time to find them because I am on a budget so I was looking for affordable used ones. After I found it then I was excited and realy to have them in my car. Then I was asked if I plan to change mags…??? because if I change mags the height will change and each time we adjust the height there is a chance I might have to do another wheel alignment. And I wasn’t planning to spend an extra -60 for wheel alignment so I kept my suspensions in the house for a few months while I took more time to find the mags which is also fits my budget. Weeks and weeks went by I found the mags. I have both the mags and suspensions put on my car at my desired height. Then we found the 9″ wide rear wheels were rubbing against the rear guards. So I had to get the guards rolled up so save my tyres. In summary I had learnt the procedures in this little project: 1. Search for the mags first. Research for desired size, width, style, brand etc. If on a budget, look around to understand what the market value is for the particular mags you want so you can budget correctly. What I did was I collected tons of photos of white skyline R33 from Google, then I look at them all to decide what’s my desired mags. Wrong mags for the wrong car or colour can look aweful… 2. Search for the suspension. I found Tein is very popular and I saw them more often in the second hand market, followed by HKS. But Tein seem to have better feedbacks second hand. Mine is KTS, it’s very uncomon but I grabed because the guy gave me an awesome deal (I have learnt the market value) and they were in almost brand new condition. It’s a good Japanese brand too. Some people will go for BC Gold or D2. I say why not if they are in very good conditon and if the deal is good. 3. Put the suspensions and wheels on. If it’s height adjustable, let it set for a week. So if you have any track day booked you know you need to allow at least 10 days in this process. After a week, adjust the height again because during that week the bush will set and the car will be lowered again. I have my car higher than most track cars because it’s also a daily driver. 4. At the right height, if the guards are rubbing then you will need the guards rolled. When you roll the guards, often the paint will start to flake off. My car is over 10 years old so it flaked off badly. The cracks were progressing it’s way up. The flaking paint can worsen and you will need a new paint job. So before it got worse, I used Hammer paint (white, same colour as my car) and paint it real thick on the guards where it was rolled at. The paint worked like glue and should stop any more flaking from the cracked areas. It’s important to do this before the crack goes up to body surface where people can see. No body can see my brush strock under the car where it was rolled and had cracked. 5. Wheel Alignment. I havn’t done mine becasue after I have everything installed I found the car travels on a straight line well when I had my hands off the steering wheel for a few seconds. But just incase yours doesn’t, it’s good to prepare a 50-60 dollars budget for this job done as well. As far as budget goes, these might be the only things you need to search or get quotes for. It’s fun to have a nice ride, but not much fun if the expenses are putting stress on my life and relationshps eh. Sorry I wouldn’t give away the prices I paid for the items or jobs done by mechanic etc. They can be sensitive information as people have got a business to run. But make a few phone calls you will get an idea. At last for R33 SKYLINE people, if you are going to do what I did. I have also made a little mod on my speaker panels so I can make damper adjustment on my rear suspensions without having to remove the seats, the speakers and the panel. Here is the video for anyone who is interested: Here: nz.youtube.com

Left-foot braking is a technique that you can use with your front wheel drive car. It will help you during cornering while you are going at high speeds. Left foot braking technique prevents the understeer situation. Driving at high speeds, if you try to turn sharply at a corner, the car won’t behave the right way as you might have thought. Instead it will go in the same direction. Such a situation is called a understeer. Using the left foot braking technique you’ll be providing the car some grip at its front wheels, more than in the rear wheels. This will help you to turn the car the way you wanted.

While you are at the turn, start slowing down the car a bit. Apply the brake using your right foot. Now, you may downshift the car, and for this you may use the heel and toe downshifting method. Once you do that, take your right foot from the brake and place it over the accelerator. Don’t pull of your foot from the accelerator now. Apply brake using your left foot. And you must do both these steps together. These are the things that you should be doing efore using the technique known as letf-foot braking. Now let’s get into left-foot braking.

You may use the method explained above in order to slow down the car as it reached near the turn. Now, as you reach the corner, you may use your right foot to hit the gas and at the same time you should be planning to apply brake using the other foot. What it does is that – it will lock down the rear wheels and now only the front wheels will be moving. This way, the weight of the car will be transferred to the front wheels. Thus, the front wheels would be getting much better grip than earlier. This is what we were trying to achieve at the beginning. Now we are in a situation which is known as oversteering. And now the car will start to oversteer. This is what you have to do, if you are going at high speed and wanna take a sharp turn at the corner.