Brake fade is your components exceeding their thermal capacity and your setup’s ability to dissipate heat. The tires are still applying the same relative amount of dynamic friction, but the applied force from the brakes is lessened; hence the increase in stopping distances.

Oh wow. Let’s see. I’ve got a reasonably populated logbook from road racing in NASA, and enough hours competing and/or instructing for SCCA and a couple HPDE schools that I don’t give a crap whose opinion carries more weight.  I posited that you haven’t had enough seat time in a well balanced RWD chassis to know the…

No, it’s physics.  Your tires provide all the dynamic friction in stopping the car.  Your brakes provide the fulcrum force required to stop the car.  If you’ve ever had to race in the rain, you have experienced the utmost form of this phenomena.  Without rain slicks or some other treaded tire, you are eff’d no matter…

Wait, wut?? ... you think a sport-tuned FWD econobox platform is more playful than a RWD sedan with almost double the HP? Ummm ... how much seat time do you have in both? I have plenty and I can tell you which one I’d have more fun in without blinking.

Wut? COTA is crystal smooth compared to almost any other venue in the US.  Add in that it’s pricey for regular track days means that there’s less wear and tear from riffraff types who break/wreck on every track.

Amen. There are numerous nuances that make a manual more fun to drive, and if I’m shopping for a hoonigan Dad-mobile ... then I want all the funtastic options. My kids love the clutch kick u-turns ... (ahem) as long as my wife isn’t watching.

There is a sublime magic about wringing out a lightweight chassis at high rpm. For us lesser mortals, this can be done in an FD with sane levels of boost and a lightweight flywheel. I’ve driven/instructed in a reasonable array of go fast hardware, and nothing quite comes close to that essence of the rotary…

I’m told that the less glamorous exhaust note from the S55 is due to the exhaust routing to the turbos that has some pre-spool function. The exhaust note can be improved, but at some expense to performance. Unfortunately, it appears that BMW has continued this strategy on the S58.  

Had an FD with downpipe and hi-flow resonated cat. It was obnoxiously loud but only at the top of the rpm band. Friend had a single turbo FD with full straight pipe. It was L . O . U . D .

Side note: EVERY car looks better on TE-37’s.

This is due to BMW’s design preference where the bump stop is engineered to be part of the suspension travel. The E90 M3 started this trend, and it’s a weird logic in the application. It allows them to run a softer spring while still engineering stiffer dampening. Works ok ... gets tougher on skinny sidewalls. On…

1. Electric steering is still in its nascent stages. The E90 has electric assisted hydraulic steering, and it just works. Perhaps because the electric motor is mounted on the steering column and not the rack. I read somewhere that Porsche or Volvo figured out moving the motor on purely electric steering made a…

Proof that adding wider fenders and big wheels with low profile tires will make ANY car look better. 

Much like manual steering on a car with wide tires. I co-drove a 240Z racecar on 285 slicks, and maneuvering that thing out of the paddock was an arm workout. But once you got moving (and got some heat into the slicks), that monster was a ton of fun. Felt like you could place apexes within inches.

I suspect this transition in RA started with the E90, and fully manifested in the F30/80. This is the unfortunate balancing game BMW has gotten into with hedging towards volume sales. The average buyer doesn’t want to push hard to feel the car come alive. And we enthusiasts go slinking away once we discover these…

The E36 gets a bad rap because it’s the only M3 that looks identical to the regular 3-series. The boxy shape has aged well, IMHO.  And while the US version 240hp motor was torquey, it would’ve been a lot more fun at 300hp.

People also talk about how tiring it is to drive a manual in traffic, but won’t admit that they’re too lazy or out-of-shape ... or both. Clutches on modern sports cars are leagues different than the olden days of stiff-ass German engineered shifting. My E90 M3 is basically no different than shifting a Honda Civic. …

Except that the R34 still looks better, and unarguably sounds better.  But yeah, you’re spot on there.

Good gawd ... the understeer pit of hell is more fun than the tossable oversteer minion?  The platform vehicle engineering is more interesting than the 1000HP car that handles as well as it accelerates?  Just admit that you cannot handle high HP and at-the-limit handling ... your pedantry is boring and nobody cares…

Tesla’s don’t hoon well without some fuse removals and software fuss.  Another reason why I still love my dinosaur.