The hundreds of suppliers spread across many thousands of miles and multiple countries? I doubt that they’d want to incur that sort of expense.. I’ve worked in these facilities, and each of them is very specialized and generally not conducive to showing off. Going to the assembly plant works best for a low-overhead…

This is very true. I try to tell people about what I do at work, and always end up just trying to redirect the conversation to something else. It’s interesting if you have my background, but without that it’s really not very interesting at all. They do a good job for the most part, but I sometimes cringe at the…

That’s mostly done at outside parts suppliers or other plants. The actual factory mostly just assembles all the parts together into the final product. An all-inclusive, vertically integrated facility would be the size of a moderately large city, and would use an unsustainable amount of resources for any single…

Eh, mostly it’s just work after a while. I actually watched an episode that I recognized, halfway through, as the propane cylinder plant where I had interned under the metallurgist in college. I then went back and rewatched it and kept hearing “facts” that were “incorrect” or “horrifically oversimplified”. Still cool…

Try and get a ride in an Elise/Exige sometime. The shell seat is 6" below the super side side sill, and you’re ass is 2-3" off of the pavement. I’m built like a rail and it was a struggle getting out of the car after 5 minutes of gridding and one autocross run. I want one so badly, but just for the purpose of driving…

I’ll spot them the tires, as those are crazy easy to change out and you should choose the proper tire for how you’re using the car. Motorcycle mags always swap tires for track comparisons to keep the grip consistent between bikes.

They need to let you map out your own route and upload it to the Maps app directly. Some of us enjoy interesting, winding roads that aren’t the fastest route from point to point, but also like turn by turn navigation in our cars. You can build routes in the desktop version of Maps (My Maps specifically), but instead…

That sounds about right. Safety first only works if you’re keeping your head above water.

Rule #1: Don’t lift.

My AW11 has almost this exact wheel and it’s horrible.

No comment on the Naming, but as an AW11 owner I would tell you that it’s an excellent car and you should get it. It’s easy enough to fix, and at the end of the day it’s a Toyota so it’ll keep going for a long time.

Pre-check is still worth it, in that you and your fellow passengers don’t have to shed shoes, belts, liquids, and laptops which speeds up overall throughput.

Hopefully they move towards an actual racecar, rather than whatever it is I just saw.

This sort of car is the perfect first car.

It’s a small price to pay for the few that grow out of it and move on to better things.

Having a shitbox car was a major driver in cementing my enthusiast status. I didn’t have the “I’m going to screw up the car” fear that one might have with something halfway decent, and so I got over any hesitation about wrenching that I might have had. Because of this I don’t ever consider that I won’t be able to fix…

I thought British people could spell. They always harp on the English language, you’d think they’d give some of their own usage some attention. Perhaps this is just a trait of online Defender enthusiasts.

I’ve actually been searching for a rear bar after my last autocross. I put stiffer springs on, but I could still use a little more roll stiffness in the rear for rotation, and I think the factory rear bar would be a perfect addition.

It’s an early ‘86, no wing. Late enough that it doesn’t have the rear Anti-Roll Bar, but early enough that it has the mounts for one. I spent much of last year refreshing the exhaust (for smog purposes), suspension, and steering (and everything that I could get to that was made of 30 year old rubber). I’ve taken it on…