LENSPEED

By James Wong

I may have been driving my 2006 MkV GTI for quite a while, but my car ownership history indicates that the average age of my cars is 15 years old. I’m no stranger to something from the 1990s – I have been observing and appreciating cars ever since I could say car brands. In fact, I could still remember telling my dad that I liked the ‘lion’ logo on the back of a Peugeot 406 when one was in front of us at the drive-through McDonald’s at King Albert’s Park. No kidding; I thought it was the most beautiful car in the world. Strange era indeed.

My first 90′s car, the NA Miata MX-5, didn’t feel like it was nearly 20 years old. The gearshift was click-clack slick, something that I only came to appreciate only a few years after I sold the car. The engine started every single time, the suspension supple and robust and the exhaust throaty. In fact, I took for granted every single aspect of the car. It had such a store of perfect balance and exploitability that I never dipped into. Every single day, I still wished I had it in my garage.

One thing I especially took for granted was its reliability. Sure it had some rattles from the interior, but otherwise it ran just as well as any modern car. It must be the Japanese engineering. I was thinking to myself, hey, why are people buying new cars at all?

Fast forward to 2010, when I was on the front porch of a man from Hackbridge, London. He jumps his car to life (which took a couple of tries), pumped up his tyres (which must have been left flat for several days) and said the second gear crunch I heard was normal for all Mk2 GTIs. Oh, and where would normally be a radio I see a bunch of wires. ‘I took it out after someone tried to break into the car’, he quips.

So despite all of that, I bought it. Why? The car’s exterior and interior was immaculate, especially the interior. Maybe they replaced all of it. I don’t know. But I liked it. And I was desperate for a car before my reading week was over. Coming from Singapore, it seemed rather cheap too. How mistaken I was. Anyway, I handed over 1500 quid and happily drove it home just like that. I was so intrigued and thrilled at the same time that I could buy a car from someone’s porch and drive it home on the same day. I was on a high – I had a car, it feels good, I bought it for a fraction of what it sells for back home. If my MX-5 was so reliable, and this car looks and goes rather normally, all should be well. Right?

Sadly, in the following 6 months, I had to call 999 to help me push my car to the side street after I got stranded in the middle of a 6-lane thoroughfare in the thick of winter, replace my tyres, replace my brakes, replace my cooling system, my clutch cable, exhaust and a whole assortment of suspension parts. And a whole lot of other things I rather not remember. Then I opined: what a fool I was. Thankfully, I had this experience which taught me a couple of good lessons about buying used cars.

After all the fixes, the car felt great. Sure, it isn’t particularly fast, but I like how it flows down a road. Very chuckable, very easy to drive and place, extremely practical and a great daily. In other words, it’s some kind of magic. But cheap prices and servicing aside, owning an old car isn’t all easy. There’s still this fear lingering in the background every single time when I unlock the car (can it unlock?) and twist the ignition (does it start?). The heart always skips a beat when the car first cranks but thankfully the car has spared me from the heart-stopping moments so far. Well, apart from one time when it died and only started again after a good ol’ prayer…

There are other foibles. Parts might be difficult to come by. Standards we’re used to in 2012 may be so far ahead of the benchmark in 1990 that it’s laughable. You aren’t doing very well in a 90′s car by way of safety either. And 9km/l from a 1.8L with 116bhp (probably far less today)? Not great. So we car enthusiasts shouldn’t totally discount modern cars. We’ve come to lean on them, forgetting that just only a decade or two ago, our cars were built very differently from today.

That said, old cars are still the bomb. I like to draw parallels, just like everybody else who found out just how old my Mk2 is, with my age. In the past 22 years, I have grown and matured to be a man. In the past 22 years, my Mk2 has witnessed an inevitable decline into old age. The reality is, as the years tear past, old cars are just going to be rarer, more troublesome, more impractical and in all just a headache. But you know what? It is worth every bit of the trouble. Just be prepared for an adventure (ie. inconveniences), a laugh (say, a broken clutch cable) and lots of love (when it is 2am and the car wouldn’t start). As car enthusiasts, I don’t think that’s too much to ask of us.

By James Wong

I must narrate this down. It’s getting unbearable how people think the Mercedes E-Class is so comfortable and so relaxing. It may have been for models of the past, but of the W212 and especially in Avantgarde guise, I have to beg to differ.

We forget the importance of comfort so much. Comfort does not mean softly sprung. Comfort does not mean being a softie. It certainly doesn’t mean wallowing about. Let’s talk a bit about what it really is.

A Lexus is relaxing and cossetting, but does it really expound the qualities of being comfortable? An unruffled ride must not only be agreeable but also be at one with the flow and momentum of a car. For instance, a softly sprung American car (of which there are many bad examples) will bounce, rebounding several times after hitting a pothole. This after-effect or aftershock resulting from the irregular road is not comfortable. It, therefore, rejects the notion of softly-sprung cars being comfortable.

Also, some people out there think comfort is for sedate drivers. Oh how short-sighted is this view on so many levels? On one, ride comfort is tied inexplicably to how much tyre the car can put on the road given irregular surfaces. Yes, you can have a rock-hard suspension, thereby giving the impression that you are indeed sitting low and having as much rubber on the road as you can, but is it really the best solution? Perhaps on the race track, where the tarmac is very smooth, but not on public roads, and definitely not on roads as pockmarked as the UK’s. A hard suspension on irregular surfaces will hop and jump and generally not be on the road where it is supposed to be – thereby sacrificing precious traction and causing jarring imbalance to a car’s stability. A well-sorted suspension is such a great contributor to a car’s drivability and fun factor that I will go as far to say that believers of harder suspension = better handling need a major rethink of their car knowledge. So comfort isn’t really as simple as soft, it’s also about how a car flows down a road.

So now that we know what comfort is, we come back to the W212. It’s funny how nowadays, the extras actually detract from the full-on best experience of cars. I have a strong feeling that the base spec, 16″ comfort suspension E-Class is the best model to buy. No need for the fancy Avantgarde pack with the lower and stiffer suspension or the AMG kit. How about this – the Avantgarde suspension is about as a comfortable as a brick. At low to medium speeds, which is what you will experience most in Singapore roads, the suspension is hopeless. It is jarring, unnecessarily stiff and unfriendly, completely at odds with the E-Class values. Over humps, you might mistake the car for losing a spring or two over the ordeal. Now, I know it’s supposed to be sportier suspension, but it definitely does not need to be that firm. Sure, the car handles nicely but it’s not worth the trade-off in ride comfort at all, not for an E-Class at least. Like mentioned before, flow is more important.

OK, I have an inkling on why the car feels as such. On German tarmac, it’ll probably be a whole lot better. Couple that to the fact that the E-Class is usually likely to cover long distances on the Autobahn most of its life – and that I must say it does very, very well – the car engineers probably didn’t foresee the problem of the jarring ride to be happening so often as the car wasn’t built to crawl in cities. Sadly, a large proportion of them do just that for their whole lives. For some reason, the suspension seems tuned to high-speed, relatively smooth driving but is completely pants at the slower stuff. This applies to the gearbox as well.

If you’ve driven any of the 5-speed Mercedes autoboxes, you probably didn’t have a problem with them before until you encounter them paired with the new turbo-ed engines. Given the peaky delivery of the engines (despite having a light pressure turbo, the E is still a very heavy car for 1.8 litres), the gearbox drags the engines to ungentlemanly levels before it switches gear. This is so unacceptable I don’t know where to begin. For one, why give a 2011 car inferior 5-speed gearbox technology when competitors are already going to 6, 7 or 8 speeds? Second, why is the darn gearbox so poorly paired with the engine? Third, why do the old 5-speeders in the W211 actually feel better? Fourth, why the heck am I in third gear at 60km/h with the engine revving at 3,200rpm? Shift up!

My theory is that in a temperate climate, the turbo engine probably has to work less to give the power delivery, thus when tested at those climates the gearbox functions well. That concurs with my experience when driving the E in cool weather – it does seem a lot smoother. In the tropical climate however, the engine probably produces less power, which probably messes up the tuning of the gearbox with the engine.

Again, MB probably tested the car on high-speed runs, which did not test the quality of the shifts as the car cruised on top gear anyway. As to why it feels better in the W211? Probably the instantaneous torque of the old supercharged engine helped to mask any lag in the gearbox. I have no explanation for why the 5-speed is still around though. I think Mercedes knows too, which is why all E-Class models will get the 7-speeder from mid-2011. Nice way to leave current W212 drivers in the lurch.

Mercedes really needs to sort these little issues out. It can’t allow its most popular model, the E-Class, to stray from its core values. Sure, most magazines you read out there say the car has gone back to its roots in the W212. I say most definitely not, not after driving the car for a good year and knowing its faults in and out. Oh, and Mercedes still doesn’t do quality control well enough. The suspension is already making noises at low-speed. That’s only after a year and 18,000km.

I guess that’s why Mercedes is now the third-place brand behind Audi and BMW in global sales. For my love of the 3 pointed star, criticism is the best way to mend broken products.

PS. In the interest of this article, I would very much like to try a W212 in standard spec – ie. not Avantgarde or AMG. If you are keen to contribute to the knowledge of the article and allow a test drive, please get in touch!

By James Wong

Selling a car has always been difficult.

There’s the emotional attachment, part of which stems from the experience of time spent with the car. The other part, which is a lot more painful and starkly clear, is the money spent: a car is a money pit no matter how you try to justify it. So with all of that investment, naturally, you would look for returns. Selling a car at what you may deem as fair value would probably appear ridiculous to any prospective buyer. But that is how it works. One party has to give, and poof – suddenly thousands of dollars disappear into thin air.

I have two cars in my ownership now – both Volkswagens. I won’t deny that I am tired of at least one of them. I have worked the German front-wheel drive formula for a long time. Actually, it’s only been 2 years. But in a young man’s life, that is rather lengthy.

One, a 1990 Mk2 GTI 8v, was bought in haste and then repaired in haste as well. Young man mistakes aside, it has been a faithful car, but alas, it has also been rather anodyne. Predictable handling, unbeatable practicality and ease of driving are great traits, but I am made hungry for thrills because of all of this dependability. Unfortunately, I might live to regret it sooner than I think, but then the young ‘uns shouldn’t be afraid to live, right?

The other, a 2006 MkV GTI, has the tricked-out go-faster bits. The ECU chip, the exhaust, the brakes, the anti-roll bar. Yes, all good things. It’s been a better experience than the Mk2, I think, not least because it is at least more reliable. There’s also a shed load more power and torque, plus that gearbox is still a novelty in 2012 in a hatchback. I like this car. In fact, anything I change to after this would probably be a step back in terms of an all-round package. Well, I’ll just see who will pay my price. If nobody steps forward, I am quite happy sticking with it as well (turbo engine and DSG gearbox, please do not live up to expectations and fail prematurely).

So let’s focus on the Mk2 GTI. It’s a UK car, so I am looking for a UK replacement. God knows how much I have toiled with the dastardly insurers in looking for a new car. Car insurance in the UK is shockingly expensive, pure extortion, unpredictable, surprising and ridiculous. I guess it’s also some reflection on how the country is. Just look at the Hammersmith flyover issue that’s been hot in the news now. But I guess that’s for another story.

After all of that hunting high and low in the last couple of months, exploring cars as diverse as a air-cooled Porsche 911 to a BMW M5, I have come up with a list of the following (coincidentally, this has also been sent to my dad as a proposal).

1) Mazda RX-7 FD3S

2) Toyota MR2 W20

3) Renaultsport Clio 200 Cup

4) Peugeot 306 Rallye

Peel below the choices above and my reasons start to appear quite quickly. The RX-7 needs no introduction as an utterly bonkers car, yet also something that you would never own, with all of the talk of its unreliability and problems killing any thoughts of practical ownership. Yet, it remains a truly special automobile and surely one of the most beautiful ever to come out of Japan. It also has such a special motor, the rotary, twin-turbo’ed officially in this model to produce mind-boggling power in that era. All that power, of course, has come to haunt the engine, which can barely keep its own even in a naturally aspirated guise. Still, its small displacement makes it attainable for me in terms of insurance, which is quite a surprise given the car’s reputation. I am sure you can see the reason why it makes my list.

The MR2 is up there because I first fell in love with how it looks. Having owned a NA Miata before, I am a sucker for pop-up headlights. The car is also mid-engined, something rather special in its price bracket and it’s not a bad engine either, the 3S-GE which is good for 178bhp in its final production spec. I like the gearshift action too, plus the practical and sensible interior. What isn’t so great is its 2-seater restriction, which means no big road trips with the lads. However, it ticks all of the right boxes – although – because of insurance I am denied the turbo model, which I think is the more focused driver’s car of the MR2 range. No denying that the NA model is a special one too, definitely a driver’s car and a candidate for the perfect steer.

The newest car of the lot is the Clio. A stick shift, good looks and a great engine plus supreme handling makes this the most sensible car of the lot (of course, you pay for it in the purchase price, which is at least double anything else here). But I’ve always loved those Recaros, plus French front-drivers always had a different handling temperament when compared to the German hatches. That’s something I have wanted to try ever since I got recommended by a friend to the world of French hot hatches…

Which brings me to the 306 Rallye. Probably the most sensible old Pug to own and with killer lift-off oversteer I am raring to go try. Dirt cheap too as these cars have reached nearly the bottom of their depreciation curve. The only way is up as less and less of these stay on the market. I’ll settle for a GTi6 too.

So, clearly, all cars I would be so happy to drive and noticeably, nothing German for now (either too much of the same formula or too frickin’ expensive to insure and upkeep). What are your thoughts on these cars? Write to me if you have any other suggestions which I should be looking at (although I am pretty sure I have considered nearly every car in the market today). Sickeningly, I had to resort to search up 318is models as well as diesel Fiestas in my desperation for cheaper insurance quotes. If I ever do that again, do remind me why I am writing for Lenspeed and then go direct me to a driver’s car, okay?

By Gerald Yuen

I have to admit that settling into a car with a manual drivetrain proved to be a rather daunting task three months ago, since the last time I handled a stick was under a driving instructor’s supervision, where having freedom to maneuver the Civic was the last thing on my mind filled with information overload. It didn’t help for the subsequent four years, when I didn’t have the chance to manhandle a stick shift. There’s a newfound appreciation behind manual gearboxes, given more wheel time. And here’s why.

The 1 Series M Coupe was the car that taught me that driving fast does not necessarily equate to fun, however immensely ironic it may sound. I was greeted by an empty stretch of tarmac, and it seemed only logical to plant my right foot down, but I didn’t in some subconscious fashion. Do I want to feel the shove of 450nm, or do I want to work each gearshift to analyse the mechanical beauty behind each shift? I would definitely be lying if I told you that I didn’t want to experience what the straight six aided by two fully functioning angry typhoon fans could do.

I would love to execute both at the same time, but my inability to make both ends meet was a blessing in disguise. In step my left foot, which had been way too lazy for the past four years, and out step my right, which seemed to have a mind of his own in the past – “Mr Right” only wanted to press on without thinking of the consequences. Every subsequent movement from the lower limbs was nothing short of a bundle of joy. I’ve been told that driving a manual transmission in Singapore was impractical and tiring, but they had never ever crossed my mind (think Bangkok streets, and drivers bordering on the limits of insanity). Of course, the M’s slick short shifter added to the sensation, but this school of thought was ditched out of the window when I tried other cars in the subsequent months, namely the Suzuki Swift Sport, Megane RS 250 Cup Monaco GP Edition and the Citroen DS3 1.6 150THP.

 We have to go more than skin-deep to understand how to make use of all four limbs to the best of our coordinating ability, to inch every bit of emotion out of every little input that you make, be it shifting or depressing the clutch. Every imperfection during early execution stages will be a step forward for the driver to find gratification in future shifts – and the reward will be Huge.

I had been a petrolhead ever since the days where I crashed my first decked-out Tamiya car against the kitchen door, but understanding how others find joy in driving toys for big boys was a challenge at that immature stage of growth. Fast forward a decade and I’m certainly privileged to comprehend the excitement when enthusiasts talk to me about the beauty of utilising a stick shift. It’s better late than never. I urge fellow petrolheads, whom like me, grow up in an era where numbered gear knobs sounded ancient, to dispose of lightning quick dual clutches, and hop into a good ol’ manual car, and you will never regret and forget the sensation derived from having full control of the machine, at any point in time, at any speed. If you have a Class 3A license (automatic-only license in Singapore), enroll in manual driving lessons and I assure you that you will find more joy behind the wheel.