Wow, if you are from Southern California, we experienced some pretty crazy weather this past weekend! It was pretty danged cold outside and to top it off, it was raining pretty hard. There was an international D1 Grand Prix event at Irwindale. Pretty good way to welcome our foreign guests, huh? I bet you they were expecting sunny blue skies and palm trees. So Cal is not like the movies guys!

I got my car back from Tanabe! I’m testing out their Sustec Pro Seven coilovers right now. Pretty much, it’s the next generation of the Tanabe DDs (my previous coilovers that I thought were good). The good thing about these coilovers is that they improved the dampening so that it feels much tighter. On the Tanabe DD, the coilovers felt great when the dampers were set stiffer but at soft, it felt like the dampers didn’t match well with the springs. With the new Sustec Pro Sevens, the coilovers feel great through the entire damper setting range. They are even pretty comfortable when set full soft! Another improvement is that there are 16 different damper settings instead of the previous 4. I’m also currently testing their TEAS electronic active suspension controller, which is much like Tein’s product where you can adjust dampening from inside the car, but it has some even more impressive features. The controller unit gets a signal from the ECU telling the controller wheel speed. On full auto mode, the controller will adjust according to the speed of the vehicle. You also have 4 memory settings so that you can quickly change settings depending on the type of driving/racing you are doing, or different tracks that require different setups. So far, everything is really cool driving it on the street. I can’t wait to see how it does on the track when I leave it on full auto mode. I’m also interested in how it will feel during autocross and gymkhana. I know it allows you to fine tune the way it auto adjusts, so I’m really excited to see how much I can do with this thing!

Tanabe also custom fitted me a Concept G Blue exhaust so that it would fit with my extreme aero a little bit better. Basically they took the S13 exhaust kit and extended the exhaust further out. MAN, the exhaust sounds MEAN!! There’s no pre-muffler, so it’s just piping from the catalytic converter all the way to the muffler cannister. And the best thing is that it’s pretty quiet with the silencer in. But once you take the silencer out, it’s ear bleeding time baby!

Now I can focus on getting a few other things taken care of before the January 27th event.