Street Class

Nobody is born with knowledge.  We all start out with a blank slate, more or less.  Certain creatures, perhaps, are instilled with a bit of evil right from the start.  Hitler, Charles Manson, and our cat Stig all come to mind.  Either way, the point is that we all have to start learning somewhere.

When we set out to work on a particular type of car or try to develop solutions for existing problems, a steep learning curve is always present.  We openly admit, for example, that the intricacies of Mitsubishi’s Active Yaw Control thoroughly elude us, and likely will for all eternity.  One method of learning is ghosting in forums.  We’ll plunge through the FAQ sections and search till our fingertips are raw to find what we need.  More often than not, there is no solution, and that’s where we can go to work and create one.

Stig, in particular, doesn’t care too much for these sessions, because we tend to get frustrated and throw paper wads at him, which makes him meyowl and go hide in a dark corner.  Usually he has it coming, because he likes to jump up on the counters and get into things.

Unlike a lot of aftermarket companies out there, we want to share our discoveries with you.  Until there is a significant amount of cash flowing into the company, like Saleen or Hennessey, our focus has to remain this side of giant twin-turbo conversions and making convertible SUVs or what have you.  A good example is the cold air intake we just finished developing for the 1986-90 Acura Legend.

Cost was a huge issue.   The expenses for parts ballooned way past double what we had anticipated.  There was no way we were going to cave and try to go the cheap route like eBay “profit-only” sellers and use chrome-painted plastic tubing and some knock-off filter that would be confused by air moving through it.  So clearly we had a quality mentality, but with quality parts comes great cost.

We didn’t want to go too overboard with the development either.  Who wants to buy an intake that’s contingent upon purchasing a different battery or moving the existing one too the trunk?  So we had to go around the battery and be happy.  For now.  We’re still mulling over that one.  As it is, we had to eliminate the valve breather hose setup from plugging into the intake and reroute it over the intake manifold.  Still thinking about that one too.  We’d rather not start having to drill holes into our intake elbow and trying to exact-fit that miserable hose back into the stock location.

So we’ve got our challenges ahead of us.  Just the other day one of us was wrestling with a vacuum hose and leaned too hard on another one, snapping it off.  It happens.  So look for more soul-revealing here in the future.   Lessons learned from the school of street.