I want to start this piece by saying that I love the modification scene. I love to see what people come up with when given free reign with nothing but a car and their own creativity. I love to see what people build on a shoestring budget, and I love to see the absolute monsters that come out of big sponsored builds.
But there are a number of reasons why I’ve never really been bitten by the modding bug myself, and they’re mostly to do with the fact that modified motors are an absolute pain in the backside to drive most of the time. Such cars generally only make sense within a small set of parameters that need to be explained – “sure it drives horribly, but it looks great at a car show”, or “yeah, I know the steering is impossible at low speeds, but it comes alive on the track” are two examples I’ve heard on my travels.
Below are a few aspects of modified cars that bug me, and are the reason I’ll stick to fairly restrained modifications on my own car in the future.
1. They’re too damn loud
Yeah, I know I sound like a massive wuss right now, but have you ever actually spent a lot of time in a car with a crazy loud exhaust? The novelty wears off really damn fast. I have so much respect for people who are either dedicated or stubborn enough to put up with a ludicrous exhaust.
The problem is that most sound amazing under full load, but drone like you’ve got a wasp nest in your ear the rest of the time – I drove a Toyota AE86 with a bonkers exhaust for three hours on a motorway, and as fantastic as that car is, I refused to drive it for the rest of the shoot!
2. They make you hyper aware
The great thing about manufacturers pumping millions of pounds, dollars and yen into research and development is that you can be pretty confident that everything’s going to just work. When you leave a car stock you’re never too worried about clanks and whirrs and groans from under the hood, but when you’ve invested time and money into modifying your car you’re constantly listening out for signs it’s about to die.
If you’re the kind of person who’s happy when stuff goes wrong because it means you get to fix it, that might be fine, but for the rest of humanity being permanently on edge while driving, it isn’t that appealing.
3. Everything you do is multiplied
Once you start going all in on modifying, all the occasional expenses you used to put into your car become a lot more frequent and a lot more expensive. If you currently top up your oil every few months, you’ll find that you’ll be checking it weekly once you fit that new turbo. And it’s not just oil – once you start adding performance, it begins to snowball to other parts of the car. More power? Now you need better brakes. Bigger brakes don’t fit inside your stock wheels? New set of alloys it is, then.
It might be fun seeing a project progress, but there’s rarely a final satisfaction where you know that you’ve finished.
4. The ride is almost always horrendous
This E46 has awesome suspension, but it’s still too hard in everyday driving
Throughout the last couple of decades, every car manufacturer’s marketing department was suckered into the attitude that for something to be a ‘performance car’ it had to have a bone-shaking ride. Fortunately suspension technology has moved on, and now we’re getting fast cars that don’t blur your vision over every imperfection in the road.
Unfortunately the same can’t necessarily be said about every modified car I’ve ever been in. Even the BMW E46 M3 owned by our very own John, which has a very high-end suspension setup, is pretty hard around town (though in all fairness it’s sublime when you drive hard and load it up). Unfortunately suspension is one of those things you can’t do on the cheap, and ride is one of the easiest ways to ruin a car.
5. The interior is not a nice place to be
This only really applies to the super-modified rides that require extra gauges and controllers with readouts that must be judged all the time. It’s hard to make stick-on gauges look like they belong, and having controllers with readouts cluttering up the footwell grates quickly. For me, the interior of a car needs to be comfortable – even in a performance car – because when I’m on the limit I only want to be focusing on the driving experience. If there’s a gauge rattling about on the dash or a wire touching my knee it takes me out of the moment.
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