A hobby is a hobby is a hobby. I don't care that folks do stuff that doesn't meet my style, its just good that they are playing with cars.
A hobby is a hobby is a hobby. I don't care that folks do stuff that doesn't meet my style, its just good that they are playing with cars.
HappyAndy wrote: I love dusting the ricers in ratty old SAAB c900 turbo
It gets more entertaining with a flat red first gen taurus......
mndsm wrote:stuart in mn wrote: Sounds regional to me, very little of that in Minneapolis.It's around. Go to Cars and Coffee in Chan sometime... whole row of useless VWs and Audis all slammed out. The VIP scene is creepin' too, but that seems to be more in the east metro- HUGE in the Hmong community.
HOW DARE YOU SPEAK ILL OF THE HONG COMMUNITY!
aussiesmg wrote: I am happy to say I have never seen a Hellaflush car in Ohio and I drive 75K a year. Classic muscle, 4x4 trucks and diesel power are the big things here
They come out in akron in the warmer months, most of them are hondas because all the old VWs have rusted out. I guess it's hard having your tires be hellafush with your fender when half of the fender is gone
A kid recently saw my rust-free 91 Jetta and went ape E36 M3 over it, offering me way too much money for it but I turned him down when he told me about his hella flush plans for it. I may own the only two A2 chassis Jettas that are rust free in the northeast. Any GRMer want to rescue one?
I agree that most of the scenes are a lot more about looks than anything else. Sticker bombing, hella flushed and stanced, boso/ shakotan style, etc. It's funny how people try to be original, so they follow what others are doing! Kinda like what tattoos have become. It's definitely "because everybody." I was guilty of it too when I was younger. I had two 12" woofers, and two 8" woofers in the back of my 240z when I was 17 years old! That was the thing at the time... but at least I had a cool Z car 
. As I have gotten older (I'm 37 now), I have realized that less is more, and trends are nothing but trends that don't age well over time. My '97 miata has gunmetal 15" Rotas, lowered a bit with a nice Racing Beat front bumper. This was all done over 10 years ago, and it still looks great and gets comments all the time. It sure has saved me money!
It also seems that since Hondas have become so cheap now, the owners are younger and poorer and so the result is cheapo mods like the stick on vents and flat black rattle-can paint jobs (noting wrong with that if done well though). They eventually get sold to a younger guy for half the price, and then they go downhill. The scene is huge here. Sounds pretty west coast.
My two "sense."
-Hamid
mazdeuce wrote: I would love to see stanced out VW's. All there is by me are stacks, stacks and burnin' coal and truck nuts as far as the eye can see.
Rollin' around Brookfield, WI:
I've only ever seen it parked, never driving.
They can't go down the road with those tags......lol
RealMiniDriver wrote:mazdeuce wrote: I would love to see stanced out VW's. All there is by me are stacks, stacks and burnin' coal and truck nuts as far as the eye can see.Rollin' around Brookfield, WI:
Urelated(?)
I was skateboarding when tiny ass berkeleying wheels became the "thing" for street. "Nice bearing covers!" we'd say. Sorry. Makes me think of that. Get off my lawn.
Around me, car culture is mostly limited to stick on chrome from auto zone and stereo.
I started with two different Camaro's in the Navy in the mid-late 80's. Played around a bit with both, long before the stance crap and booming stereos were just getting going, but I did have a really nice Kenwood setup. Got married and dropped out of it.
Fast forward to 2008, divorced and bought my '06 Scion xB. Always thought they were "different" and would be fun. I discovered the car scene and TRD accessories at the same time. While some of my new Scion friends were going stance and craziness, I tried to go sporty and race-look at least.
Then I tried an autocross and was hooked. Joined the SCCA, did a few more, discovered rallycross and REALLY got hooked. Bought the MR2, and it's all been go over show (well except the stickers, because they add 10HP right?) with performance adds.
Here in Cincy/Dayton, we have our share of ricers/stance nation/stupid camber, but not in the majority. I made it my mission as Assistant Region Exec for our SCCA chapter to try and recruit some of the kids and bring them over away from the dark side. More power, less camber.
Yeah people suck nowadays. Sometimes it's easy to forget they sucked 30+ years ago too.
bastomatic wrote: Yeah people suck nowadays. Sometimes it's easy to forget they sucked 30+ years ago too.
Corvette Summer bitch!
I've seen the Corvette Summer Vette, along with the Alligator From Death Race 2000.
They were on display at Mid America Motorworks during the Hot Rod Magazine Power Tour, in '05. Also on display were the Tumbler from Batman Begins and Lindsay Lohan version Herbie.
The whole import scene I agree with you has changed, but I do believe it is a west-east coast type thing. I live here on the east coast in Tn and what the import scene has become is how I like to say "Nonfunctional". I myself am still young and also in college but I have grown up around the racing scene especially with autocross because of my father. I am not huge on the way the import scene is today. I enjoy the import cars with I myself owning a wrx but I do not want to make it to where it is a hassle of having to avoid speed bumps because I am afraid of ruining my car or dragging my exhaust.
All that I hear among people of my age and the tuner scene here is "I wonder if I can get so low that I can't even fit my cell phone under my front lip".I wish that the scene would change for the better. Most of the people i meet with "slammed" or "hellaflush" cars are not even aware of events like autocross where they can actually enjoy their car in a friendly, inviting environment, but with the setup of the cars currently I do not think they will be able to handle properly. It has become a form over function theme among them. I am happy that there is a interest for the cars as a whole among the group but I do not feel that it will last long, and definitely do not think it is practical what so ever.
In the end I think it is going to just have to come down to dealing with it. The plus is at least the kids involved are dealing with tinkering with cars rather than illegal things.
In the 70's early 80's it was jacking them up. I remember guys with the most ridiculous leaf spring lifters on the back of any Transmaro or mustang they could fit them too. I remember some of the kids in my school making them becuase they couldn't get long enough ones. The failures were spectatcular.
Its not too far off the lowrider scene, except lowriders have insane fabrication and attention to detial in their cars and the new kids just buy crap to stick on theirs. But it is about looks. I don;t get it, but none of my co workers understand why I spend $3000 on a $500 cars to duke it out all weekend with a bunch of lunatics at a frozen racetrack in BFE Texas.
I just ket it slide, but I do chuckle every time some body kit import 4 door with a melon baller muffler, stcikers and CAI drives by me and I hear the automatic shift
I used to try to talk car w/ 'em at their local convenience store parking lot hangout... but 17 y/o's are waaay too smart for a 54 y/o... so now I just ignore 'em. 
My nephew had a rabbit with a VR6 swap. That tank of an engine was positioned way out on the front right wheel. He had 15X8 nascar steelies with stretched out 155 series tires on it. I took it for a ride and just about ran into the back of someone trying to stop it. I was slowing down when I came up to a painted road surface at a railroad crossing. I locked up the wheels and it started sliding. Worst driving POS I have ever been in, but he thought it was cool. Now that he is a little older, that car has been chopped up and sold.
Around here fart cannon JDM isn't real big, it's the ballers on twennyfo spinnaz yO. See a fair number of jacked up pickups, the funniest is the jacked up pickups on twennyfoz. 
There's some guy who I see in the mornings with a Focus that has some suspension work and a NASA sticker on the side glass, he did a semi ricer flyby on the Trooper one mornng. I guess that's because of the SCCA sticker on the back glass. Every warm spring day brings out a metric E36 M3 ton of old Brit steel over on my side of town.
The stance thing isn't really possible year round here. We have those guys but its their second car. Mostly it's guys who just want to be "cool" and TV and Internet say you have to do "A". They will attempt to do "A"! I won't knock anyone who is working on their car and as long as what they are doing is safe for me driving by them with my kids I say go for it.
Aussie and I live 40 miles from each other so the coal rollers and mustaro crew are still in full effect here also.
In defense of the stance kids, there is something to be said about being able to walk out of a store and see your car in the lot looking noticeably different from the rest and smile and think to yourself "my ride is so berkeleying cool". For as much fun as in have in my Mazda2, I've never thought that about my car. 
I've been working on my 5 speed, rust free, 2 door MKIII Golf for a few years. I was building it into a rallycross car, but the prices on them have started to creep up.
I am thinking of sacrificing it to the Stance crowd. I can probably turn a profit on it, but I doubt they will appreciate the spare engine block that was lovingly machined, the new forged pistons from Wiseco and the 15" BBS mesh wheels on it will be sold to the scrapyard.
No, check that, I'll sell the 15" BBS wheels to a Miata guy.
I will totally feed the stance crowd what they want if it means that I get to enjoy my cars more, and it seems my new to me RX-8 is begging for tons of things.
DeadSkunk wrote: This is just the first sign that you are getting old.
This!!!!!
Nice cars in Chicago five years ago? Huh...I must have missed them. All I ever saw looked like it drove through Pep Boys with a magnet.
I think it's easy to get annoyed with anything that you are conditioned against or saturated by.
There aren't any rules as to who has the "correct" concept of what a car should look like. The form vs function doesn't have right and wrong answers, it's two different ways to do things with two different goals.
I have a few friends that drive me crazy when they say nasty things about the 'stanced' cars, 'riced' cars, 'dubs', 'donks', and anything else that they decide they don't like. They say some incredibly nasty things, without knowing anything about they person they are criticizing or insulting. Not everybody builds a car to race, some people are more proud of how they look than how they perform.
There is nothing wrong with that. People can still like what they like without insisting that everyone else is 'wrong' and they themselves are 'right', whichever side they happen to be on.
It's just people having fun in different ways. There are pleasant people on both sides and unpleasant people on both sides. It's not what they drive or how they look.
Maturity knows that it's just a form of automotive racism, judging a book by it's cover. Perhaps there was a specific incident or person that made myself or anyone else become pushed away from a particular brand or style. What we should really do is keep it straight in our heads that one person doesn't represent an entire brand, style, culture, form of racing, type of music, style of clothing, etc....
It's good to just treat people like people :-) Everybody gets frustrated by something now and then, that's human. But it's good to not let it get out of hand.
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