Turbo Dreaming ...

Yesterday I submitted for auction a painting which I recently bought for £45 on eBay. The reserve is set at £180 and the estimate is £200 to £300. This is my first step towards owning a turbo Coupe!

Good luck, Annie.
Although you could just put some vt badges on your Coupe n save a fortune.
In our congested and speed restricted roads it'd be a rare occurrence when you could exploit the extra power.
Oh, and get a fruity exhaust for yours while your at it.

Parp parp

Ha ha! I could then call it a "turbo replica".

I saw a clapped out old Ford Cougar all done out with Ferrari panels and badges and wheels going for faaaaarsands.

I do have a badge on the back "Built by Ferrari" but due to the overall tattiness I think people assume it's just a joke!

Rick at Solo Italia made a tail pipe for me that sounds a little bit fruitier.

I do love my VIS and the plan would be to keep it AND have a turbo one. In yellow or electric blue. *Sigh!*

P.S. Can old ladies find sugar Daddies?

Good luck with the auction and the turbo plans

Cheers Gunzi. I really should buy a tumble drier but how boring would that be?! And can you take a turbo condenser drier on the motorway for a blast when you feel blue? I guess I could poke the sheets and towels out the windows of a turbo Coupe and get them dry in no time!

ouch, hey, gerrof it was only a joke!

if it wasn't for that pesky Mrs c2d

I'm very tempted to agree with this

I have had my 20V form new in '97. I did not want the complexity of the turbo as an only car so ordered a 20V with leather and as sunroof. A decade and a half later I thought I should buy my retirement car while I can still actually get into it and drive it so I found myself a used XKR. The performance is noticably more exciting but journey times are much the same. Even on Autobahns, as they are mainly too crowded, and the rate that fuel goes down soon brings you down to earth.

The slow 20V is such a nice car to drive at normal speeds because it feels right it just clicks. To get the XKR to come alive one has to drive it quite hard and that is not on much of the time so it ends up being used as a cruiser for which it is way over speced.

The XKR is nice to have but the 20V is all the car I need. I just wish it had not started rusting so early in its life (front bonnet corners and sills). I'm not sure I will spend the few thousand Euros it would cost me out here to make it look good again

You drive an XKR?? I have found my sugar Daddy!

"Drive": Well I have recently only been driving it out of the garage onto the drive while working on the garage itself or doing other stuff on the house we just bought. So driving is is a bit of an overstatement this year but it looks nice on the drive

Really? My dad used to tell me that 19 years ago and yet I've been driving 'as conditons permit' ever since.

Most cars will get to 60 mph quickly enough and that being pretty much the speed limit level of most A-roads across Europe, being able to get there twice as fast is rather academic. Most cars grip well now too so they can carry enough speed through corners not to become a hindrance. Sure you can overtake one or two extra vehicles but at the end of the day you get to your destination in front of one or two other vehicles. Big deal.

Sure, sometimes one could fairly safely go a fair bit faster but we are not allowed to so HiraethHuw's comment is sadly true more often than not. Pointlessly blasting past other traffic just to be a few cars up the road when there is no significant benefit makes one look stupid for taking the risk, so one could just easy back and not become part of that embarrassing crowd.

This is all true, and I agree.

It is nice to feel the "shove in the back" of a turbo though. Nothing more complicated than that !

An NA will certainly get you to the same destination but surely the driving experience of a "sports" car is all about the journey and not the destination? Even if you never exceed the speed limit the driving experience can be very different with a turbo.

Shove in the back I know about - the XKR is a fair bit quicker than a 20VT again, probably with better balance and more grip, even though it is a big, heavy GT but the Coupe is also not really an out and out sports car.

Even the basic Fiat is a nice drive that is the point. It feels right even if it is not really very fast or that capable. It does not really have to be blisteringly fast as that bit of the thrill is actually the one that is least often experienced.

And a slow car makes you think about what you are doing more, forcing you to drive more accurately and that does make the journey satisfying.

I really hope no one out there ever bought a fast(er) car to get to their destinations faster?

Sometimes my destination is the very same space I left outside my house when I set off!!

For me, pootling along sensibly in traffic is part of driving normally. Maintaining a gap far in big enough to act as a 'damper' when the all stop / drag strip launch brigade are up ahead trying to create traffic shockwaves is far more fun than 'blasting past other traffic'.

For me, the fun part is when the road eventually clears / opens up and the chap in the big V8 GT who's been trying to push me up the road for the past 15 minutes realises that the little blue Fiat isn't the pushover he was expecting

Totally agree with you. And stressing the car in front is the worst strategy of all, then even a little 20V can become hard to pass

However, I actually usually let them go if I think they will not hold me up as I feel safer behind them than with them on my bumper.

I think the feel of the car is important too. I have just sold an XK8 I had for a few years and loved. On the road I think the performance was very similar to my Coupe but delivered in a very different way, a lot lazier but it could go if requested to do so. I've temporarily bought an MG TF to run around in and am loving it, it's the 160 so reasonably quick but it invites more spirited driving because of it's nature. I've probably overtaken more in it than I ever would have bothered to do in the Jag even though the Jag would have done it more easily. Why? The answer is probably why not.

Can't say how that relates to an NA v Turbo Coupe as I've never driven an NA, just knowing the extra performance is available for those times Trappy mentioned when the road opens up I chose the turbo but never really felt the need to make it quicker for road use as it was sufficient. Now I use it for competition it is a different situation.