- Hey my name's Tom Long, and my car's a 2016 Audi A3
2.0 turbo Quattro.
And this is On the Low.
(piano music)
Why Audi, I mean I've been a huge Audi fanatic for
I don't know how many years.
I started out with Volkswagen, swapped over to the first
A4 I had about two and a half three years ago,
it was a B6 A4.
I had that one static, exhaust, intake, diverter valve,
nothing crazy just a few different mods.
Got bored with that one, wanted to get a little bit
newer, so I jumped up to a B7 A4, still a 2.0 turbo
Quattro, didn't do as much to that one, just exhaust
and kind of kept it mellow.
I ended up blowing the turbo on that one so kind of lead
to "what do I do next?"
And with being an Audi fanatic and working in an Audi
dealership I kind of had to make my mind up and see
if I wanted to go newer, find something old and,
that's why I ended up purchasing a brand new 2016
Audi A3 back in November of '15, and just started
it from there.
So after looking around at a couple of the A3's and A4's
I decided I liked the smaller car.
When I was trying to decide between the trim levels,
I really didn't wanna waste my money on navigation and
blind spot monitoring so I went with the premium plus,
still has all the Audi MMI technology, the banging
system, so it's got the 14 speakers.
The thing sounds amazing.
Other than that, push start, just your basic
stuff, heated seats, the big panoramic move roof,
and found it pointless that part of the roof was still
silver so I ended up wrapping the entire roof with
a vinyl wrap and made it all just solid gloss black.
I tend to stick with Audi just because of their build
quality, the ride, they're luxurious when you jump
inside them, and of course you can't go wrong with the
Quattro, the all wheel drive.
Even though I park it in the winter and drive my truck
in the winter, it's still nice to have the all wheel
drive and speaking of Quattro, about 10 months ago I had
picked up a black lab, and with being a huge Audi fanatic,
that was the biggest thing, was what to name the dog.
So I got a black lab that's named Quattro.
She's wild and she comes to all the car shows with me.
Loves going for the rides in the car.
Everyone always asks me
"why the personalized plate 'for sale?'"
Or "how do you get that, why did you get that?"
I started in the car business about five years ago,
started selling, now I'm a finance manager out
at Prestige Auto, it fit me.
This is car number 18, my lifted Silverado at home
is my 19th vehicle.
Had 20 and sold it.
So I've always been into cars, I've always been going
through different ones, trying different things.
Why do I spend all my money on my car?
A good question, just always been one of my favorite
things is modifying a vehicle or changing anything
that I can about it.
I just love the environment of the car shows and I try
to go to as many as I can.
This year I've got lie five big ones on my schedule.
And it's just always been a passion of mine.
I really enjoy it, I mean between everything that I've
done to it I don't even want to try to figure out
how much I've stuck into this car alone.
For my wheels I went with 3SDM 0.06, I'm really a big
fan of the spiral design on them.
They're the 19 by eight and a half with 35 offset.
The biggest thing for me is I wanted something with
concave but I wanted to get the best fit that I could.
I don't rub at all, when I air it out I could still
fit a credit card in between and it doesn't touch anywhere.
For the tires I want something decently aggressive
but I don't want to go with something ridiculously
expensive like Parellis, so I went for the general
G-Max, they're 225 3519, super good traction,
great tread pattern, still looking at possibly doing
something different in the future, but for right
now I'm still in love with my wheels.
When I was looking at what car I wanted to go with,
I had narrowed down to the premium plus A3.
But one of the biggest things I wanted to go with
was sports suspension.
Not that it really mattered because I already had
the plans of going static but I didn't wanna do it
right away, it ended up being about a month later
after I bought the car brand new that I ended up going
with something just midgrade for coils.
I went static on solo works, it's just an in between
thing, something that I didn't wanna spend a ton of money
on because I really had the planning going on air,
so I didn't wanna blow a ton of money on that.
I ran static for one season and then when I parked
my car this past winter, I got a hold of One of a Kind
Eurosports and started talking to them about
installing air, and wasn't long after that that I told
them to order it up.
(gentle music)
So I went with the Air Lift Performance Series bags.
Only thing available for my car, I couldn't do the Slam
Series, but if I had the choice I would have gone
with the Performance anyways.
You get the hard and soft dampening and a little bit
more options to it.
Then I decided to go with the V2 management.
I didn't need to be able to air my car up or down
for my phone so I just wanted something that I could
program setting in and mainly just wanted to be able
to air my car out and hard park, really is all
it came down to.
When I was doing the install and getting it all figured
out and having One of a Kind Eurosports do it all,
I decided that I wanted to go with the 444 C compressor.
To fill up the tank a little bit quicker, and then also
went with the three-A cinch lines instead of
the quarter inch, just because wanted to air up
and air out a little bit quicker.
So the quarter inch.
Static versus air, obviously on static it was
bumpy as can be and just horrible ride quality.
But it is what it is, when you wanna go low.
When I went to air, I've been on it now for about
two weeks, the ride's a lot nicer but you still feel
every bump, it's not like you're riding on a cloud.
It's not the greatest thing in the world
but it's a way of life.
Performance wise, I mean the car's as stock as they come.
You can line up to me at a red light and you're gonna
blow right by me.
In the future though the plan is go United Motorsports Tune
and then probably gonna do, everything in the engine
bay's gonna be CTS with the turbo in it, probably the
turbo muffler delete and the intake.
And then exhaust I'll probably do just simple straight
pipe or the CTS turbo back.
And get it done right, but other than that I really don't
want to take it too far yet and do anything internal
or bigger turbo just with how new it is.
I really don't want to mess anything up too bad.
The first thing I did to my car, the first thing I did
was the RS3 front and grill.
I headed in for about a week and unfortunately got
into a nice little fender bender and kind of messed
it all up, and that was about the biggest waste of
money that I ever had and at first started making me
think, should I go back to stock and do nothing
to this car and keep it a daily driver?
And after doing a little bit of looking around I found
a conversion kit for the RS3 front end, and that's kind
of what really made me decide to take this car as far
as I have and to keep going with it.
I found the front bumper, the RS3 front bumper and
got the grill again and got it sitting the way it is
and decided to just keep going with it.
I got the car back and I was still static then,
and I realized that with that front bumper, with how much
lower it sat than the stock bumper it was almost
nearly impossible to get into any driveway.
My actual driveway at my house, I would three wheel
and almost scrape everywhere.
There was times when I was running 20 miles until
E and I couldn't pull into the gas station because
I would have lost my bumper.
I mean that's kind of what really lead me into
going into air, I wanted to be able to air up and get
into some driveways especially when I'm running on E
and I'm out of town and I have no idea where I am
or where I'm gonna find the next gas station.
This year part of my plan is to kind of just finish
up the exterior of the car and get the cosmetics set.
Recently I just put on the carbon fiber rear wing,
just thought it'd add a little bit of extra to it,
break it up.
Everything on the car is silver so I wanted to do something
that wasn't gonna make just the rest of the car
blend with it, and it kind of just broke up
the trunk a little bit more and really added
a little bit of design to it.
My favorite mod, I mean I'd have to go with my air lift,
I just dropped almost five grand on it, so if it wasn't
my favorite I'd be really disappointed, so I mean it
was something I wanted to do on my past three vehicles
and finally went through and did it, and just
super happy with it and probably I'll do it
again in the future on any other vehicle.
My future plans for the car, I got an S3 steering wheel
that I plan on getting put in the next week or so
hopefully, then carbon fiber rear diffuser just to kind
of blend with that rear wing, and then be able to go
from just a dual tip exhaust to the actual quad tips.
And then the trunk for right now, just got to temporarily
set up with the factory floor board in there, but the
plans for that are probably gonna just go with the
typical wood floor, but something a little bit
different than every one does instead of just your
typical stained wood.
I'm probably gonna go with like an antique grayish look
just to kind of match the silver of the car.
And then with the tank I decided that I want the tank
to be popping out of the floor and not actually be
mounted on top of it.
I wanted to go with something that would make that
stand out a ton on my trunk.
So I had Precision Powder Coating go through and
he did illusion cherry on it and the color
just turned out phenomenal.
And in the sun it's super bright, nice metallic and
when it's dark it's just a super dark cherry.
So I'm super happy with how that turned out.
The first show that I plan on going to this year,
it's Euro District, it's a huge Euro show down in
Jeffersonville, Indiana, other than that lot of stuff
up here in Wisconsin, so I look forward to meeting a lot
of you guys, if you ever see my car or see me, come say
"hi," introduce yourself.
But other than that, thanks for checking out my episode
of On the Low.