- You heard the saying, all right,
"It's better to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow."
The people that usually say that are Miata owners,
MG owners and Ruckus owners
because that's pretty much all we got going on for you.
Now spoiler alert, I've owned all of them.
So, I'm gonna talk a little bit smack but I love them all.
And they have a dang point
because driving a slow car fast
is way more fun than the opposite way around.
Even though you look really cool in a fast car.
All right, sometimes.
But how do you do that?
Like how do you actually drive a slow car fast?
Do you just thrash gears and (mumbles) everything
and everywhere you possibly can?
Well (mumbles) kind of, but not really.
I'm Alex, Alex.fi on Instagram .
Today we're gonna be talking about
how you can make a slow car feel fast
with just a few cholula steps to your car
and your willingness to live maybe coming down a step or two
because you prefer to have a little bit of fun.
All right, let's go.
And if you're just jumping into one of these videos.
(mumbles)
YouTube do not put us in Spanish speaking.
That's all I've got, okay.
The rest is English.
My dad gets mad
that I don't keep my Spanish speaking skills,
but honestly this is not very popular up here in Wisconsin.
Anyway, hope you're doing well.
I got socks for Christmas.
It was a pretty good time.
I got these pants, not entirely sure how I feel about it.
Hopefully everybody had a chance to relax a little bit
before jumping in to the new year.
I'm grateful, you're grateful.
I love you, maybe that's a strong word.
If you're looking for (mumbles) gifts though,
like wheels tires or suspension,
be sure to check us out over at fitmentindustries.com
where you have everything your little heart
could possibly need.
And of course, if you wanna check out our gallery,
we have one of the fastest growing online galleries
in the world just saying, it's pretty neat.
You can check out what fits your car
and it's pretty fun time.
Driving a slow car fast is like my MO.
It is like what I how I used to live my life
because ladies and gentlemen,
I have and had a lot of slow cars.
I had a 3000GT SL, like six Miatas.
(mumbles) that even with a bigger turbo was like a dog.
I had another Miata that had a shot of nitrous in it
and a few others.
And I'm pretty sure the neighborhood bikes
could take me on any street that you could possibly imagine.
But I learned a few tricks along the way
that made the car either feel faster
or actually did make it a little bit quicker
without costing me much money at all.
Like none or very very little.
And sometimes this is nice
because if you are jumping into your first or second car
a lot of times you're saving money
for a really big purchase on your car.
Maybe you are gonna do a turbo swapper, supercharger,
something like that, that's really gonna wake up the car.
But until then you just got a slow V6.
Number one, most definitely was remembering that manuals
and low horsepower sports cars need to stay
in higher RPMs to have any source of fun.
We often forget that with the smaller horsepower cars
and feel like we can't keep up when the SS
or the ZL1 fly by over our 200 horsepower BRZ or FRS.
And while that may be true in the fact that
you're probably not gonna keep up with them
on some sort of highway or going 160 miles an hour
that's not exactly where you're stuck having the fun.
All right, because you can keep it in the upper half
of the RPMs when doing the back road cruising
and feel like you're going just as fast
and sometimes you'll even feel
or you are going faster than your SS or ZL1 friends.
It'll a little odd at the beginning
because 90% of the time we're driving a car
we're trying to drive it at the lowest RPM possible
to save on gas and for cruising potential.
And I'm telling you that when you're going on the back roads
and you're cruising around
and you wanna really make the car feel fast,
you wanna make that 1.6-liter scream,
keep her up in the RPM range.
All right, make it scream bloody murder.
Because when you do that
and it had a test pipe or proper muffler
if you don't have enough cash for full exhaust,
the sound will encapsulate you in the back roads
in between the engine screaming
and the exhaust sounding like a solid nine out of 10.
You'll feel like you're going fast.
Even though you may only going like 47 in a 45.
It's the quick gearing.
It's the high RPM sounding.
It's when you really start to feel the car come alive.
Another common tip is driving slow cars fast as hard
when your faster than the car.
No, hear me out.
When you really think about it
you want your modifications initially
to be built around making your slower cars feel faster
by like reducing the amount of lag between the input
of a driver's interaction with the car
and the car's output based on that driver's feedback.
It's kind of like real life lag.
The more you can decrease it
the more connected you're gonna feel with the car
the more connected you feel with the car
the faster you feel like you can interact with it
which then kind of feels the faster that you're driving it.
The most common places this has seen is in the steering rack
and the shifter slash transmission.
Now, not everyone has $4,000 for a transmission,
a new clutch and a housing swap.
So let's keep it easy and affordable.
So first and probably best that you can do
is upgrade to a short throw shifter.
Now, nothing insane.
All right, still don't understands the ones like the one
that short throw shifters that are like
underneath the housing of the Miata,
it's like you have the case
and then you have to put your hand in the hole to shift it.
I don't really understand that but just a typical moderate,
short throw shifter a full short throw shifter gearing setup
is a great modification for a slow car.
But remember a short throw shifter is not just a shifter
that short it's an assembly.
There's a whole thing to it.
You're just gonna wanna to make sure you keep that in mind,
a short throw shifter will help reduce the angle
of the shaft or your shifter and it changes the pivot point.
And even if you take out the performance implications
of a properly installed short throw shifter,
the ability to get through gears faster
used for acceleration and deceleration
with the clutch and steadier brakes
and just the fast paced ability to have,
like your hand you do the shift,
you throw it back on the steering wheel faster
kind of just speeds up the experience with the car.
And a lot of times it's gonna make you feel
like you have a faster car.
It's gonna make you feel like you're driving quick,
even though you're really not.
And don't forget a lot of times
when you are able to shift faster
you can throw that hand back up onto the steering wheel
and you're gonna have just more fun preparing
for the next turn versus waiting and having tea
as you wait for the RPMs to dwindle
as your car wakes up from its slumber in between the gears.
They'll loosey goosey.
It's like wet mashed potatoes in there
and you just don't wanna do this.
And number three would be practicing on how to make the most
out of that lovely little clunker of a car.
What do I mean by that?
Well, honestly it's like practicing, practicing our driving.
Being more meticulous and manual
with everything that you do, really practicing and preaching
all the little details of what makes a car fast by...
From like a driver's perspective.
It's like a driver's (mumbles), heel toe manual rev matching
and finding the edge of what your car can do
is like the best way to make a slow car feel fast.
I used to have a friend, his name was Michael Shaw
who had a cafe racer, right?
It was built by himself
and our garage when we were going through school together.
And I had my 280Z and I blew it up,
which was felt like every few months.
And we had a lot of fun in that tiny cold two car garage.
And I also had a bike at the time
but spent more time on a car than a bike.
And his cafe racer wasn't quick by any means.
And it had more bark than bite
but he drove that thing everywhere and it was loud.
It was obnoxious.
It was crazy weird.
And he did everything on that bike.
He learned every little quirk and feature
that would give Doug a run for his money.
And let me tell you that when we did ride
when we did spend time together going through the back roads
of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, you would have run lengths
around me because he like skill caped that bike.
He leveled 99, that thing.
And even though it was slower than my 600RR
and every single way, he always out drove me on that thing.
And that's because he spent a lot of time
fine-tuning, honing in and really understanding
the full capacity of the vehicle that he had built.
Spending time and truly understanding the limits
of that slow car you have,
can help you enjoy every single ounce of it.
'Cause a lot of times a slow car really isn't that slow.
It's more about how we drive it.
Whereas the Supercars of the world with 650 horsepower stock
and these muscle cars that are coming out at 35 grand
that can just run like eight minute nurburbring trips.
It just it's nuts to me, all right.
It's not the way that you're gonna wanna to do it.
All right, when you jump into one of those cars
the fear constantly throwing it into a wall,
sometimes prevent you from driving it how you truly want to.
Whereas when you start with a slow car and you max it out
it's gonna feed you a lot more comfortable
when you jump into something,
that's got a couple of two three more horsepower.
Spend time with the car and the back roads
or local tracks to find out just
how much abuse the car can take.
Practice, that manual rev matching
and all the good stuff that makes the car do everything
it possibly can to go fast.
And when you start to really narrow that
and when you start to really hone that in
you can have a slow car that will beat the living crap
out of some fast cars.
Driving slow cars fast is like
what you do for the first half of like a decade
when you jump into cars, regardless on if you're 16 or 36.
And so when you can jump into them
and you can learn everything about them,
it puts you on a great foundation.
A lot of times people get bagged on
for not having a fast car.
And it's not really what it's supposed to be about.
It's about how you're able to maximize
your driving experience with the car.
So it don't matter if it's a Prelude, which by the way
still one of my favorite local cars,
it doesn't matter if it's a Miata,
it doesn't matter if it's a Civic, a 3023
or some sub $5,000 car, your parents bought you.
Enjoy it, enjoy it as much as you can
before jumping into something else.
If you don't enjoy what the slow car can teach you
there's a chance that you may never learn to love
what a fast car can give you.
Oh put that thing on a stamp.
Put that in a business card, baby.
That's that's my...
That's my motto for today.
But what do you think, should it be..
Should we just say shovel and install racing harnesses
that take 23 minutes to install
and throw a supercharger on it.
Let us know below and of course,
if you're looking for aftermarket wheels, tires
or suspension, you should have hit us up over
at fitmentindustries.com.
And if you want a pro tip number four,
you wanna drive a slow car fast, get some damn good tires.
That's a really good place to start
because when you do them give (mumbles) bonus.
When you really start to (mumbles),
a lot of times those tires keeping you on the ground
are what's gonna help you a lot.
That's why people throw Proxes R888 onto me,
(mumbles) because you just never have to lose grit.
And that's what makes him so dang fast.
I'm Alex from Fitment Industries
and we will see you later, peace.
(upbeat music)