Quote:
Originally Posted by als2052
Not to beat this horse to death,but is seems that most of your gearheads belong to Mustang and Z clubs...just my opinion
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Zs and Mustangs do have in common, if nothing else, one important quality. They are cheaper than a Vette. Cheaper to buy, cheaper to maintain, cheaper to insure (unless you are me), and cheaper to modify. There's some weird mental block that makes people who spent a lot of money on their car to want to avoid pushing it's limits, or modding the piss out of it.
Fortunately, as I am also a Z guy, I don't suffer from that mental block. My psychiatrist called them "sensibilities". More contagious than swine flu in a slaughter house, apparently. Anyway, to the point... I do not see the computers as a limiting factor, only as a new skill to be conquered.
Tuning an ECU is no harder than tuning a carburetor, put somebody who doesn't know what they are doing to work adjusting the A:F, and they can still lean it out and blow it up. If you don't know what the knobs do... you get what I am saying.
There are many extremely complicated tuning programs out there. There are just as many simple, yet capable ones as well. If you can't tune a single carb, don't go out and buy a triple Webber setup. Also, you car has pretuned aftermarket chips (again, unless you are me) that are both affordable and capable enough for most applications anyway.
So the computers aren't to blame. But gearheads have been disappearing from the face of the Earth, and I think I know why. Back in your heyday road pilot, manual labor was respected. You work hard and people respected you. Now... with so many people going to college, college has almost become a prerequisite for that same respect. So we are kind of biased against doing work. Everyone wants to be successful, and getting sweaty/dirty/greasy is seen as "beneath" a lot of people. You are poor unless you can pay somebody to do the work for you, so why learn how to? Couple that with cars that have less room in the engine bay, skillsets that are more difficult to learn, and more complicated designs... The moderately obsessed and hardcore types of gearheads are all that are left. The other types traded in their sports car for an Escalade and are going through the drive through at McDonald's.
Some people just aren't wired the same way. So find a group of gearheads to hang with, there's sure to be a few Vetters in the mix.