Ian's Perfect Car

Well folks it seems yours truly has had the honour of being “tagged” by someone much farther up the writing food chain, that being none other than freelance auto journalist Miranda Lightstone. You may have read her work in a number of places, the Montreal Gazette, Auto123.com, Askmen.com, but my favourite stuff is actually her personal blog where she writes just any old damn thing she pleases, always managing to come up with an intriguing subject, anecdote or wonderfully worded point of view. I also am readily impressed by people who are different, non-conformist or break preconceived notions of who or what we’re all supposed to be, so the very fact that Miranda is an anglo female auto journalist from Montreal by itself assures her a rarity and uniqueness possibly on par with the Loch Ness monster.

http://drivingmsmiranda.wordpress.com/

But this “tagging” business means I now have to try and follow her lead on the subject at hand, of which you may have cleverly have divined from the title is The Perfect Car. Originally I thought I would just shamelessly steal the same Top Ten format Miranda used and insert my own shopping list, but I then decided that:

A. That’s a cop out

B. That also by nature lends itself to being concise, thus cutting down the possibilities on me going off on one of my long-winded, James May style dissertations. We can’t have that. You might stay awake, and this in turn would greatly interfere with my ultimate plan of selling this blog to a major pharmaceutical supplier as a device to help study sleep disorders.

Where were we? Oh yes, Perfect Car. For me, you say? Well let me tell you, if there’s one thing I’m primed and ready to blog about this is it, because I’ve just spent the better half of a year trying to decide this very thing. Have I yet to achieve it? To find out I’ve decide to go back through my own 4 wheeled scrapbook and see if I can come up with anything that fits that descriptor.

Until it was time to make this very purchase again a few months ago, it had never even vaguely occurred to me that my auto buying rationale, um, wasn’t. Without exception, every car I’ve ever bought previously in the last 30 years was a 100% total and complete impulse deal. Considering that I’ve never had a piece of property in my name, this means the most expensive thing I’ve ever owned has always been bought on a whim. That’s either delightfully refreshing, or terribly frightening. I’m not actually sure which. But it is most definitely me. People are always confounded when I tell them I am largely ruled by my emotions. I guess my obsession with science, logic and how the world works leads them to assume that I decide things in an orderly fashion based on sound principles. Not quite. If you were to actually peer inside my noggin, you would see something that most resembles the scene at the end of the first Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, the one where the camera pans back to reveal an enormous warehouse of random sized boxes piled in jumbled rows that appear to go on for miles. So what I decide on any given day tends to have more to do with which box I happen to open rather than some prosaic formula.
Let’s start with the ultimate example of this, which occurred roughly half way through my driving life when I saw my first Miata. I can recall this like it was yesterday. I had just picked up the March 1989 issue of Road & Track and when I saw the cover, I thought I was looking at an old Lotus Elan, until I read the tag beside it that said it was a new Mazda.
Huh?
That’s impossible. They don’t make cars like this anymore. Except now, apparently, they do again.
My first exposure to British sports cars had been courtesy of my aunt, who had a string of Triumphs and MGs when I was a wee lad, and I was always captivated by the sound and feel of the little roadsters. Sitting in those low-slung buckets with the shifter up high, peering out the tiny windscreen with rows of gauges just below, listening to the throaty roar of the little four banger with the clouds racing by overhead… you could very well imagine yourself in a real Spitfire mixing it up with ME109’s in the skies over London. But the sad reality was when I became of driving age, the only examples left of these that I could afford were awful. Clapped-out, slow, and horribly unreliable, there was no way even the romance of the experience was going to overcome the fact that they were not even close to useable daily transportation. So when Mazda re-invented the recipe with solid all-Japanese mechanicals, it’s absolutely no exaggeration to say by the time I had finished reading the article my mind was made up – I was buying one. And sure enough, one of the first ones to arrive at Mazda 2-20 became mine.
This was not a matter of need. At the time I had a two year old 16V GTI, one of the fastest compacts of its day and a brilliant all-around car. And I still owed quite a bit of money on it. But I HAD to have the Miata. So I did whatever it took to make it happen - which wound up being a lot, but that’s another story in itself. However I don’t regret a single moment. About as quick as the GTI but with even better handling and the best brakes of any car I’ve owned even today, it was also nearly indestructible (still the only car I managed to own for two years and break NOTHING) and offered as pure a driving experience as could possibly exist. A bonus was having one on the streets of Montreal in the early fall of 1989 was about as close to being a rock star as I’m likely to ever get. Although they are as common as Kraft Dinner now the Miata was nothing less than a sensation when it came out, and I got stopped by everyone just about everywhere I went with it. Driving down Crescent St. with it the first time on a Saturday night was hilarious, everyone completely ignored the rows of ever-present exotics and came running to surround my little red soap bar, hands pointing and mouths a-buzzing.
Was it the perfect car? No. Was it the perfect car for me? Being in my twenties with no long term commitments to anything, it probably was. Beyond the obvious sports car qualities it got great gas mileage, had just enough trunk space that me and a buddy managed a lengthy winter trip to Florida and back in it; I had just gotten big into rallying in those days and it was excellent at that, and I even managed to win some winter events with it! Speaking of which, I recall one artic-like morning when most of the cars on our street refused to start (including my ex, the GTI, which was still in the family). But the Miata fired up first turn of the key and motored away without a hitch. The heater was in fact so strong that when pointed straight ahead the dash vents would defrost the REAR window of the hardtop! I didn’t care that it was tiny and a long way from being a macho ride, it was an absolute blast and if driven with skill on any kind of challenging road, or better still on a track, would humiliate many much more powerful cars with ease. This car was so connected it was like an extension of your own limbs.
Sadly two years later I made the painful decision to sell it so that I could finance my commercial pilot’s license. I’ve driven a few early examples since, and have to admit that in today’s crowd they feel woefully underpowered and very basic. But they’re still wonderfully responsive, and the closest thing to a go-kart that you can drive on public roads for so little money.
The Miata as it turns out would be the last new car I would buy, once I had finished with flying school I had decided that the depreciation was too much of a killer and also one could find much more interesting used stuff for less money, assuming you didn’t mind the lack of warranty and getting your hands dirty occasionally. Which I didn’t. The cars I drove during the flight school years were ones of financial necessity, an old hand-me-down 626, a VW Fox and a delightful mongrel I dubbed Franken-Audi, an ’86 5000 Avant with a dead motor but in otherwise perfect shape that I found for $400. I swapped in an ’87 high compression 2.3 motor and an early short-ratio manual, as the FWD wagons were only ever sold as automatics here and I generally despise slushboxes. That was one awful job, but the finished product was a surprisingly quick, and it was great fun seeing the mechanics at the dealership tilt their heads like puzzled dogs when they looked at the model badging and saw the stick shift inside…
I had just only decided that it was maybe time to move on when fate intervened and a client at Lazer showed up with what would be turn out to be the another candidate for Ian’s Perfect Car list: a pristine 1990 Audi 90 Quattro 20V. He was having his first child and thought it time to get something more practical – read: wouldn’t require re-mortgaging the house to maintain. Once again, love at first sight. Having tasted Audi-ness with the 5000, I wanted more, and this car was much more. Its 2.3 20V inline 5 cylinder engine put out 162 hp, a pretty impressive figure for such a small motor back then and could be tweaked even higher. But the clincher was the Quattro system. If you’ve never driven a good AWD car in the rain or snow, you have no idea what a difference this makes. Suddenly, you’re Superman, able to leap past traffic through vast, snowy intersections in a single bound. My first winter with this car was like a trip back to being a six year old with a brand new shiny toboggan at the top of a really big hill. I still remember laughing hysterically the first time I powered out of a drift-covered corner out on a snowy rural road with four big rooster tails shooting out behind me. You could pull the most amazingly stupid moves on any nasty surfaces in this thing and the Torsen center differential would just simply go about its business and move the power around so you wouldn’t die a horrible, fiery death at the bottom of some ravine. Amazing. But the 90 had something else: refinement. From its electric, heated Recaro sport seats with position memory and fully optioned interior to its stealthily solid and quiet highway ride, it was a cut above anything else I’d ever owned.

There was nothing you couldn’t do with this car. Daily commute? A breeze. Arrive at a fancy function? You’re a player. Rallies? Are you kidding??? Long distance high speed trips? How soon do you need to be there? In fact the 90 20V still holds the record for my fastest Montreal-Toronto run at 3 hours and 45 minutes. An exact time it managed not once but twice. Its most impressive performance ever though was in my time living in Toronto. I was managing the wheel and tire shop I worked at on Saturdays, and woke up one morning during winter changeover season to discover that I had 35 minutes to get to work and open the door before the crowd accumulating outside would revolt. And that was more than 50 kms away. I got dressed, jumped in the beast, hit the 407, and was there 17 minutes later. I’ll let you do the math.
And it sounded fabulous. With the custom designed glass-pack exhaust I had made for it, nothing on earth sung like that thing. The signature, syncopated 5 cylinder wail when you opened it up was spine tingling, and never got old.
The 90 was also one tough son of a bitch, having survived things that would have likely destroyed lesser rides. Beyond the usual rally adventures down dirt roads and over railroad crossings at Dukes of Hazard speeds, it was capable of absorbing some forms of punishment that nearly defied explanation. I once made a U-turn in a parking lot during a blinding rainstorm and ran it straight into a median. I got out to survey the damage but didn’t see any, so I drove it the 50 km or so back home. The first sign of trouble was when I braked for an off ramp a half hour later and the oil pressure warning light came on. Not good. I gingerly eased it the last few kilometers to the house and when I got out and looked carefully underneath, I discovered the entire front wall of the alloy oil pan had taken a direct hit and shattered. The engine had made it the whole way home running on less than a liter of oil (Mobil 1 synthetic at least, thank God). I had the pan repaired, re-installed it, and it ran exactly the same as it ever had. No noises or oil consumption and perfect compression. It also once suffered an injector failure about halfway to T.O., but made the rest of the trip on 4 cylinders with ease, flying along in the left lane, business as usual. It never failed to start, never left me stranded, got me through some of the toughest years of my personal life and handled everything I could ever throw at it effortlessly. An incredible car. But after 5 years and some 271,000 kms on the clock (171,000+ of which was mine), she was finally beginning to show her age; it was time to move on. I don’t mind admitting that the day I drove to the SAAQ office to transfer it I cried like a baby. That car had become a part of me.

The replacement was probably the first, faint signs of logic creeping into my car buying process. Having so loved the 90, it only made sense to look at its descendant as a replacement, and that would be the A4. I had already driven a few examples and it was clear that this was a different animal. All new body shell and chassis, multi-link suspension; this was obviously the postman’s child as there was really nothing other than the block in the optional V6 engine to trace it back to its predecessor. But what a kid they made. Smoother, quieter, faster, this car was like a time machine. You had no sense that it was particularly quick; it just ate kilometers with so little effort that you thought everyone else around you was driving at a glacial pace. And she was a looker. The 90, to be frank, had a mug only a mother could love, but this car was something else. To this day I still find it to be one of the most perfectly designed affordable 4 door sedans. Every line on it flows seamlessly into the next, the cabin, trunk and hood are all in perfect proportion. OK, maybe that protruding grille area that defined the 1990’s Audis seems a little dated now, but then this is akin to faulting Rachel Weisz for her bodacious schnoz.
Being a far more popular model it was easy to find a clean used one, so when a friend offered to give the 90 a new home I went to try several examples, finally settling on a low mileage 1998 1.8 T Quattro in the de rigueur silver hue. With an order of magnitude more fiddly parts available and never able to leave well enough alone with any car I’ve owned, I of course got busy with mods. First up was a full APR exhaust and ECU chip which added another 50+ hp. With considerably more power that the 90 as well as a limited slip rear diff and later some studded Nokians, the A4 was the fastest car I had ever driven on winter roads and an absolute weapon of mass destruction in winter rallies, probably claiming more frosty podium spots than all my other cars combined.
But only a short time into ownership I realized this thing was going to be a bit of a hangar queen. I knew that the design had a few weak spots, notably suspension control arms and wheel bearings, but boy, could it eat through those things. I quickly became a pit stop expert on changing the arms and eventually even bought the special tooling to change the bearings myself. But the worst happened at 128,000 km when the factory timing belt tensioner let go. Although the book said it was supposed to only be changed at 192,000 km, I had been warned by many sources that this was a known fault on the car and to change it to an updated version ASAP. The worst part was I had already bought the kit and had picked out a weekend a mere three weeks away to change it. The real problem now was that the A4 has an interference design motor, meaning when the timing belt breaks the valves crash into the tops of the pistons. So not only was the belt snapped but there was untold carnage waiting inside.
Thankfully friend Peter Kirby (who coincidentally was the 90's new keeper) came to the rescue and offered his garage for the surgery, which as you can well imagine was epic. Over the course of two weekends and five very late week nights I managed to completely strip the front of the car down to a naked cylinder block, get the head rebuilt and get it all back together. And running. With no leftover parts! Well, not that I recall anyway.
And while I had thousands of bits scattered about Peter’s garage, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to turn the volume up a notch. I swapped out the factory K03 turbo for a bigger K04 unit from the 225hp TT, added a 5 bar fuel pressure regulator and some aggressive software courtesy of Aaron Neumann of Neuspeed fame, upping the ante to some 240hp and 265 ft-lbs of torque. And in case there was any doubt as to how quickly that would fire it down the road, during its first fully tuned road test I managed to collect some documented testimony from the local SQ constabulary. To the tune of 152 km/h in a 100 zone. It was about the only time I smiled when I got the bill. Man, did this thing cook.
After the major meltdown I have to say the car settled into a reasonable groove. I got better at changing the bearings and they were now starting to go 2 years+ without problems, and the jobber parts guys slowly started making better and better control arms that would go a lot further as well. In due time I changed more stuff, but nothing really untoward considering the mileage I racked up. Although a more insulated and detached driving experience than the 90, the A4 was still the king of making very faraway places seem much closer. You could easily go 12 hours or more and get out absolutely no worse for the wear. And despite the 60% increase in power from the mods, it got better fuel mileage than when stock! Good looking, refined, fast, economical, reasonably reliable and able to handle anything Mother Nature could throw at it. Could this be the Perfect Ian Car?...
I suppose that list should make it as qualified for the title as anything discussed so far. But still there’s something missing from the equation, that burning emotional bond that the Miata and the 90 forged deep inside my psyche never grew quite as strong with the A4. Like the Six Million Dollar Man, it did everything faster and better. Calmly and without any undue stress. But somehow that very lack of drama made it, dare I say it… predictable? So after a record eight years and 166,000 km on my watch I decided it was time for a change.

But what to buy? Considering all the A4 offered it would be hard to improve upon. I briefly toyed with the idea of pulling a complete 180 and getting a Mustang convertible, a car so far in the opposite direction from the A4 that it could have originated from an alien race. But as much as I loved the raw, all-American experience they offered, I quickly realized that as an avid biker now my requirements had become a little more skewed; it would mostly get used when it rained or snowed. It became clear that a drop-top ‘Stang with its front weight bias and RWD made as much sense as the proverbial bicycle for fish. Back to reality then.
One thing I knew I desperately wanted back was a kickass exhaust note. Yeah, I know, how old am I? But really, few things connect you with a good performance car as much as that purring voice. The crazy caterwaul of the inline 5 was still burning bright in my memory. So, has to be reasonably refined, have AWD, sound cool, look good, and especially be emotionally involving to drive. And oh yeah… be automatic.
Excuse me?
Could you repeat that?

Yeah, I said the “A” word.
Wait a minute. Aren’t you the guy who spent six months trying to jam a manual into a car that clearly hadn’t been built for it? Um yes. Not only that, but earlier in my auto history I had done this very same feat with a ’77 Capri. That’s pretty hard-core testimony for my dislike of the auto box. But the sad fact is since moving to Chateauguay and commuting to Vaudreuil every day was beginning to take a toll on my skeletal alignment, and as the traffic began to seriously worsen in the last year I thought it was pretty much time to finally consider this drastic measure.
There was a new hope though. Some seven years ago VW and Audi pioneered the world’s first dual clutch electronically controlled manual gearbox for the road, the DSG. This rather incredible device offers the best of both worlds; the efficiency, control and performance of a manual coupled to the clutch-less ease in traffic of an automatic. It only took one test drive and I was hooked. Full auto when you needed it, and lightning fast 8 millisecond manual shifts when you felt like being Schummy. Now I just needed a car to go with it. The list became small in a hurry. The only AWD cars offered with this in Canada were the TT and the A3. But the only TTs that fit into my sub-30K budget criteria were the early gen ones based on the MK4 Golf, however all the A3s sold here have the newer MK5 platform. If you’ve ever driven both, it’s pretty clear that the MK5 is a quantum leap in chassis development. In fact five years later, Car and Driver still picked it as their favourite handling compact FWD platform. In an industry where major advances occur seemingly every month, that’s astounding. So then, the choice was pretty easy. No difficult engine or option choices to make either, as the only way you could get an early A3 Quattro was with the DSG tranny, 3.2 VR6 engine, and all the S-Line sport gear. So there it was.
Just to be sure, I spent at least a month putting together a very comprehensive spreadsheet that compared the pricing, interest rates, maintenance, insurance, mods, fuel and any other conceivable long-term costs you could think of and had an Electronic Showdown with all of the cars that I had seriously considered. Some of the contenders were:

Mustang - Wondeful back-to-basics fun, but killed for obvious reasons when sanity prevailed

New Golf TDI - Came to me in a momentary tree-hugging epiphany (I'm starting to get these more frequently) but killed for lack of AWD and high purchase price with any meaningful trim

2002-2008 A4 2.0T or 3.2 – excellent, sensible and logical choice. But still uses slush-tech auto (albeit a good one), and just too much the same as curent ride

2004-2008 S4 - awesome beyond words with its fire breathing 7000 rpm 40 valve V8, but sadly killed by its horrific planet and wallet destroying fuel consumption. Also would HAVE to be manual, ensuring by next year I’d need be put down due to hip dysplasia

2009 A3 2.0T Quattro – Great performance/economy ratio, but killed by still-too-new high resale

2006-2008 A3 3.2 Quattro – Ding Ding Ding!!!! We have a winner!

Yep, the littlest Audi equipped with its biggest motor and the magical DSG fit the bill. At least on paper anyway. It had AWD, great handling, fabulous sport seats and interior, giant front and rear panoramic sunroofs, reasonable cargo capacity, liveable fuel mileage, and the broad, powerful torque curve of the VR6, which as a bonus also had much of the aural appeal of the old growly inline 5.
But would this really work? Could someone so touchy-feely as me actually pick out something so crucial as my next car with nothing more than some road test reports and an Excel sheet? It seemed insane. But I was about to find out.
One morning in May I walked out of the house, got into the A4 and turned the key. Nothing. I tried again. Nothing. I looked at the gauges. A full 13 volts. I try and try again, pumping the clutch pedal and playing with the remote starter and whatever else I thought might interrupt the process, but no dice. To make matters worse, I am supposed to be downtown in 30 minutes to pick up one of my vendors for a meeting at the office. I reluctantly call him and explain, then grab my motorcycle. It was time.

I begin scanning the classifieds, e-Bay, Les Pacs, you name it. Finally a silver 2006 A3 3.2 appears at Audi Prestige. Only 57,000 km, full extended warranty, and only 2.9% finance. One visit and the deal was done. I hadn’t even driven it. Now of course I had only left a deposit, along with the understanding that when the car was ready and I test drove it if I didn’t like it for any reason I didn’t like it the deal was off. But it still felt so bizarre. It was like an arranged automotive marriage.

The day came and I got in and drove.
Click.
All the right sounds, all the right moves. It’s as comfortable as any of my previous rides, handles with a surgical precision not seen since the Miata, is almost as refined as the A4, and with the addition of a Milltek exhaust and Evolution Motorsports intake sounds almost as good as the 90. The DSG is one of the seven wonders of the modern world, a true dream in traffic and capable side arm for impromptu stop-light duels.
And you can’t pry me out of it.
In a little over four months I’ve managed to put on some 16,000+ kms. During biking season, no less.
Is this The One?
Well, winter’s not here yet, so I’m still withholding full judgement on the Haldex type AWD until the snow flies.
But so far she’s in the running :)
Stay tuned…