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I love AWD and I love Boost!
This is long, and is just a detail of my experiences. It serves no purpose, but maybe someone would be interested in reading it.
My car for ten years, from my teenage years 'till now at 25, was a '92 Automatic Pontiac Grand Prix. 140 Horsepower 3.1 Litre V-6 FWD beast of a car (I don't mean that in a good way) with no antilock breaks or airbags, but I loved her and I was depressed every time she broke down (it's pretty amazing how much a car subliminally grows on a guy, even if they don't realize it or want to admit it). In even mild rain, I could floor it and I'd spin out in spot for what seemed like decades. I've had my 2008 WRX Sedan for 6 months now and I've never WoT'd it for more than a few seconds every once in a while. I shift under 3,000 RPM and until I just installed my boost gauge last week I never realized that I wasn't ever even in boost (maybe that's why I averaged 25mpg). Granny shifting and treating her like a princess, it made me feel dirty to push her hard. So today we had a nice hard rain, I'm on a deserted 2-lane highway pulling from a stop light and I get into second at 20mph (I usually shift every 10mph - 20mph is second, 30 is third, 40 is fourth, etc). I completely floored her in second gear from 20 to 60 in a torrential downpour (intending to get a little skid) and she didn't break traction once. Straight line. I've never in 6 months seen the traction control light go on. AWD is absolutely amazing. No skid, no slide, no anything. Some would say I'm wasting the potential of the car but I enjoy her for what she is and I like knowing what she could do if I had the skill/will.
Never having driven her hard, or tracked her, I can't really say I know how to drive her. I'm in the wayyyyy south country suburbs of Chicago. You'd be surprised how little you have to drive from a city with 3 million people to enter towns with under 3,000 (under 30 minutes). I want to take her to some dirt tracks to see how she slides (conservatively) because I've taken some 30+mph turns around tarmac roads with scattered gravel and she's skidded a few inches, and that's scared the crap out of me. But then I remind myself, this is a 4,000lb vehicle with gas and bodyweight. Two tons and I'm expecting it to stick like a spider.
I drove this car for nearly 6 months before finally installing a boost gauge in her. I've never so much as changed oil in my life (go Subaru maintenance warranty thing!), but I've soldered pins on 939-pin CPUs (which are about 4" square) successfully and work with computers for a living. I envy (extremely) people who say a "bolt on" like a complete catback exhaust is an easy process. I would kill for skill like that. It took me about 2 weeks of reading and 7-8 hours (broken up over 4 installments) of installations to carefully install everything, but it works beautifully. The experience is completely different now. Without a gauge telling me what was going on with my vacuum, I honestly was left wondering, time and time again, why did my car perform like this? If my car is at 5,000 RPM at WoT, why didn't it push the same boost as 5,000 RPM at 10% throttle? They're both 5,000 RPM, why aren't they pushing out the same amount of exhaust gasses thus boost? Mosc helped clear this up for me. Anyways, with the gauge installed, visually seeing the car go past 0 PSI, seeing the tachometer accelerate, and feeling the g-forces push you back makes a lot more sense now. I don't know how I drove her without it.
Though, in retrospect, it's probably a good thing I haven't pushed her hard since Subaru decided to e-mail me 3 days ago telling me that, and I quote, "Subaru has determined that the turbo charger oil supply pipe located on your vehicle’s engine may have been deformed due to misalignment during the assembly process. As a result, the pipe could crack causing an engine oil leak and potential fire." Oh, that's just great. Anyways.
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