The Broken Fiat Club

Fascinating read . .

I've been slacking a bit on bringing this up to date. Looking at the invoices and using my faulty memory it's difficult to understand what was going through my mind in the Spring of 2015.

Madfiat (he wasn't MadFiat back then) announced the idea of having a drive on the Three Sisters in the Texas Hill Country. I made a few changes to the Abarth to get ready.

The ATM intake, FMIC and VEI gauge arrived. All beautiful and still part of the build today.

Then I bought:
- Koni Yellows all around
- Neu-f Torque Insert
- MPX Brake Master Cylinder Support
- MPX catless downpipe (with a wrap kit)
- MPX axle back
- NGEN custom mid-pipe

and a J&J Racing/RAW flash tune!

Bryan found me a black dash to make my interior more manly, switching out the original white.

I think that's everything to that point. This is my car at the first Twisted Sisters event, which was a great success.
It looks like after Sisters not much happened to the car, my wife was pregnant and we were trying to have a house built. I still found time to add some Eibach spacers (5mm up front and 10mm in the rear), an MPX underdrive pulley and MPX hood lift kit.

On the night before the 2nd Fiat and Fraps event in August my daughter was born and my priorities changed for a moment.

Updates?

I'm having some difficulty piecing things together. I already see a couple things I've missed. Somehow I ended up upgrading from cloth to black leather seats and swapped the chrome trimmed lights for the GQ lights. I know this happened before the first Sisters drive, as I see them in the photos, but I don't see a record of it in my finances. Must have used some of that fancy Texanbrit accounting.....

The seats have a interesting story. I believe they were originally Shaggie's. He traded them to Bryan when he installed his Braid seats and Bryan traded them to me because he wanted cloth for something. I ran them happily for a couple of years, but then installed Cipher seats and put them in my Pop (we'll get to that). I traded them with a local guy for a set of the red leather seats, he wanted black. This weekend I got them back through a series of trades. They are currently in the Abarth, but will go back in the Pop when I have the energy. So the seats have been under many different drivers in 5 different cars (7 if you count my Abarth and Pop twice)

As for the continuing story, I don't think a lot happened until late 2016 early 2017. I decided that catless Abarth was a bit noisy for the precious ears of my new born child. I decided that I should be a responsible parent and put the rear seats back and install the NEU-F axle back with a muffler. That triggered, well, everything else really. It's probably worth pointing out that I did all of this to make my daughter happy; and therefore should have no form of adult accountability for the next chapter.

So the first thing that any responsible parent should do is make sure the brakes are okay. Mine were okay, but I purchased Brake Performance slotted and drilled rotors with some new Hawk brake pads. Refilled with DOT 4.0 brake fluid. This was purely for child safety you understand.

Then we reinstalled the back seats, for the child seat to sit on, and installed the muffler to create a quiet peaceful environment.

Now the muffler was going to steal a bit of power, so how to counter that? Bryan released his first "Big Turbo". Problem solved!

February 2nd, 2017. I should have the invoice framed on my wall. New turbo, Forge BOV valve and wastegate actuator. Also CPR tophats and lower brace (one of the early ones with the flush bolts too).

So I had a few happy months here. Sure RAW couldn't get the tune quite right, but it was still fast. Sure I was getting 9mpg, but I might be partly responsible for that.

I was really looking forward to the 2017 Twisted Sisters, and we were due to head out on June 23rd. I'd changed up the look of the Abarth, losing the black stripes and adding the reflective stripes that it still has today. The only thing left to do was a quick oil change before the trip but on June 19th, just 5 days before, my turbo vanished. The car did not want to make boost at all, everything looked fine but the engine sounded like a small tractor and there was clearly an exhaust leak from the manifold.

Here's what the idle sounded like: https://youtu.be/sMCDLBHw_jY

At this point there was nothing to be done, so I rented a Porsche and went on the Sisters run.
Seriously, it was the only option available to me......

This shite's a disease.

Btw, is that a Cockster?

I kinda have this wild hair up my butt that I need an older Cayman ..... Good thing I don't have any money at the moment.

It is a Boxster Black Edition. It drove really well I have to confess although the seats were stupidly uncomfortable. Also was annoyed to find out that it did have cup holders, but they are hidden in front of the passenger.

Enthralling Read . .

So having returned from a great weekend, and deciding that I prefer my little Fiat over any silly Porsche, I started thinking about fixing Isabella. Almost as if reading my mind Lorenzo with Speedmotive posted asking if anyone would be interested in a custom, tubular manifold. ‘Well duh!”, I said, “If the cars coming apart then adding an upgrade only makes sense right!?!?”. I talked to Lorenzo and he made it clear that this was going to take a few months. “No worries”, I thought.
This is when things started to spiral. While waiting I found:
- A Wavetrac LSD at a great price. The e-diff really hates the power that the bigger turbo puts down, so replacing it made sense. Then since we’re messing around down there anyway, we should probably add an upgraded clutch right? Right? Oh boy, here we go!!!
- A great trade on a super-sprint exhaust. I’d been running an MPX catless for a couple of years, but had some grief in 2017 getting through inspection. The new exhaust had a high-flow cat so that was probably the right thing to do. Plus, we’re taking the manifold off so we’re in that area anyway right? Right?
- Eurocompulsion was now selling an upgraded cam. Oooooooo shiny!!!!! Plus that could help with the big turbo because that thing still has legs up to the rev limiter and we’re taking stuff apart, so makes sense right? Right?
- A great deal on some Neu-f wheels and tires and some wider rubber might be good too with all this power, and they look cool, and I’ve had the same wheels since day 1. So that’s all good right? So as you can see; I don’t do well when left on my own. I’d spent quite a bit (please don’t add this up I don’t want to know and there is more to come); and still I didn’t have a manifold.
The Speedmotive deal for the tubular manifold never came to fruition. In fairness to Lorenzo he was very patient with me through the whole process; and was completely forthright about the situation and the possibilities. However, I was being stubborn and now I needed an upgraded manifold.
Reading my mind again (I need to learn how to stop this); Road Race posted about a porting service they now offered. Since I didn’t know the real condition of the manifold, I decided to buy a new one and ship it to them for the work. It took a few weeks, largely because I forgot to send a gasket with it, but they sent me back a newly upgraded manifold. I took it to a local shop and got a ceramic coating done for it as well; and now I believe I have the world’s most beautiful exhaust manifold. You can't really see it once it's installed, but I'll know it's there. Since I did this lots of other options for manifolds have become available, it's usually not a good idea to follow my path. It's now October 26th, 2017 and Isabella has been in the garage for about 5 months.

beautiful manifold