TTAC Track Days Episode 2 Preview

@arbnpx I love 4 cylinder engine sound. The noise I'm referring to in the FR-S is the purely mechanical racket the engine makes. It is disharmonious, coarse and rattly and very loud. In fact I never heard the exhaust at all over the mechanicals, and have to say it's quite a bit worse than any other car I've been in or driven, bar my parent's Vega 40 years ago. I was so disappointed during and after my test drive, I just sat there in the Toyota showroom, basically dumbstruck and bemused. They brought me bottled water, evaluated my Legacy, offered a great trade-in price, an Argento 6MT in 3 weeks. Just couldn't do it. My current car is a 2008 Subaru Legacy GT, it is dead quiet and smooth by comparison, unequal length headers and all. Before that, my '99 Impreza 2.2 had equal length headers and was reasonably quiet if a bit thrashy at high revs. I expected the latest Subaru boxer to be more mechanically harmonious than these engines, it's 2012 after all! My 1990 Eagle Talon TSi AWD, which I sold only a few years ago, silly me, is (was) a far nicer car with a far nicer engine. My test drive on that car sold me instantly, remember it to this day. My boss's VW Tdi Golf is far less thrashy, and it has a direct injection fuel pump working at even higher pressures than the one in the FR-S. Anyway, all I wanted to point out was that the FR-S engine is so mechanically noisy, I could not imagine owning the vehicle. And I didn't even get around to mentioning that the power delivery is such that it feels as if the flywheel weighs 100 lbs. It doesn't like revving, but will do so if forced, and you have to force it to get anywhere: the resulting noise, to me at least, is a cacophony of unpleasant sounds and intake boom. The new Focus illustrates to me what a modern 4 cylinder DI engine with 12:1 compression ratio should be like. The FR-S six speed manual is slick, the clutch ridiculous, steering fine, seats great. Now the car needs a real engine. A pal just bought a 2008 BMW M3 10 days ago, DI and all. No mechanical disharmony there, and I felt like a champ rowing that 6 speed, even though its clutch is supposed to be tricky. Not as tricky as the FR-S. This car needs to be sent back to finishing school, IMO. YMMV. By all means drive an FR-S or BRZ yourself, and see what you think. The experience I had was so far out of my norms that the time I've spent this past 8 months reading every post on FT86Club forums has left me musing over how easy it is to mass hoodwink an audience, myself included. As you can tell, I'm not over the experience yet. Darn it, on paper this car seemed made for me, but the execution is lacking any finesse in the engine department.