Hello? Anyone home?

hmmm - let me think.

You own two old alfas worth about 10 quid each...

And yet if the Strada had actually survived we'd all still be talking about Strada 130s in the same way some think the 205Gti is the nuts.

That's the mark two...

No no, more than that, he's well off, so they usually have fuel in them.

Zackly, new cars are s**te for the environment :-)

Planned C6? You're mental.

I still see quite a few Mk1 Mondeos knocking about. Thing with Mk1 Mondeos is they tended to do millions of miles as private hire cabs and now they're too old to be used for that.

I've made 'em popular :-)

Accompanied by the sound of a chisel on slate Richard Kilpatrick, managed to produce the following words of wisdom

The Integrale was a Strada variant, in fact, the RHD ones tended to use Strada diesel steering racks. That's probably why they were s**te compared to the left hookers.

I had a Strada 130. I miss it.

Accompanied by the sound of a chisel on slate Elder, managed to produce the following words of wisdom

I saw a white 75 in Guildford on Wednesday.

I'll have you know it's out of order to call Lord Doug a Pikey :-)

Price up an engine rebuild for a Turbo Range Rover... last one on mine (by Janspeed, admittedly) cost just under £8000. The pistons were £200 each.

Surely you can fit septic parts on a Rover V8? There was an article in PPC, and IIRC the people who sold it to Rover developed it into an iron V8 and a V6 and a lot of bits were interchangeable.

Accompanied by the sound of a chisel on slate Doki, managed to produce the following words of wisdom

This one had a habit of eating pistons, it's now got some very funky forged Omega jobs. New pistons meant re-balancing the motor, finally having forged jobs meant the boost could go up, putting the boost up meant it was advisable to uprate the crank bearings and big end bolts etc, big end bolts were made by Cosworth for it... the list goes on. Then it was blueprinted again.

It's an impressive lump, and it's the only Rover V8 I know that will tick over smoothly at a mindboggling 250 rpm - we checked that on a multitude of things ranging from a Snap-On timing light to some weird oscilloscope thing in my mates garage.

Problem is, having the more pokey motor means it has bugger all problem producing more than 300 lb ft, and the silly turbo means the boost isn't really very gradual so the gearbox - which is only rated to around 290 lb ft - gets a massive surge of torque all at once.

Accompanied by the sound of a chisel on slate Doki, managed to produce the following words of wisdom

I'd probably back the boost off a little...

Do you want a dead Range Rover gearbox? I'll probably have a couple of 'em soon. :)

Would it not be possible to uprate the existing dead one into some uber-gearbox?

Celsior or ST185/Corolla/MR2 coilovers from known brand like Tein or JIC=20 colst between =A3900 and =A31500 uk money for off the shelf ones.

Toyota know they are only going to have to charge once maybe twice in=20 the life of a vehicle and make sure they do it properly.

It isn't like some makes where it is cheaper to change a whole wishbone=20 for the change of a single bush as a service item.

--=20 Carl Robson Audio stream:

It does the job for me, commuting to work.

And it's cost me almost nothing except fuel for three years now...

Of course I'm starting to tinker with it now (just to stay on-topic), so any hope of reliability could be coming to an end.

And speaking of blandness, my tastes definitely run more to an anonymous invisiblemobile with surprising amounts of go than some pretty shiny thing ;-)

Reality is this way -->

Hell, I can't remember seeing one of them either

LOL, ain't that the truth.