I've put stainless steel flex lines in all of my cars; the Triumph has them as does the Carrera. In both cases the original rubber lines were ancient, and in both cases I was using the car in Auto-X competition and wanted to remove any squish in the brake pedal. It's a personal thing, but I am a huge fan of what they do. So now the A5 is 12 years old and hitting 97,000mi. I had to flush the brake fluid because its been over 2 years, and I figured I'd install the new lines at

The 911 is going to get a top end rebuild near term and if it happens during the Auto-x season I'm looking at my options. I can trot out the ancient Spitfire which will be a lot of sideways fun, but will not be able to get on pace unless I fit it with slicks, and even then.. or see how the Audi holds up. This seems like the better option, but I don't want to do anything too racy to my 'grownup car'. Speaking with some other competitors (Audi drivers), theirv reputation is th

Replacing disc brakes are one of those jobs that is easy enough for a shade tree mechanic to take on without too much concern. Yes, it's your brakes, but they are nearly the same on every car. They're just a much stronger version of your bicycle's brakes, but operated via hydraulics rather than a cable. [Cars like the Model A Ford did use a cable. Not fun.] It had been years since I had my brakes worked on and now they were making grinding noises. This is a 'feature'; they te

I had more noise coming from the front of the car than is normal, and not the right noises. Cars make happy sewing machine noises at the front and burble noises at the rear. Or they should. I went underneath, looking for a leak. There was nothing obvious. So I removed the splash shield under the engine to view the downpipe. I put the car up on the quick jack, locked it in place and then started the car, letting it idle while I crawled under it. I like using a piece of paper

I had my first couple of codes thrown with a CEL back around 90,000mi. The fun thing with codes is they can have multiple causes and in fact the online shop manual I started using takes feedback from users as to what actually resolved a particular issue in order to help guide others. A pretty cool feature, although I still prefer a traditional shop manual I don't have to log into. I did a pretty basic tune-up plus new coil packs and the car was running well. But then it thr

Back in the fall of 2013 my VW Jetta lease was ending and my fancy consulting job gave me a stipend to pay for a nice car. I went looking for an Audi A5 with a stick, initially used but then found a cool deal on a new S-Line in Daytona Grey Pearl with a 6-speed. I didn't want an S5, the engine seemed a bit pricey to maintain and the even more expensive RS5 did not come with a manual so that was out even before I couldn't afford it. The S-line was kind of perfect, Quattro AWD,