Glad to hear you're still intact, ins_man.
Kroggers, I simply could not remember your forum name and forgot to go back to your post and look it up to drop in here. I hope you two can work out a deal...it's always good to see members helping each other out.
My apologies if anything I mentioned before was said in any harsh way. Don't take it personally, it's directed more toward the person who set the car up that way before you bought it, not you for owning it. To be a little more diplomatic with my verbiage this time around, and though I'll likely be repeating myself, having that big spoiler out back without having something equally downforce-inducing up front (functional splitter or a GT3-style bumper) will actually have bad effects on the car's aerodynamics at speed. Also, just because a spoiler looks like it came off the back of a race car doesn't mean it will actually do any serious downforce inducing. We've seen plenty of useless pieces of plastic and "carbon fibre" on the backs of many a street car that's worth less than the spoiler itself...sometimes you'd be better off just mounting a 2x4 to some steel trusses and hanging that off the deck of a Ford Probe.
I digress since I'm doing it again: While I imagine you're not looking to take all 201 crank horsepower
up into the triple digit speeds on a regular basis, if you ever do with that car as it stands now, it could start exhibiting some strange handling characteristics.
The stock spoiler is there to counteract some rear end lift that starts when you pass 75mph and gets increasingly worse as your speed increases. Without it the car would get extremely squirmy out back and the rear end will be ready to float out and come around on you in anything other than a perfectly straight line. I'm not trying to scare-monger you and say that it
will happen, just saying it's a serious possibility. Putting anything other than a spoiler designed for the car (read: AeroKit or AeroKit II) will affect the ability for sufficient downforce to be applied to the rear end. If the spoiler
does produce more downforce than stock you also run the risk of the front end getting light...not something you want with the wheels that steer. On the other end of the spectrum, some folks put a GT3-type bumper up front and nothing extra (and functional) out back, and that creates a situation where the front end receives much more push down than the rear.
If you're just going to be cruising around, then your worries are minimal and you'd see no real harm in putting on a different permanent spoiler or modification to the retractable one (see Johnny Danger's car for what I mean on the latter) that will look nicer. There are plenty of options out there that can be applied that will look much better than what's there now. They may have more form than function, but they're not as overdone.
Don't take the behavior in this thread as the norm, even I found some of the exchanges above to be a bit unnecessary. Overall everyone here is very helpful and are not trying to make you feel like an idiot to make themselves feel better.
You'll find that the car is set up pretty nicely out the box, so adding to it or changing anything is really more of a "want" than a "need", maybe with the exception being adding something like the M030 sport suspension option to it (check the white sticker under your front trunk lid and see if there is a "030" among any of the 3-digit numbers on it...if so then you've already got that option)...but even that isn't truly needed. The car handles very well as it was built, especially for any kind of spirited street driving. Enjoy it.
Hybrid Mode
