Topic: I've owned this thing for a week now and I'm still giddy.
The Plight of the Car Hipster, a story by SpaceFrank.
So I wrecked my venerable Grand Marquis back in August and picked up a beat up little Toyota Echo shitbox from a friend for $250. Then I went back home for Christmas and traded it to my stepdad for a shotgun. Got a ride back to Houston with a friend and immediately started looking for a more permanent DD replacement while driving the race car to work in the meantime. After several days of searching eBay and Craigslist (wherein the guy selling a '63 Buick Riviera for $6500 did not return my emails), I finally decided to look for a later model car for the sake of reliability and comfort, but not brand new, since I didn't want to spend THAT much money. I wanted performance as well, either straight-line or in the bendy bits. No sense driving a car every damn day if it's not fun to drive in some way, right?
Just to make things as difficult as possible, I also decided RWD was a hard requirement. Unfortunately, my freakish torso doesn't fit in any of the small sporty RWD cars. No FRS, no RX-8, sure as hell no Miata unless I cut a hole in the roof and gutted the door as well. I shied away from the Big Three muscle cars for various reasons: everyone and their mother has a Mustang, the Challenger is the slowest of the bunch in a straight line AND around corners, and I'm not 12 years old, so I can't drive the new Camaro. Didn't want to work on a 3-series or an S-class when it broke down in a few years, nor did I want to look like a Deutschbag when driving in a spirited manner. I couldn't be caught dead or alive in a Lexus, and I didn't really know much about Asian cars to start with anyway.
At one point I actually test drove a Cadillac CTS; shit was starting to get weird. Then my good friend and Lemons co-captain Bob introduced me to the Pontiac G8. Plenty of room for me and my big stupid friends, lots of power, decent handling, and respectably good-looking lines. Not at all unlike your mother. In addition, there aren't that many of them around because after two years, a bankrupt GM made the impressive decision to scrap the division that was actually making interesting cars and instead keep cranking out Buick fucking Regals. Whatever the reason, importing Holden products didn't seem to work out for Pontiac in the end, but that all just means that you've probably never heard of it before.
Long story short, I bought one: a 2008 model, the LS2-powered GT version, as I could not afford and was not about to shell out an additional $12k for the top of the line LS3-powered GXP. This is it. This is my new baby.
I'm not the biggest fan of the color, but I'm not complaining. I actually got lucky with this one. Not only was it the lowest-mileage of the four G8 GTs for sale in Houston, but when I got to the dealership I also discovered that the previous owner had been a bit of an "enthusiast" himself. The car has what the internet tells me are a very nice set of headers and a decent cold air intake. The test drive led me to believe it had received a bit of an ECU tune as well. Whether in automatic or "manual" mode, the 6L80E shifts like a... thing that shifts gears really well. The only real issues are a missing engine cover and an aftermarket set of wheels with no TPMS sensors. Okay, so maybe the "enthusiast" was a bit of an idiot. This means I'll have to deal with clearing the Tire Fault message every time I start the car until I figure out what the hell to do about it. I'm thinking a signal clone module to make the computer happy, as long as it's cheap and easy. I can check my own goddamn tire pressures, thank you.
Anyway, the GT model made an advertised 355 HP stock. I'm guessing this one is getting closer to 400 as it sits, but my butt dyno isn't that precise. All I know is that the car is so fast it's literally stupid. As in I will probably die driving it. It also makes about half a million foot-pounds of torque at idle. I can't wait to take this thing to an HPDE weekend.
