Life is Great with a 6.0-liter V8
RSS icon Email icon Home icon
  • SF Bay G8 Cruise

    Posted on March 20th, 2010 tcorzett No comments

    A couple of G8’s from the SF Bay Area got together this morning for breakfast and a cruise. We met at Lou’s Coffee Shop in Palo Alto for a nice breakfast and then headed-out across Palo Alto towards the hills south of San Jose.

    This was the first time I’d been on a cruise with my HD GoPro Motorsports Hero cameras. For the first part of the cruise, through town, I had both cameras on the back of the car to get footage of the other cars on the cruise.

    Before we headed into the hills we stopped so I could reposition the cameras. We took advantage of the stop to grab a few photos.

    The second half of the cruise was much more fun, driving wise, and really gave the group a chance to push their G8’s to towards the limits. The roads that were selected to drive were really fun and quite challenging. The start was very tight and twisty with quite a steep ascent. As the road continued it became much more sweeping and much quicker.

    I had one of the video cameras mounted to the front bumper and another on the rear bumper. This produced a bunch of great footage and did quite a good job capturing the sound from my exhaust.

    The cruise ended at a parking lot and the group spent quite a while talking about just how much fun the drive was. Many of us had our hoods open trying to cool things off… we were really pushing things, and the cars showed it (my IAT and Trans temps were well normal).

    While I had hoped we would have more cars attend the event, it was great to spent some time driving with friends. Maybe someday the G8 community will pull together like the GTO community has…

  • NCG Mega Mod Day

    Posted on March 14th, 2010 tcorzett No comments

    NorCal GOATs had a Mega Mod Day today. What might you ask is a “Mega Mod Day”? Well, imagine having a full garage with all the tools you could ever want… a bunch of parts… and a great group of knowledgeable people to help get the work done. Big thanks goes out to Garage Works in Vallejo, Ca for welcoming us into their shop, and Big Joe for setting-up everything.

    I didn’t have any work that I needed to get done on my car, but there were many impressive tasks going on. The big one was a stall converter upgrade, which I guess isn’t that complex, but anytime you have to remove the transmission from a car it’s not a “simple” job.

    I spent most of my day standing around a G8 GT that was getting the Solo High-Flow Cats installed. Working under a car that is on jack stands isn’t one of my strong points, so I ran around gathering tools and parts. The HF Cat install process sounds simple on paper, but due to the location of several of the bolts and connectors (specifically those for the front O2 sensors) it took much longer than expected. Once the work was done though, the results were spectacular. The car went from be loud to a monster… so much so that the owner has since changed exhaust/mufflers to quiet things down. I think when I get my HF cats I’ll save some trouble and have them installed.

    Other work that was being performed included the installation of a dual-exhaust on a ’04 GTO (which is a factory single-exhaust), trans-cooler, headers, and a drive-shaft loop.

    Like the previous mods days, I really learned a bunch. I’m still a little unsure about doing too much work myself, but the more of these events I get to the more confident I am getting about doing the “simpler” things.

  • Welcome Back OnStar

    Posted on March 1st, 2010 tcorzett No comments

    My battle to get Bluetooth in the G8 has been a crazy one. While I was looking forward to getting the BlueStar system, I was a little disappointing that I would loose the functionality of OnStar. Today I happened to get really lucky and was able to purchase an OEM OnStar module with Bluetooth! After reprogramming, this will give me all the functionality that I was exited to have all the way back in October. When I get everything together I’ll reactivate my OnStar subscription.