It always starts out with the idea of how much you like the car. You like the lines of the body, you like the interior, you like the way the car sits, you like the way the car drives. You just want the car for everything it has.
Then you go and change one thing that adds more power. Thinking that just one little mod will really help bring out the best of the car… and from there. You have no idea what our one performance mod started.
For me what started out as one of the best looking Audis made turned out to be one of the slowest cars audi made. I decided to fix that with a little more pep. What started as a innocent little modification of the ECU and Air box turned into a completely different motor, transmission, with forced induction.
Here is part of my story.
After years of the B5 2.7T and all the drama with that. I decided I wanted something MUCH MUCH different. Why not just go get something really sleeper. We all know that the B5 is one of the most sleeper cars ever in the Audi line. So I decided to look over the Audi brand and find the slickest car they had and just make a super project from it. I wanted to build something better then the 560+whp B5 S4 that I just wasn’t interested in anymore.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2567/4199841896_340bbd75fa.jpg
The B5 was one of the first GT cars EVER and it broke almost every record at that time. 11sec pass at over 134 wasn’t a bad start. Yet for me it was the end of the B5. The B5 sene was so full of drama. I wanted to just do something much different. I wanted to challenge myself and start something new.
So came the 2002 A6 4.2… YES wide body A6. come on everyone loved how that car looked. It still looks great today and how sleeper. That car is so slow stock you can get out and run faster if you need to get somewhere quickly. But The style of the car was unmatched for me and I wanted something REALLY REALLY sleeper.
So for months and months I looked and looked. It had to have the right miles and it had to have the right color. I was picky about every car I called on. I looked at like 13 or 14 cars before I found a 1 owner car that was so clean you could eat off the hood. I didn’t jump on that car I let it sink in for a few days and looked to see if I could find something better. After going back and talking to the guy I knew it was the car I wanted.
I had to have that car. It was the car I really really wanted. The car was so nice it was so clean. I dreamed about the clean A6 1 owner car. The owner was a great guy. We talked and talked about money. we went back and forth. I didn’t have a ton of money to spend on the car cause I knew I was going to want to modify the car. So after many nights of dreaming about this clean 1 owner A6 I just decided to low ball the piss out of him and see if he would take it.
Well he didn’t… But the next guy did hehehe hahaha and it turns out almost all A6 4.2 cars were clean 1 owner cars anyway. So it was a win for me.
After I got the car I drove it for over a hour. Just to drive it. It was clean. Not the exact one I originally found but it was nice non the less.
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4008/4199824478_13e39d53dd_o.jpg
Seriously one of the best cars Audi has made. Maybe not one of the fastest. The body lines on the car are great.
A nice rear shot of the car.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/222650412.jpg
The 4.2 A6 drive real nice. I really liked what the car had to offer. I decided that I would pull the car in the garage and take a look at it and see what I could do.
So less then 2 hours after I owned the car. She was up in the air.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/565130817.jpg
I decided to look the entire car over. Due to the fact Im not much of a chrome guy I decided to remove some of the tags from the car and clean up the rear end.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/656327774.jpg
I then decided I would give my new car a oil change and look to see how much if any carbon was on the valves. so to do that I had to remove the intake manifold.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/780742034.jpg
It all looked good. I was happy with the condition of the motor. Yet the more I looked the more I decided I wanted to really dig into the car and to really really make a difference with this car. I mean no one had a hot rod A6 4.2
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/697365350.jpg
At that point I then decided to take off the the front clip and core support along with the rims and look at the suspension Rotors and a good look at the motor.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/141914146.jpg
You can see the rims stacked up in the back.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/306193082.jpg
The rotors on the A6 were nice but they were heavy. At the time JHM was working on there first few sets of LW rotors and what is better for a big Hog of a car like the A6 then some lW rotors
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/123255907.jpg
The slotted rotors look so much better. Not to mention the air gap.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/300961446.jpg
I don’t think too many would argue that have done the LW rotors from JHM. That when you do the rotors you can really feel the responsive nature of the car. With the A6 this was deffinitly the case.
At the time I still need to get a few parts to make the LW rotors work on the A6 so I thought I have the intake manifold off and the core support off. Why don’t I just look at the motor now.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/817096298.jpg
I really liked the easy nature of the A6 Seemed so much more fun then the 2.7T. Everything was so straight forward. So I decided to just dig a little further.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/852415813.jpg
At this point I have owned the NEW (to me) A6 4.2 car for just a few hours and I have the exhaust off the rotors off the front end off and now the motor down to the timing components.
At this point I did what anyone else would have done with a perfectly good working car with absolutely no issues.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/99311128.jpg
Yah. I pulled the motor and transmission out of the car. I mean thats par for the coarse for anyone that has owned a perfectly good running car what was a 52,000$ car new. I mean I already owned the car for like 4 hours now. What was I going to wait for.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/576160976.jpg
Yup less then 6 hours after I owned the car. A car that I searched high and low for A car that had to be in perfectly good running condition. I ended up having a car that did run and had no motor in it.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/179170723.jpg
Ok so at this point in time the motor is out and there clearly isn’t tuning back. The best thing to do is to make a game plan… Well that never happened.
I just decided that with no one ever building one of these cars that I would have to tear it down to learn as much as I could.
So… Off came the valve covers.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/319926319.jpg
I Felt pretty good at this point. I didn’t get the car to a point where I couldn’t have the motor back in the car in more then say 3 hours. If I just stopped at this point I could have the car running by the time I was ready to go to bed.
With clearly no goals but to make sure I dove into the future of performance and the strong knowing that I can have my new car running in less then 3 hours of where I was at with all the stuff I took off. I decided to do what any level headed guy would do.
YUP…
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/873143696.jpg
I took off the cylinder heads and really tore the entire motor apart.
Still at this point Its not like I took off the transmission right…
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/228137180.jpg
Yah no that was off like an hour ago. I was pretty well F*CKED now.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/527420234.jpg
So less then 8 hours after owning the great A6 it has been tore down to nothing but a bare block.
The good parts are just about to begin.
For those of you who are not able to really follow along and are impatient. The project took off after the motor came out. The car got a new motor a new transmission and forced induction.
http://audirevolution.net/addons/albums/images/84745244.jpg
This project for me was the start of the V8 revolution for me. JHM started to take a serious look at what was going on and then jumped on board.
JHM has since taken over the program of the 4.2 and this is the car that helped spawn that.
http://www.streetfire.net/video/audi-42-performance_148031.htm
While the video has Vastperformance’s name in it. They did really help get this project started (keep in mind it started back in maybe 2005) since then JHM has taken hold of the entire project and built 3 A6 4.2 car converting them to manual cars and doing the advancement of this platform.
Even this project car has undertaken a much larger improvement JHM style. More on that later in the thread.
To see how the car got to the point where it was a supercharged 6speed manual car. Look for more updates as I will tell the story of where it went and how it got there… That is if anyone is interested.
