Actually no: awesome at some times, awful at other times.
Found myself at a stop light outside a muffler shop yesterday, engine was idling unusually smoothly so on a whim I popped in and had them take out the 2 primary mufflers/resonators under the car. Been in the back of my mind to do for some time.
Ye Gods! And this coming from a guy with a Maserati GT with a sports exhaust, the car that makes Ferrari drivers mad as “their” engine sounds so much better in the Maz than where it started life, in a Ferrari 430. I do like volume.
But this is way too much. I think.
Yes.
And so do my neighbours, all of those who live within a mile radius in fact. Most of whom drive Teslas.
It’s like God shouting at Moses in a movie where Moses was Charlton Heston and God was James Mason. Or James Roberston Justice with toothache. James Earl Jones shouting at his kids.
It’s awesome on tickover and light load, although the engine really does need to be in a tidy state of tune as any coughs or splutters are amplified. Obviously.
Also great on the freeway. Oddly finding myself driving at higher revs than usual, 3500-4500 rather than 3000-3500, the racetrack sound(track) is a bad influence and quite intoxicating. Really it sounds just like a racing E-Type, it makes me all misty eyed for Goodwood.
It also makes me a bit misty-eyed for Bovingdon Tank Museum, it does have a touch of Chieftain Tank about it.
The freeway now actually brings out the inner hooligan in me. Much of the excessive noise is lost in the 80 mph top-down wind, and the amount of 4000rpm that can be heard above it sounds entirely appropriate. To me at any rate, probably less so to the aforementioned locals enjoying a hitherto serene ride in their Tesla’s, where they suddenly get the full tornado ricocheting between cars.
Having pulled off the freeway to the relative calm of a stop light, ears ringing and possibly bleeding, I found myself bursting into uncontrollable schoolboy giggles, then just a head-back belly laugh. Looked to my right and happily the driver in the lane next to me was similarly smiling. The '67 Corvette he was driving instead of a Tesla likely influenced that.
The bits between tickover and 80mph though are altogether obnoxious. The quality of the noiseis fabulous, clean and sparkly (technical term) and remarkably refined on acceleration, and with some lovely cracks and pops on the overrun. All in surprisingly high definition, genuinely sounds like a race tuned car, just extraordinarily loud. Even for me.
Taking it straight back to the muffler shop on Monday, need to find a happy medium, somewhere between before and after is the way to go.
There are rumours of Cherry Bomb being the answer? Sounds worryingly like a firework, or a lady I met once in Vegas, although I knew her for somewhat less than an hour and she wasn’t much quieter.