Last weekend I went autocrossing for the second time and I’m as hooked as ever! It’s such a blast, especially now that I have a 6 point racing harness in my car. It makes it a lot easier to feel what the car is doing as you’re held in very securely.
I still have a long way to go though — I see so many mistakes watching this video!
A guy I know through my local Cars & Coffee car meetup event was kind enough to take a bunch of beautiful photos of Viper, right after it was fresh back from getting paint correction at a detailer. They turned out gorgeous!
You can find all of the pictures on Flickr, but I’ve also mirrored them here for easier viewing:
After 24,000 miles, my front tires wore out due to the camber that my car has (the tires are tilted slightly). $522 for the two mounted and installed. Ouch.
Last week I drove my Viper to Automattic‘s annual grand meetup in Park City, just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. On the way home I was apparently unlucky enough to puncture my tire but thankfully it wasn’t bad enough to quickly deflate because I made it home safe. It was only a few days later when I went to wash all of the bugs off my car that I discovered I was way down on air.
Turns out this was the little bugger that caused me all the headache:
Grr. Thankfully America’s Tire fixes tires for free, even Viper ones, so I was good to go in about an hour.
This past weekend I passed the 30,000 mile mark on my Viper. When I purchased it in March of 2012 it had 9300 miles on it so that makes just over 20,000 miles that I’ve personally driven the car, all of it for fun.
25,000 miles happened back in May so that’s pretty good progress and I still have at least another couple thousand miles left of driving to do before weather sets in this fall!
I went for a drive yesterday with some other cars from the local Viper club. We headed east from Portland out the Columbia River Gorge and then up and over Mount Hood. Around 250 miles in total.
Last weekend I attended the first national meeting of the new Dodge Viper owners association near Detroit, Michigan. It was an absolute blast and I thought I’d share some of the photos I took of the awesome event!
I’ll start with the tour of the factory where they assemble the cars. Chrysler was super awesome to open their doors to us and all other Viper owners.
The chassis start out on rolling dollies with barely any parts put on them:
It only took me a year but I finally have new wheels on my Viper!
They’re the same style as I had before but these are a separate set of wheels that have been painted a gun metal grey. They look lighter in these photos than they are in person. The stock polished chrome look was too blingy for my taste and too hard to keep clean.
Getting these new wheels on my car though has been an absolute nightmare. Here’s what amounts to a short essay on all of what I’ve gone through.
I originally wanted to get one of the wheel designs that come on the 2013 Viper. However the front wheel on a 2013 Viper is 10.5″ wide instead of the 10″ wheel that my car uses. This means that it sticks out about a quarter inch farther than my current wheels do. I thought this would be noticeable or cause problems so I started looking for other solutions.
Around that time (last Spring of last year), I found a set of my wheels that had been refurbished and painted Hyper Black on behalf of the national Viper club’s parts store. This seemed like the perfect option as they were the right size and the color I wanted. So I bought them, even though these wheels had no refunds.
When they arrived, they were dented and chipped due to the process of being shipped. They were very poorly packaged, only having bubble wrap on the faces of the wheels and nothing else in the box! FedEx took them back and parts store had a new set prepared for me and shipped out.
After the replacements arrived intact, there was a tiny crack in the clear coat but I wasn’t concerned enough about it to go through the hassle of trying to get it replaced yet again. I was really fed up with the seller at that point and wanted to just forget about the wheels. So I put them in my garage, planning on getting the clearcoat crack fixed in the fall when my car was out of commission.
When I finally took the wheel to a wheel repair shop last winter, it was pointed out to me just how horrible of a paint job the seller’s painter had done. There were runs in the bolt holes and the backs of the wheels weren’t primed and likely wouldn’t even hold air well. Great.
So I shelled out even more money to get them sanded and repainted to a quality that I had wanted in the first place. My car was in storage for the winter so I told the painter to take his time.
Unfortunately a month or two later he called me to inform me that one of the wheels was warped into an oval! He had somehow missed that during initial inspection and only realized mid-way through preparing them for paint. Adding to the problems were that the national Viper club had gone through a complete management change due to mismanagement by the previous leaders. None of the people who I had previously dealt with at the parts store were there anymore so I had to explain my issue. Thankfully the guy who had newly been put in charge of the parts store took great care of me and sent a replacement wheel to me free of charge and well packaged in its box. That’s the kind of customer service I should have gotten the first time around.
Finally however the wheels are done! That’s the important part and my wheel repair guy has been absolutely stellar through all of this. At least one part of this whole nightmare was a good experience.
You want to know the funny thing though? Turns out the 2013 Viper wheels barely stick out and you don’t really notice it. All of this could have been avoided if I had just gone that route in the first place and I would have ended up with a better looking set of wheels too. Oh well, maybe in a few years I’ll switch wheels again. 🙂
For now I’m just happy to have new wheels and not having to worry about them anymore!
When I got my Viper on March 23, 2012, it had a mere 9,299 miles on it. That’s well under 2,000 miles a year. I don’t understand why people buy a car like this and then don’t drive it!
In the time since I got it however, I have driven all over including a 3,100 mile road trip to San Diego and back. Finally last night I rolled the odometer over to 25,000 miles.
That’s about 7,500 miles a year. Not bad!
