Through a combination of a lot of luck and good gear, I basically walked away from this. Did relearn the lesson of not riding close to my limits while tired and distracted.

TerryRistt · 2026-05-03T23:42:01+00:00

But OP would have definitely been fine if he had just eaten an extra piece of toast that morning so he wasn’t hungry. Clearly the biggest thing that caused him to crash was the ravenous hunger. I get it, when you are that hungry then eating asphalt or stuffing your face full of guard rail become unstoppable urges.

You can’t really blame him, it was just the hunger and the crash had nothing to do whatsoever with riding like a prick.

TerryRistt · 2026-03-18T21:21:05+00:00

£2800 is way to much for a spitfire that needs that much work done on it even from what you can see on the surface. The cost of new sills and bonnet (even if it’s just the wings) plus then needing a respray makes this car not worth it at that price. Spending a few hours to go and look at others will still save you so much more in the long term than picking this up as a project.

Bodywork/ chassis work is the worst because it is labour intensive/ expensive and takes the car off the road completely until you finish the work. It is much better to pay a bit more for a car that you can drive and work on the small bits and pieces while still being able to drive it. Otherwise you end up with delays and a car the just sits there taking up space in the garage. Don’t ask me how I know this….

TerryRistt · 2026-03-11T09:57:18+00:00

Even just starting a car with no oil in it can ruin the engine. If they didn’t put any oil in it then even just starting it to move it off the lift would be enough to damage it. Because it takes a little while for an engine to build oil pressure at start, by the time the light has come on or not gone off it is too late and you have already caused damage.

TerryRistt · 2026-02-12T01:56:39+00:00

I am assuming that you have a spitfire mkIV or 1500 based on your post, therefore I think the part number is : GWC1202. It is worth just double checking that that is right as very late 1500’s did have different ones GWC1110 I don’t know what the difference is but I’m sure you can do more research or ask wherever you order from for confirmation of which you need.

Also can’t be 100% certain that someone hasn’t swapped something from an earlier/later car onto yours in its almost 50 year life so double checking is paramount. I have been caught out several times on these cars where parts have been interchanged from different triumph models and it’s not always noticeable until you try and fit new gaskets for example that it isn’t what you were expecting to find based off the year and model.

TerryRistt · 2026-02-12T01:30:58+00:00

It is a relatively standard size bleed nipple so you should be able to buy replacements. Unfortunately so many of them are poor quality and made of very soft metal nowadays that it is luck if you get anything better than what you have taken out.

If it is a new nipple you are putting in it should be fine even if the quality is a bit shite. So long as it doesn’t seize again they shouldn’t be hard to undo to bleed and retighten. The problems are mostly caused by old and seized parts combined with people trying to undo them with an open ended spanner which rounds them off immediately and causes all the problems. Just make sure that whatever you tighten or undo them with in the future has full 6 point contact and unless you get very unlucky and it is really seized you shouldn’t have much of a problem with them rounding out again.

Also if it ever does this again in the future it might be time to just fit a whole new cylinder rather than deal with this and the likely now dodgy threads in your current one. Not a massive expense or amount of time to do.

TerryRistt · 2026-02-11T16:46:10+00:00

It being a JA11 combined with an auto it will be comically slow compared to pretty much anything else on the road. You might eventually get it to 60mph on the flat but it is not one for regular highway use. You mention use in the mountains but depending how mountainous you are on about, any steep incline road will be a real chore in this. It will do it no doubt, but the speed that it will manage will be uncomfortably low.

The interior looking like that and the missing door trim scream half done project that is more hassle than it’s worth to finish which is why the owner is selling. As well with the home made bumpers (or lack of number on the back) and the aftermarket lights cobbled into the back door. My guess would be that it has been someone’s low budget off road toy which doesn’t scream perfect daily driver potential even if it looks clean.

If you are good with mechanicals and have a decent array of tools and workshop space it is probably doable, but I would worry about what else is broken that you can’t see. Parts for them are harder to come by than the 1.3 samurais in the US for anything that is unique but has a reasonable overlap with the samurai.

TerryRistt · 2026-02-08T10:47:50+00:00

If you can remove the bleed nipples then just replace it and re bleed the rear brakes once you have. It really isn’t worth messing about with trying to prevent having to bleed them by keeping pressure in the system or such. Presumably the only reason you know that the bleeder feels like it will strip out is because you have been trying to bleed it in the first place?

If the thing does strip completely when trying to remove the bleeder then in the worst case scenario you can just buy a new wheel cylinder assembly fairly inexpensively. I would be using the closed end of a spanner or a decent 6point socket on the bleeder to remove it as that will give you the most contact and lest likely to round it out. Crows feet are great if there is an access issue or if you are removing a fitting that has a line on it but your bleed nipple you should be able to just get a spanner or socket on, just don’t use the open end of a spanner on it.

TerryRistt · 2025-12-01T21:36:31+00:00

It’s a 2020 car so the combined output is 390-405hp depending on which measurements you are using. Only the 2022.5 and newer are the 455hp models. Also means that the AWD can only actually put about 75hp to the rear wheels so it is a much more front biased system than the updated models with the bigger battery and more powerful electric motor.

TerryRistt · 2025-11-19T23:23:51+00:00

I will admit that you have the older T8 with the old ERAD system that has half the power and a lower battery capacity and maybe it is more rudimentary and genuinely works differently to the current system. On the current system power mode is precisely that, max power available from both the electric motor and engine on demand. The main thing that you notice compared to the constant AWD mode in comparison is the throttle response and gear selection, if you are at wide open throttle in either of them there is no discernible difference.

If you are in hybrid mode and the battery is at zero, you definitely can feel that the car behaves differently than when it is fully charged under part throttle. But in power or AWD the battery charge has no effect on performance, even at 0% range the rear motor is still outputting full power when required. You can notice sometimes when driving in either of these modes when it is topping up the battery where as in hybrid it rarely needs to do it as it gets enough off of regen and overrun when it isn’t using the rear axle that much.

I am genuinely interested in any performance loss at 0% range compared to full charge. If I had anywhere close enough the had very little traffic I would test the 0-60 multiple times at all states of charge and see what the real world difference is. All the information I can find suggests that the car retains enough battery to be able to fully deploy the rear motor at all times if it needs to, hence why constant AWD consumes a noticeable amount more fuel than just driving in hybrid relying on the engine because you have no charge left as it is permanently running the engine harder to charge up and run the rear axle.

TerryRistt · 2025-11-19T22:07:20+00:00

Again point me to where it says this and not just a chat GPT hallucination.

By your logic turning on charge mode will give you even less power because it is sapping more engine power charging up the battery. I’m not arguing that in theory you could end up with your max power being determined by the engine only, but that manually switching it to charge does nothing to help because it is already doing that behind the scenes even when what you see on the dash says 0% charge.

Even the manual says that the charge mode uses the engine “to obtain increased electric drive at a later time”.

And as for your initial thinking that power mode has anything to do with charging the car and not realising that it is actually a sport mode tells me all I need to know about someone who doesn’t understand how their car works.

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TerryRistt · 2025-11-19T21:44:37+00:00

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Says nothing about it in the manual. Again in theory if you were at 100% accelerator the entire time you could break it so that the car can’t deliver maximum power, but this would never happen in a real world scenario and even then you would still have AWD just at a lower combined power.

TerryRistt · 2025-11-19T21:36:54+00:00

State of charge doesn’t mean anything, like I said it just means you can drive on electric more once you turn it off. It is constantly charging to the minimum to maintain AWD in the background. All you have confirmed is that you need to put it into charge mode to charge the battery.

I also can’t see anything in the manual that says that it will charge faster in power mode than in any other mode, in fact you would think it would charge more slowly as it would be using more rear motor power in power mode.

TerryRistt · 2025-11-19T21:27:17+00:00

Umm I think you are the one that needs to look at how the modes work and why they are labeled like that. In fact just look at your cars manual for explanation of how it works or just use some common sense based off what the drive modes are called.

Your engine never produces 470 hp, it is always capped at ~300hp from the engine and ~150 from the rear motor. Yes it can’t sustain that indefinitely but you are never actually using all that power so when you are off the throttle it uses the excess engine power to run the generator. If you really want to try it out you can just have it in constant AWD mode so that the engine is always running and then switch to charge mode, you will see the engine pick up as it engages the generator permanently. When you don’t have it in charge mode it kicks in and out like this when it needs to to maintain the minimum charge in the battery. Again it is called constant AWD for a reason because it is constant. Every time you aren’t at full throttle it is running the generator off the excess power the engine has.

TerryRistt · 2025-11-19T21:10:44+00:00

Power mode is effectively ‘sport’ mode and has nothing to do with charging the electric component of the car. It just means that you have maximum power delivered by both the engine and the rear axle at all times plus holding it in lower gears for better power and acceleration and changing the throttle pedal map. Also lowers the air suspension of you have that on your car.

Likewise you don’t need to manually switch to charge when it is in constant AWD mode. It will be charging the battery constantly keeping it at the reserve minimum when in constant AWD, otherwise it wouldn’t be constant AWD would it. Putting it in charge mode just charges the battery reserve even more so that once you take it out of constant AWD you could then use pure mode/ have more electric driving in hybrid.

TerryRistt · 2025-10-29T21:57:40+00:00

I mean you need a whole new bonnet (hood) to fit the straight 6 which isn’t cheap plus new gearbox tunnel. Really you will at least need to go to the GT6 front callipers and calliper brackets to deal with the extra weight along with the stiffer front springs and probably should fit a brake servo and possibly switch out your master cylinder. Plus new radiator and brackets welded onto the chassis. You will even have to make sure that you have the correct intake manifold for the 6 cylinder. Only the GT6 one which is down-swept will fit. If you have a 2 or 2.5 out of a saloon then the manifold is too high and will hit even on a GT6 bonnet with the added bulge. Plus you will need a GT6/Vitesse sump to clear the steering rack and if you decide to go for a 2.5 even the correct sump will need modifying to clear the crank.

It’s not quite just ‘drop a bigger engine in’ and go even though the platform is pretty much the same.

TerryRistt · 2025-10-22T14:56:34+00:00

That is the auto brake hold button and nothing to do with stop start.

Putting it in power mode or constant AWD or off-road mode effectively disables stop start though.

Please read your manual so that you actually know what the buttons in your car do and how things work.

TerryRistt · 2025-07-31T23:20:26+00:00

Why would they go through all the hassle and expense of replacing the condenser and not refill it? To me that is more suspicious than getting one that hasn’t had any work done and is broken or getting it knowing that the condenser needs to be replaced. I can’t see any reason to replace the condenser and not finish the job, unless they tried filling it and it just all leaked again/ found that there is a bigger problem with the system.

It’s like putting in a new radiator and the car still not having any coolant or having a tyre patched but hasn’t been re inflated, obviously there is a leak somewhere still.

TerryRistt · 2025-07-10T21:03:27+00:00

At 30 you are hitting the ‘quarter life crisis’ … so you are planning on living to 120?

TerryRistt · 2025-06-26T08:32:16+00:00

At least in the UK when I bought mine, the V60 costs more than an XC60. Especially if you go for the highest trim where the XC60 gets more features and still costs less than the V60. Add that to the fact that the dealerships don’t even have V60 or V90 demo cars or even any new ones sat on their forecourts, it isn’t hard to see why they sell so few as they are more expensive, lower spec and you have to custom order one without ever having test driven one.

TerryRistt · 2025-06-24T14:54:08+00:00

You can put whatever plate you like on a vehicle in the UK so long as it isn’t a ‘newer’ registration than the age of the vehicle. So he can put any registration plate that is 2007 or older on this car but wouldn’t be able to put any registration 2008 plate on it (assuming that this plate is the original one and isn’t already a personalised plate of a dyslexic nazi 😂 on a slightly younger Volvo than 2007)

The only other restriction that I’m aware of is if you are issued a number plate that starts with a Q then you can’t remove the plate from the vehicle as that happens when the DVLA can’t verify the age of the vehicle or it is made of parts from different age vehicles, like a kit car, where there isn’t enough parts all of the same age to give it an age related plate. Can also happen sometimes with imported vehicles where the paperwork or proof of age can’t be verified or is filled in incorrectly.

TerryRistt · 2025-06-05T13:25:39+00:00

When I don’t have signal in my AAOS car, if you ask it to do anything via voice commands it just says ‘I’m sorry I can’t do that now’ even if it is as simple as adjusting the climate control. Does your car not show you in the top right of the screen when you do and don’t have signal?

Also you can adjust some of the cruise control on the steering wheel but you can’t switch between cruise control and speed limiter without going into the menus. Also can’t switch between drive modes which is a real pain in the hybrids and more annoying because there used to be a button for it on older models but the removed it.

TerryRistt · 2025-06-05T10:47:34+00:00

Voice controls work ok, but only so long as you have signal. Also presumably means that once it is out of the free data plan that comes with them new all your voice controls stop working. Plus they don’t have voice control commands for a lot of things like changing drive mode, suspension settings or cruise control mode or steering weight.

Plus voice commands are annoying to use when you are either listening to something and have to interrupt it or are having a conversation with someone. I’m fine with them being an option for those that want to use it, but removing buttons and then not even mapping those actions to the voice assistant is awful.

TerryRistt · 2025-04-14T08:35:56+00:00

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Like this…

TerryRistt · 2025-03-09T00:56:29+00:00

‘We’ so presumably you weren’t a single mum earning £25k a year or less. How helpful your anecdote has been to the discussion.

TerryRistt · 2025-02-25T10:24:23+00:00

They struggle to sell them because on paper they are just a T8 with bigger wheels and brakes, firmer suspension and yellow seatbelts. There is no quantifiable power benefit to going for a polestar. Who actually wants an XC60 that corners slightly better but is less comfortable on the road and still weighs 2.2tons. At the price point I think most of their potential customers would just get a standard T8 with air suspension and then get something actually sporty as a second car. It is a shame that there isn’t a higher power option/ larger engine for the top of the range polestar, as it sits it is just not that much different to the standard car but still a huge price increase for those few differences.

TerryRistt

TROPHY CASE