[s-cars] Stebro Exhaust

[Randy Lee]

What an adventure!  

First they only sent me the rear section.

Then, 3 months later, they sent me the front part including the cats.

Only one problem: none of it would actually fit together or work with an S6.

So, there followed months of hemming and hawing by George Ritchey at German Motors in Tahoe City.  Don't get the wrong idea!  George runs what is arguably one of, if not the best Audi service shop in the US!!!  He took that long, because he wanted to come up with the best and most cost effective solution to this problem, and, given the components supplied by my pals at Stebro, it is amazing that he came up with a solution at all.  Finally George decided that, yes, just maybe the local muffler shop could re-work the Stebro "precision" components so that they would work.

Good job George!  He took the car to the muffler shop, they re-worked the stuff, and got it installed.  

Now here is the tragi-comic part of the story: the system sounds fantastic.  At idle it has a low bass rumble, but as you accelerate, it doesn't get any louder, so it is very comfortable on the freeway.  You still hear a hint of bass, so the engine now communicates its presence in a very convincing manner but without ever being annoying.  Bravo, but not to the current owners of Stebro.  They are schmucks and losers, but at least not all the good technology developed by the founder of the Stebro company has disappeared.  The sad part is that the main reason I selected Stebro in the first place is because they are the only company that offers a performance muffler system that is not a 3" single pipe solution.  The reason I didn't want a 3" system is that, as George pointed out to me, you lose ground clearance.  My Audi is a go anywhere, do anything workhorse, so this is important to me.  Well, sadly, even after the Tahoe City muffler shop did their best, the ground clearance is not nearly as good as it could be.  *sigh*

So now, my next step is to take my car to Mitch in El Cerrito.  He is THE muffler wizard - hopefully he can re-work the system some more and get it all tucked up there nice and neat.  I now realize that I would have been a lot better off just taking the car to Mitch in the first place and having him make me a custom system out of Magnaflow or suchlike parts.  It wouldn't probably have ended up sounding so good, but it would have been less frick'n expensive, and would have easily met my expectations for ground clearance, oh yeah, and the whole job would have taken at most a month instead of 6 frick'n months!!

Whew!

Randy Lee