[V8] Stuff for your '91 V8

[Roger M. Woodbury]

I’ll add my two cents worth here regarding lights, brakes and lowering.  Simply put:  don’t do it.

There are a lot of other folks on this list who have far more mechanical knowledge about the items on your list so I will keep silent there, but as far as the three items above, here are my thoughts:

1. Do not. Repeat DO NOT lower the car.  You will not gain anything except for a whole bunch of other problems unless you are driving ONLY on extremely smooth road surfaces....New Mexico and Arizona come to mind, but certainly not most of the southern California or Texas that I have seen.  These cars were designed carefully to ride and handle pretty well, and messing with suspensions will give you limitations elsewhere.  You’re in Washington?  If you lower, lotsa luck!

2. Headlights.  I have had one V8 with Euro headlights and now two without.  By far the very best lighting imaginable is with properly wired and relayed European headlights.  Last year I was having the chin replaced on my ‘90 V8 after it very gently slid into a frozen ice back on water slicked ice. I figured “while we’re in there we might as well change out the lights.”  (Here in Maine, when I drive at night, most times it is severely black dark, and the Euro’s are almost....almost mandatory for survival against Bambi and his herd, among others.).  In the end, I gave up the search for a decent used set, and the only new ones I found were through a Canadian company who imports them.  $1100 plus shipping for the new headlights.  Not happening because I really don’t drive that much at night any more.  I did have the wrench install relays for both high and low beams on both sides and the illumination of my high beams is really pretty good...NOT as good as Euros, but much better for my purposes than dropping what would end up being about $1400 for the lights, shipping and installation of new Euros.

If you don’t drive a LOT in really deep, dark, save your money for other maintenance.

3.  Brakes.  The UFOs were chosen for this car because the brake swept area was quite a lot greater than using any other form of disc brakes that would fit inside the 15” wheels.  I bought my ‘90 V8 when it had just 60,000 miles a few years ago. The brakes were the original UFOs and both front and rear brakes were close to needing to be replaced.  I own one UFO brake rebuilding kit, and I was concerned that the calipers might not be usable without rebuilding since one appeared to be seeping fluid.  I looked hard into alternatives, and found that the only way I could maintain the braking power of the UFO’s without using them would be to change wheels and use something like Porsche Boxter calipers and A8 rotors. There are a lot of different ways to  approach the problem, but it seems that all of them involve going to 16” wheels or larger.  Once you add up the cost of making the brake system change and changing the wheels the cost of new UFO’s becomes relatively minor.  In the end, I did not need to replace OR rebuild my calipers and we just installed new UFO rotors.  The parts were not terribly expensive as I recall.  At some point in time I suppose UFO rotors may not be available anywhere.  If and when that happens, some other decision may be necessary.  My recommendation to you is to think very hard about what you might give up by changing the brakes to a convention disc system that will fit inside those 15” wheels.  If you have the dough to change everything, then that will be a different story, but your comment was about “costly” UFO’s.  

One other thing I am picky about and that is the offset of the wheels.  The V8 wheels have a different offset than the A6 or any other Audi.  I don’t know enough about steering geometry and suspension engineering to want to mess with offsets, even though I understand the difference between ET35 and ET40 is small.  When I was searching for alternative wheels for the car, supposing that I would need to change the front brakes, I found very few wheels available in the correct offset for the V8, and those I did find were exceedingly expensive.  yes, it is possible to have wheels custom made to whatever offset you want, and I shudder to think about the cost of that kind of work.  I am sure BBS and Fiske can do it.  Again, it’s dependent on the depth of  your wallet.

Those are my comments, aside from one other.  I recommend highly that you change the timing belt, water pump and assorted rollers RIGHT NOW.  Yeah, yeah, I know most seller always have “just done all of that”, but if it were me, I would want to have the car completely serviced first, and establish a list of things that were found during service to add to the list you have so you can proceed in an orderly manner to make it right and to your standards.  These cars can dish up wild surprises with no warning, but if you can get ahead of them and stay there, they are wonderful cars.  

My wife and I went to Bangor yesterday.  Mostly open road an a short stretch of interstate.  little to no traffic with light rain and drizzle and the car was wonderful all 85 miles of the trip!  Perfect.

Best of luck,

Roger