In certain circles (usually Asian-Americans and people who want to pretend they’re Asians), the cool thing is to have a Japanese import seems like it’s souped up for street racing. If all the modifications are useless and possibly counterproductive, it’s what my people call a rice rocket. You probably ought to call it another thing, or else you’re a racist.
Personally, i became a junior member of the rice rocket club as i bought a Civic Si with 18-inch rims, and I cope with my guilt by pointing out considerably more ridiculous rice rockets inside a desperate bid to prove I’m still cool. So here’s a few things those dorky people who are very different from me stick on the cars:
#5. Fake Engine Sounds
You’ve probably heard of a turbocharger, which is actually a thing that you put in your engine to create your car faster. It’s considered cool to have turbo,. Which is i don’t completely understand what it does, and for the purposes of this informative article, all you need to know. Now, there are 2 ways to let someone know your car has a turbocharger (and you are therefore cool). One is to put a sticker upon it saying so — more on that later — as well as the second is to make sure everyone hears the sound it will make.
So, it might be dawning on you that there’s no reason to pay for this if you’re putting your thinking caps on:
If you can just buy this:
That’s right, that’s a speaker system. A speaker system that can mimic the characteristic turbo sound. It even comes with a switch, so you can turn on the sound at stoplights and near attractive girls. (Feel free to call that sexist if you can show me a video of a girl revving an imitation engine to thrill a handsome man passing by.)
Listen to this awesomely sad piece of technology for yourself:
When you have this thing, I’m not sure why you need a car at all. Each and every time the girl calls, you just run these in the background say, I’m sorry, I’m having trouble hearing you over my turbocharger. Hold on, I have to ramp something.
Then if you notice her in person, just let her know it’s in the shop. The turbocharger shop.
#4. Giant Wings
First, you have to understand the difference between a spoiler and a wing. They’re both those little tail pieces on the rear of a car whose main functionality on a street-legal vehicle is always to look cool and make your trunk a bit harder to open up. The spoiler is the one with no gap and, just as a random example, here is this completely tasteful Civic Si factory spoiler.
Clearly owned by someone with excellent taste.
A spoiler’s purpose is basically to decrease the slope of the airflow path down the back of the vehicle, which allegedly decreases drag, increases mileage and keeps your rear window cleaner. Does my tiny two-inch high spoiler really do all of that? I don’t know. If it doesn’t do any kind of that Voodoo aerodynamics magic for me, no less than it doesn’t hurt my car, but even.
The same can’t be said for wings:
But all the fastest race cars have wings, you might think. I see them on Formula-1-type cars all the time!
Surely what’s suitable for a race car is nice enough to your Chevy Cavalier!
It’s important to remember that F1 cars go really really fast. At those speeds, pushing your tires down (which is such a wing does) actually creates a noticeable difference in steering and control. I’m happy to bet about 70 percent of cars with oversized wings are actually physically unable to reach a speed at which the wing’s downforce would help.
That’s probably the case here.
Rice rockets usually have only a rear wing, and have front wheel steering and drive, although not only that. If the wing is having any effect, it’s picking up the wheels you wish to push down, basically.
Wheelies only look cool once you do them on purpose.
If that scientific discipline took on corporeal form and bit them in the ass, and additionally, most rice rocketeers wouldn’t know aerodynamics. So they purchase wings that aren’t even shaped for providing any downforce. Hell, they could even be providing lift. Or more likely just being heavy, creating drag and making your car slower than grandma’s stock Corolla over the following lane.
You might think at this point that the giant wing is the stupidest thing you can put on the back of your car but you would be wrong.
You could put three wings! In a place where no oncoming air can get in their mind! That’s thinking out of the box, kid.
#3. Body Kits
Have you been worried that the bottom of your automobile is too miles away from speed bumps to adopt any damage, but you don’t want to mess with your suspension by lowering it? Well, aerodynamic body kits are for you personally!
There are two main straws people grasp at to justify a crazy body kit. The first one is that if you will get wider wheels (for better traction) they’ll stick out of your wheel wells, and you’d need wider wheel wells to cover the wheels and direct air smoothly over them. I guess that’s technically true.
But that only explains an eighth of the ridiculous setup. The second flimsy straw is the idea of ground effects, a real phenomenon where, basically, if one makes a tiny narrow space in between the car along with the ground, it helps pull the car down (that same downforce people want so badly from the wings).
Like the wings, you hardly need that sort of business inside a regular passenger car, and actually you’re probably getting more downforce out of the weight of that stupid body kit than any ground effect aerodynamics it’s generating).
In addition to being useless, body kits in the wrong hands could lead to some truly disturbing Frankenstein-like creations.
You’ll probably vaguely recognize a number of the parts and obtain an eerie feeling that they don’t belong together once you know cars. This grass-nuzzling abomination was once a stock Acura Integra.
Unable to exit a slightly sloped driveway to look for it., although thanks to a Frankenstein body kit produced from a Porsche 911 molded front end, a Mercedes-Benz hood, a Toyota Supra front body kit, a Nissan 350Z exhaust and Lexus IS300 headlights converted to tail lamps with fiberoptic halos, it has become the creature you can see above, begging for death.
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