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Video notes: I've finally figured out how to do the video so it's clearer and can stream so you don't have to wait for an eternity for it to download. I'm going to be working on it this weekend and I'll have several videos. One will be the one you've all seen with the music. The other will be the "raw" one with the wind noise, engine sound, tire squeals(yes there is, I checked) and general small talk. The third will be an outside view of the pro taking the timing course. Look at that one pretty closely. Even though the pro is definitely throwing the car into the turns, the car leans very little, even when applying heavy braking.
I'm also going to see how big a file it makes if I create an online file of all the presentations. I also have had an offer from one of the folks to edit the video onto a CD-R. So I'll keep you all posted.
Brian
The notice on the local BMWCCA site can be viewed here.
Bob
I had my car into Gatecity Lincoln Mercury Greensboro NC yesterday and today to install new drivers seat heating element and reprogram PCM per TSB 01-01-05. They got the job done faster than I expected and I'm pleased. They actually sublet the job to a local upholstery shop. My initial reaction to the reprogrammed PCM is very positive. It moves from park to reverse to drive etc faster than it did before. Also I think I notice smoother shifts as it runs thru the gears. To those of you waiting to get it done I'd say go for it.
Hector
Let us know when you get it.
I'd also get a sunroof & in-dash CD. A $36K plus luxury sport sedan has to have these. They should be standard! I'm surprised at how much headroom mine has even with the sunroof. I'm 6' 2" and there is still gobs of room!
Dick
The Alpine Sport stereo with the in-dash CD changer is the only sound system available on the '01 Sport, so you don't have to worry about the changer in the glove box. The phone has been discontinued, so you don't have that to consider, either. The new digital phone/RESCU system was supposed to have been available by now, but I haven't heard any details recently.
I'd recommend the moonroof, too; this is my 3rd power moonroof (plus a couple of manual lift-off models) and none of them have ever leaked a drop of water or malfunctioned in any way. Some people don't care for them, but I use mine regularly and really enjoy it.
AdvanceTrac is worth it for me; if it saves your bacon once, it pays for itself. I didn't get the chrome wheels, but I think they look fine on darker-colored cars. I prefer the regular Sport wheels--it's a matter of personal preference.
The only other option of note is the tricoat paint; if you want white or ivory, you have to pay extra (mine's ivory and I really like it.)
There are several dealer-added options available that many of us have. I have the splash guards, and I like them; I also have a Lincoln trunk organizer, which works very well but takes up some room. Other folks have added the trunk net instead; your dealer should be able to provide info on such items. Generally, the Lincoln-supplied accessories seem to fit well and be of high quality.
(DON'T take any sort of paint or interior "protection" packages, though--they're junk and not worth a dime. I'd run from a dealer that tried to sell me that trash.)
Good luck with your purchase--it's a GREAT car.
You're making the right choice. I agree completely with jonnylinc's post. I own an '01 V8 Sport. If you live in the snow belt, you might also consider the Lincoln vinyl front floor mats (about $50). They fit and look great and really do a good job of keeping the wet muck off your carpets.
Is this board incredible or what? Where else could you possibly find the kind of info that Mr. Cupka offered in post 110? I've been here for almost a year now and am still amazed at this site.
Joe
Please allow my $.02 on the hand brake: Remember the old style "grab, pull, & twist" handle under the left side of the dash? Of course, the handle would have to be leather covered (with a woodgrain option).
Better make that $.01.
Scott
Hector, enjoy your LS V8. Sport package is the way to go, I think AdvanceTrac is worth the $$$. I have an LS on order right now. I also got AdvanceTrak. In addition, I got moonroof and conv pkg, which is std on your 8, but optional on my V6. I joined the 3% club and got the 5Speed manual tranny with the V6. I also got the chrome wheels. I think they look great, maybe even better with the darker colors. Mine will be Autumn Red. There was one Aut red LS at the LS Mania event. It had chrome wheels and it looked fantastic.
And that brings me to heated seats. I haven't ordered those on my car, though I think they would be a great 'nice-to-have' here in Cal. So I thought about ordering them too, but there were so many cars having them break that I though why pay $400 for a headache. But now, having seen post number 110 by Rich Cupka about the new design bringing complaints down over 98%, I think I'll add them to my car. They are a real nice to have for $400 if they work fine, last a long time.
George
I realize that I don't recall where giowa lives. I could agree that if you are driving mostly in the plains, or in the city, the SST would not be a critical feature, but for mountain driving I consider it extremely useful.
I don't use SST mode in town or when driving across Kansas or Nebraska, but driving up Highway 1 along the California coast and other similar switchback intense roads, I ALWAYS use the SST mode.
I have driven many thousands of miles of mountain driving, by motorcycle and by automobile, in the Rocky mountains, in the Smoky Mountains, in the Swiss, French, and Italian Alps, in the Dolomites, in the hundreds of other different mountain ranges throughout Italy and Sicily (I lived in Italy for three years). I have driven a couple of thousand miles of mountain driving in the US with our Lincoln LS, with its SST transmission, and I think I'm a pretty good judge of how it compares with the manual transmissions I've had on motorcycles and other automobiles I've driven in the mountains.
The SST is NOT just a gimmick! It is not identical to having a manual transmission, and I don't use it in exactly the same way, but it does provide the really important features of control for mountain driving. I have driven hundreds of miles in second and third gear, where the car NEEDS to be most of the time for a lot of mountain roads. What a pain it would have been to have the automatic shifting up and down when I didn't want it to!
For a LOT of mountain driving situations, the SST is very close to the same as having a manual transmission. I know this. I have a LOT of experience with both. If you expect to drive in the mountains, definitely get the SST!
For me it isn't something I use because I "enjoy it", like some sort of entertainment. It serves a definite purpose for certain kinds of driving (hilly, twisting turning roads), and for that it provides a mode of control not attainable with a pure automatic transmission. When I'm not driving in those kinds of circumstances, I seldom use it.
Hector
Granted, it ain't no manual, but I find it to be a great compromise.
reneblanc: I'm usually in complete agreement with you ... not this time. My non-SST is great fun rowing up and down through the gears on twisty roads. I can tell by ear when an upshift or downshift is in order, and the direction of lever movement is intuitive. (except for the D4-D5 shift which happens at a speed beyond twisties driving)
I kinda like the SST bump-up, bump-down feature, but wouldn't trade the automatic first gear start for it.
When I picked it up it had been washed and vacuumed. Great Dealer with whom I have been doing business for many years!!
I have less than 100 miles on the car since this was done. If any problems show up with time I will post.
Once in SST mode I often find I have to concentrate on what gear I'm in and how to get to the one I want to go to. I have to look at the dash indicator and think to self which direction makes the gears go up or down. With my manual tranny business car I instinctively "know" what gear I'm in and what gear I want to go to. I don't have to look down or at a dash light indicator. Even with a standard AT floor shifter (e.g., in my '96 Impala SS), I have a better instinctive knowledge of what gear I'm in and what gear I want to go to just by pulling the shift lever back or forth.
Yes, the SST will allow you to do a few things in a few isolated cases slightly better than rowing the standard floor AT shifter. But if I could've saved at least $500 and kept all of the '00 Sport Pkg but the SST, I'd probably dropped SST. (I wouldn't have if the SST also kept the standard shift pattern.)
I've always thought it was interesting that Lincoln won't allow SST LSs to be rowed manually, i.e., not using SST, except into D4. Why can't I keep pulling the lever back into D3, D2, and D1? And still pull to right to engage SST if I'm so inclined? Some manufacturers with SSTs keep the standard pattern and add SST mode.
Also, ALL of my heated seat failures took place after 1/00. I've had BOTH front driver and passenger elements replaced multiple times. These replacements happened after 1/00. Has my dealer been using bad replacement elements? Did Lincoln have all pre-1/00 elements pulled and destroyed/repaired?
SST: Not having done a lot of spirited low speed driving, at first glance it would seem that the gas pedal kick-down to first and shifter to second would be pretty awkward on a cone course. Any comments? I wonder if the awkward shifting would be better or worse than somewhat erratic down-shifting in D4 or D5.
Advancetrac: The few times I have "accidentally" activated this on dry pavement, there is a definite drag for a second after regaining traction. Did this have a big imact on course time? Did you think that the control factor outweighed the drag effect?
I do plan to take the advice of others on tire pressure and set it at 35psi (where I normally keep it). I think the 17" Firestones are too squirrelly when really over inflated, yet I want to avoid sidewall roll.
Do us all a favor and just ignore him.
The other neat thing that I had tem do was to change connectors on the sub so that they were dual fixed banana type disconnects. This way, when I go to by boat, I just pull out the banana plug and remove the sub woofer box from the trunk and I have the entire trunk for storage.
I decided to put the 12 inch single sub in because of the sound deadening in the car. Also, some people might think putting a big box in the trunk is tacky but how often do you really open the trunk. With the disconnect, if I need the trunk, it's a 30 second operation.
Hope that helps.
True synoil is really superior in every way.
John, now I'm a little confused. Did they mount it under the deck? I still may just do the amp.
"gschwartz: In automatic mode, the SST always starts in 1st gear"
Thanks; I didn't know that.
For autocrossing, depending on the way the track is set up, you should be able to leave the car in second gear if you have an automatic.
I did some left-foot braking experimenting yesterday to see what the difference would be in the car's handling characteristics. It does make a difference for the automatic due to being able to finesse the brake and gas at the same time to ease the transition between on-gas and off-gas. Basically if you didn't use your left foot you would have to come completely off the gas to apply the brake, and if you just went to full-throttle you would cause the car to carry the weight more forward than if you kept eased off the gas and eased on the brake. This results in a smoother transition.
That said, if you had a pretty wide right foot I suppose you could apply gas and brake at the same time
Now, as far as Solo II SCCA Autocross classes. This is actually an area that I DO! know something about, having spent a good deal of my misspent youth doing this in a 79 Turbo Capri that was heavily modified (10 psi boost, water injection, lowered, 290 hp). This car was in the same Street Prepared class as Shelby Mustangs, z-28 Camaros, etc. Bigger, heavier, more powerful cars. I used to trounce them due to the lower weight and better balance of the Capri. Used to really tick them off too.
The Stock Class F that the LS would probably fit into should be a really interesting class. There are quite a bit of variation in cars there. We would be able to hold our own against quite a few of them and be smacked by quite a few of them. Here's the SCCA link for classifications for SOLO II: http://www.scca.org/amateur/solo2/classes/stock.html
For some reason I'm not quite sure of, I don't seem to have this problem with my motorcycle, which has an almost identical shift pattern; except I use my left foot to shift. There is something "mechanical" about the process that seems to give me a better awareness of what gear the bike is in without having to look at the LCD gear display.
With manual shift cars, I usually have my hand on the shift knob, and just the position of it tells me immediately what gear the transmission is in.
Still, for the way I use the SST in mountain driving, I haven't had a problem of "gear awareness" under those circumstances. I am using it to maintain engine RPMs and to control the car's speed both up and down hills without riding all over the brakes. Of course, when I need to slow down quickly, I use the brakes! However, when I come out into a straight section of road and want to quickly overtake slower traffic, I pop the transmission back into automatic and let it pick the shift points while I concentrate on watching traffic. Under these conditions, I think the automatic mode picks its shift points as well or better than I can.
gschwartz: In automatic mode, the SST always starts in 1st gear, so this is not a tradeoff. The way I use the SST mode, the car is typically moving along in 5th gear when I come to some twisty-turnie stuff and go to SST mode to shift down to 4th or third. Normally, I only need to use 2nd for REALLY sharp hairpins and/or very steep grades.
When starting up from a stop, I don't normally use the SST. The automatic mode shift points for this transmission (at least on MY car) are almost ideal. Starting up from a stop in SST mode in 2nd is not a problem for me, because I'm not usually drag racing somebody, and even if I did, mashing the accelerator jumps it immediately into 1st anyway. I haven't noticed any objectional delay in this transition. In any case, I think it unlikely that I could shorten acceleration times by using SST mode, because the transmission in automatic mode is so responsive to how far down I've pressed the accelerator that it adjusts the shift points upward just about perfectly.
http://www.infinitysystems.com/caraudio/product.asp?ProdId='BASSLINK'
I drive a fair amount in the NC mountains--love the SST.
I've put thousands of miles in both SST and non-SST LSs. Spend some time driving both in various topography and in various traffic densities. I think most LS8 SST owners will be able to get nearly similar results, and maintain the sense of control they desire, by manually rowing the gears in the non-SST LS8.
Because Lincoln only allows SST owner to row from D5 to D4, SST owners can't traditionally row our gears using the shifter. We have to move shifter to right and then toggle the shifter back and forth in SST mode. If we could do both, row or toggle, that would allow a better comparison.
Now I'm wondering if I may have discovered one small reason why Lincoln won't keep D5-D4-D3-D2-D1 on left and then have SST on right in the SST cars: if they did, maybe most SST owners would quickly see the difference (really lack thereof) and might prefer to row manually staying on the left side? I wish we SST owners could do both: rowing and toggling.
"drolds1: I respectfully disagree. I too live in a snowy area with my non-SST transmission. It too readily starts in first, second, or third."
As giowa points out, I have no experience with driving a non-SST LS, except for a few laps at LS-Mania where I drove a non-SST, but didn't try to manually intervene with the shifting.
However, I thought that selecting any particular gear with the non-SST trans, say D3, only limits the highest gear attanable to that gear, but that the car will still start in 1st and shift its way up to that selected gear. If this weren't the case, then there wouldn't really be any difference between the non-SST and the SST transmission except for the gear selection lever arrangement.
So, how are you able to start up in 2nd or 3rd gear, for example?
Further, the select shift concept has been around for several years now (and I believe conceived by Porsche as Tiptronic) and employed by a number of manufacturers. Without being "gimmicky", the SST offers the control benefits afforded by manual transmissions without the need of a clutch pedal.
Any comments, from any owners or the transmission guru?