EDIT: IT's a BRZ, not an FR-S.
I live near A1A Coastal Highway in NE FL. It's one of the quieter areas...2 lanes, no traffic lights, mostly residential & a few small stores. It's a popular area for weekend cruising & can get a bit noisy during bike week & during peak summer beach times. There was a thread a while back about kids doing burnouts the front of the OPs house. Great read, happy ending, etc. I had contemplated writing a rant about this specific issue a few months ago, but decided against it. Also, my son and wife begged me not to intervene. By nature I'm not a confrontational person (even behind a keyboard).
I'm not overly grumpy about "those noisy kids." I think people should be free to make their cars louder and customize them however they want as long as it's not (overly) unsafe (to others) and doesn't have a major negative impact on the people around them. I like the older guy who used to live behind me who would ALWAYS exit his driveway in his C7 Z06 (convertible automatic, of course) at WOT. Silly, but I got a kick out of hearing the Z06 go from 0-50 (45mph limits the fun). He didn't drive it every day, and I fondly recall several times where we were drinking beer in the back yard and gave him a big cheer as he blasted off.
The situation: About 9-12 months ago a guy (probably closer to an adolescent) bought an FRS and immediately fart-canned it. The car was usually parked in a driveway a few miles down the road...often on jack stands. It was loud, but not unreasonable. While I don't live directly on the main road (A1A coastal Highway), I could hear that "shoe in a dryer" drone from inside my house whenever he drove by (several times a day). Very different from the occasional squatted pickup w/straight pipes (also annoying).
Things got more interesting when the FRS got a giant wing (LOL'd). Things took a wrong-turn when he added a burble-tune (pop bang tune) and for better performance (?!?) had the hood removed. The car didn't have a turbo. The exhaust also got louder. This shiny happy person (for months) would cruise A1A accelerating to 55 and then slowing down to hear the backfire CONSTANTLY. I still can't understand how there wasn't a police intervention. There's a fire station is on his regular route and his house is <1 mile from a police station). It was LOUD. SWMBO gets very rattled by the sound of gunfire, so the regular sound of the backfiring started to bring a bit of stress into the household. I can't imagine how someone w/serious PTSD would handle it...but my neighbors had similar complaints. Since I've been working from home the last 9 months, there are times when I've counted him driving by at least a half dozen to a dozen times a day.
I contemplated knocking on his door, leaving a note (YOUR SLOW CAR IS STILL SLOW) or just talking to him if I ran into him around town (the car is hard to miss). W/the popularity of firearms in FL I ruled out confronting someone at his/her home...and I'm pretty sure how it would have played out if I asked him to drop the burble tune or to stop being such a shiny happy person. I thought about finding him on instagram and making fun of him online...but harassing someone on the internet is kind of a waste of mental bandwidth. I would have loved to throw a spike strip in front of him but ultimately decided the situation would probably work itself out. It did.
While browsing the FB marketplace yesterday I saw this:
To clarify, I'm never happy to see someone wreck a car. Hopefully there's a lesson learned about how to responsibly operate a vehicle. There's a good chance someone else on a cell phone actually caused the wreck. All I can hope is that the insurance payout won't be enough for this guy to afford a burble-tune on whatever else he buys.
If anyone is looking for FR-S / BRZ parts don't buy them from this guy. I'm still tempted to message him and ask if the wing is still for sale or ask him to remove the subframe and not show up.
