Why Exotic Car Mechanics Are Essential For High-Performance Vehicles
An exotic car is more than just a car, it’s an investment, an experience, and a piece of art all cleverly disguised as a car. To ensure you are constantly getting the best experience, protecting your investment, and getting the highest level of performance out of your exotic car, you’re going to want to keep up with your manufacturer’s recommended service schedule. While that may seem obvious, what is less obvious is the reasons why you’ll want to take your car to an exotic service specialist for all its service and repair work.
Specialist Mechanics Understand Exotic Cars
There’s a reason we lust for Lamborghinis, McLarens, and Porsches more than a Corolla. Exotic cars are made with advanced materials and technologies, incorporate unique designs and high-performance (and often high capacity) engines crammed into tight fitting engine bays.
Successfully servicing these vehicles often requires a lot of know-how. My favorite example of this is the legendary Ferrari F40, where for most service items most of the rear clamshell is removed from the subframe, and to the untrained eye can appear as if the car has been split in two.
Specialized Tools & Equipment
Most mechanics will only keep sockets and spanners to fit the vehicles they do the most work on, and for US cars those are imperial sized. However, the majority of the most desirable exotic cars are from Europe, where metric bolts are more common. What makes working on exotics even more challenging is that manufacturers will often use bolts with triple square or torque heads. Triple square and torque heads look very similar if you aren’t familiar with them and can quickly lead to stripped bolt heads that become an even greater task to remove, I haven’t even begun to mention some of the specialty tools required for some service and repair jobs.
Something as simple as resetting a service light or rotating tires often needs a specialized OBD2 scanner to tell the onboard computer there has been a change. Dry sump oil systems need specialized pumps and vacuums to change oil, even changing a wheel may require a high torque wrench and breaker bar if you have center locks.
Availability Of Quality Parts
Exotic cars come with a big problem, exotic parts, parts that you are unlikely to find at your local parts store. An exotic service specialist will be familiar with the most common parts they need to keep on hand, what parts can be pulled from lower end models, and where to get quality aftermarket, performance, or reproduction parts.​​​​​​
Most exotic car owners struggle to believe that their dream car contains parts from far more mundane vehicles, but if you think about it, it does make a lot of sense. If you just spent millions of dollars developing a high-performance engine with an aerodynamic body and suspension to match, it makes sense not to waste more time developing a climate control panel when you can use the whole assembly from another manufacturer (just like Lamborghini used an MG-Rover climate control assembly in the Murcielago.) An original Lamborghini assembly may cost you a couple thousand dollars, but a MG-Rover unit is a few hundred, even though your mechanic may be required to swap over some trim.
Essential Services For Maintaining Your High-Performance Exotic
You bought your high-performance car to drive it, to feel the roar of the engine and force of the acceleration, and trust me when I say there is nothing worse than bracing yourself, dropping a gear, putting your foot flat and your car just lurching forward or spinning out. To prevent that, we recommend following these routine maintenance services:
Fluid Flushes and Changes
We have spoken about oil changes to death, but for good reason, nobody ever wants to experience a seized engine, but let’s take a moment to chat about the other fluids in your car that may be getting neglected, starting with coolant. Unless you have an Air-cooled Porsche, coolant is as important to your engines well being as oil. Keeping your engine at operating temperature helps oil perform best, and ensures that the tolerances are at their tightest for high rev pulls. An engine that is too cold may have components that have not fully expanded and can cause unwanted knocking, ticking, or blowback, while an engine that is running too hot may cause interference between components, seizing and even baking of the oil.
This brings us to transmission fluids. Whether you have a manual or automatic, transmission fluid plays an important part in engaging and disengaging clutches, lubricating gear sets, and lowering the friction between gear teeth that are engaged. Like any fluid in your vehicle, transmission fluid ages and degrades, making it less effective as a lubricant and coolant that causes severe damage.
Tire Inspections and Rotations​​​​​​
It doesn’t matter how powerful and aerodynamic your car is if you aren’t able to transfer that power to the ground, and there is one component solely responsible, tires. While you may not realize it, we often have a route we travel more often than others, which often has a preference to turns in a certain direction, which can wear one side of tires more than the other, the curvature of roads for water drainage also plays a part in this, and so does your vehicle’s drivetrain. Rear wheel drive cars will often wear out the rear tires faster than the front.
By regularly rotating your tires you can ensure that tire wear is more even, extending the life of your tread, and has the added benefit of allowing a tire technician to inspect tires for any damage or unusual wear that may impact safety and performance. More than anything it is vital that tires are replaced when the tread is no longer sufficiently deep to offer proper traction.
Exotic Car Mechanic in Pompano Beach
Remember, investing in a good mechanic now can save you time, money, and headaches in the long run. If you own a exotic sports car, give the team at Foreign Affairs Motorwerks a call at 954-746-0488. We have over 125 years of combined experience as specialist auto mechanics. From Ferrari’s to Honda NSX’s, we work on anything that gets your blood pumping!