Modify Your Car the First Day You Get It

You Should Modify Your Car the First Day You Get It

The longer you wait to modify or upgrade your car, the more it costs.

By Jack Baruth

I still remember the day that everybody in my college dorm got a credit card. Maybe I misremember the day, because I seem to recall that the cards just showed up in our mailboxes. That might not be quite correct. It might be that we all got preapproval notices and then we all sent away for our cards, which arrived at pretty much the same time.

Most of the fellows in my hall immediately maxed-out their limits on beer and pizza. There was a delirious couple of weeks where you could just walk from door to door and get a free meal at all times of the day and night. I took advantage of every extra slice, because I had different plans for my $200 limit. You see, I had a brand-new 1990 VW Fox with "radio prep" from the factory, meaning that it had four speakers and a bunch of wiring that terminated in the center console. But there was no actual radio, just a blank panel. I had plans to fix that on my very next weekend home.

In a perfect world, I would have worked and saved my money until I had $200 in cash. I could easily have done it in, say, six months. Maybe nine. Instead, I put a new single-DIN CD player on my new credit card, immediately stretching it to the limit. I made the minimum payment on a monthly basis. I bet that CD player probably ended up costing me $400 by the time all was said and done.

IT WAS A YEAR OF ENJOYING THE CAR QUITE A BIT MORE.

Sounds ridiculous and irresponsible, right? It may well have been–but that doesn't change the fact that I had a CD player in my car for maybe a full year that I'd have had a blank plate otherwise. Divide $200 in interest charges by twelve months and you get a monthly payment of $16.67 to have music in the car instead of the Fox's standard-equipment (and quite substantial) wind noise. It was a year of enjoying the car quite a bit more than I would have otherwise. Money well spent.

Twenty-seven years later, I find myself using that old example of fiscal insanity a few times a year at trackdays and club races. The typical situation is this: I'll have a student with a new Mustang GT. He knows the car needs better brakes, and he knows that it will cost him three or four grand to make that happen. Should he buy the brakes right now, often on a credit card, or should he save up to make the purchase in two or three years?

Now, I'm no financial advisor and I'm not qualified to give financial advice. You'd know this if you could see my bank statements for the past two decades. But there is something that I do know: the best time to buy durable upgrades for your car is right now. Not in six months. Not next year. And certainly not when you pay off the loan, whenever that is.

THE NUMBERS ARE IN MY FAVOR.

The numbers are in my favor. Allow me to explain. Suppose that we have two track rats with brand-new 2017 Mustangs. Driver A buys a $4000 brake system right now. Driver B buys it three years from now. Both of them keep their cars six years before selling them. When they sell their cars, the upgraded brakes bring an extra $1,000 in resale value.

How much did each driver pay for his brake upgrade? The answer is obviously $3,000 in both cases. But Driver B only got three years out of his brake upgrade, so it cost him $1,000 a year in depreciation. Driver A, on the other hand, got six years out of his upgrade. That's $500 a year, which is a much better deal even if you fail to consider the number of times Driver B had to buy new underwear at the end of the back straight during those first three years.

Note that this concept does not apply to things like R-compound tires, upgraded brake pads, bottles of NOS, or any other consumable. Those have a fixed service life no matter when you buy them. I'm talking about brake systems. Camshafts. ECU tunes.

Here's a great example of what happens when you wait to do something. Sixteen years ago, I bought a lightly-used Porsche 993. It came with cheap, crummy plastic window tint film. "I should get a new ceramic tint job," I thought. "It'll cost $200 max." I never got around to doing it. Instead, I just lived with the old tint. Watched it develop bubbles and streaks and weird psychedelic color patterns. Driving the car in the summer is like living at the bottom of a bowl filled with Easter-egg pigment.

I could put ceramic tint on the windows now. Probably should. But the tint is no cheaper now–quite the opposite, in fact–and I've had sixteen years of annoyance that I would not have had if I'd just done it at the start. In ten years, I'm giving the car to my kid. So any tint money I spend now has to be divided by ten, instead of by twenty-six. Boo hiss. I'm gonna leave the old tint on and make him pay for the upgrade himself.

THE SOONER YOU UPGRADE YOUR CAR, THE LONGER YOU GET TO ENJOY THAT UPGRADE.

The sooner you upgrade your car, the longer you get to enjoy that upgrade. The longer you wait, the less time you will have with your new shift knob or your slick new wheels or that LS7 swap you've always promised you'd do for the '79 Chevette Scooter out in the barn. Time and again, I see people put upgrades on cars they've had for years, cars that they are going to sell or trade-in at some point in the near future. That's the worst way to do it. I speak from experience: I once put a $3,000 stereo system into my Nissan Frontier four and a half months before I traded it in. You can imagine how thrilled my installer was when I called him to come take all the stuff back out.

There's this great scene in Macbeth where the protagonist gets tired of his wife nagging him about some murders she needs him to get done and so he stands up and roars:

From this moment

The very firstlings of my heart shall be

The firstlings of my hand. And even now,

To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done.

That's the attitude you need to bring to your new coilover suspension or your Hard Dog rollbar or your LeMans headlight kit. Let the firstlings of your trackday heart be the firstlings of the hand that holds your Visa Infinite card. Get your car done the way you want it now, so you can enjoy it for years to come. Take it from a man who was once a young man–a young man with the windows down and the stereo blasting on the way to school, enjoying his life sixteen dollars and sixty-seven well-spent cents at a time.

From: Road & Track