Bob Stubbs
Saturday 27th June 2009, 14:07
Well, having been reading this forum for a few months now I decided to go for a bit of a performance uplift on my 2003 V70 T5.
As seems to have been everyone's experience here, I had a really helpful exchange of e-mails with Russ first and booked the car in with him for a "once over" and fitting of the RICA PPC upgrade. This took a bit of planning as for me, it's a 1200 mile round trip, but as I had some business to fit in, it seemed like a plan.
I have had the car for just over a year had had it "maintained" by a local independent who claimed to know the cars well. However, to cut a long story short, Russ and his team have transformed the car, curing a brake judder and sloppy handling with some very overdue maintenance of steering arms, ball joints, discs and a whole lot more. Basic service items, like fuel filter, appeared to have never been done in the cars life (and it was dealer maintained in its first 4 years of life).
Then the RICA was installed last and required a software patch or some such modification to get it to work correctly on the car. Russ spent a fair bit of time puzzling over the cause of the problem but he stuck with it and got it sorted.
The run back was excellent and the car pulls like a train; feels safe and stable and is returning similar fuel consumption as it used to.
Lessons for me are:
1 Even franchised dealers skip on the basics
2 The cheap and cheerful independent I have been using won't be seeing my car again!
3 R T Mechanics deserve all the plaudits they get off this site and Russ can count me as one of his very satisfied customers.
As a side note, I also run an old classic sports car (TR6) and the Register website's equivalent forum doesn't allow the naming and praising (or otherwise) of suppliers, which frankly I think is nuts, especially after my experience with R T M.
Time to head off out and go for another blast.........the car is rather addictive all of a sudden.
Bob
As seems to have been everyone's experience here, I had a really helpful exchange of e-mails with Russ first and booked the car in with him for a "once over" and fitting of the RICA PPC upgrade. This took a bit of planning as for me, it's a 1200 mile round trip, but as I had some business to fit in, it seemed like a plan.
I have had the car for just over a year had had it "maintained" by a local independent who claimed to know the cars well. However, to cut a long story short, Russ and his team have transformed the car, curing a brake judder and sloppy handling with some very overdue maintenance of steering arms, ball joints, discs and a whole lot more. Basic service items, like fuel filter, appeared to have never been done in the cars life (and it was dealer maintained in its first 4 years of life).
Then the RICA was installed last and required a software patch or some such modification to get it to work correctly on the car. Russ spent a fair bit of time puzzling over the cause of the problem but he stuck with it and got it sorted.
The run back was excellent and the car pulls like a train; feels safe and stable and is returning similar fuel consumption as it used to.
Lessons for me are:
1 Even franchised dealers skip on the basics
2 The cheap and cheerful independent I have been using won't be seeing my car again!
3 R T Mechanics deserve all the plaudits they get off this site and Russ can count me as one of his very satisfied customers.
As a side note, I also run an old classic sports car (TR6) and the Register website's equivalent forum doesn't allow the naming and praising (or otherwise) of suppliers, which frankly I think is nuts, especially after my experience with R T M.
Time to head off out and go for another blast.........the car is rather addictive all of a sudden.
Bob