10 Ways To Maximise Your Car's Street Cred #blogpost

1. Lower it to the point when it's absolutely undriveable anymore

This the most important thing. When you want Street Cred, you want to have your cars nice and low and undriveable. No car with stock ride height will ever get a good Street Cred. Lower car means stiffer shock absorbers, which means less ride comfort, this results in absolute manliness for your and your car, thus increasing your Street Cred.

2. Camber

This is perhaps as important as the lowering. You need camber because drift cars and race cars have camber, but your car is faster than any of them. Therefore you need more camber than them. The more your car looks like it has an axle facture, the better. Camber is absolutely mandatory.

3. Chosing the right car

Any car can achieve a lot of street cred, except if it’s a Corsa or a Fiesta. These just don’t have Street Cred, or any cred at all, on that matter. However, the maximum Street Cred can be achieved by cars that are just about the same size. The Honda Civic EG and EK as well as the VW Golf III and IV have a tremendous amount of Street Cred. The former having better Street Cred in the JDMYO community and the latter in the Euro community, obviously. If you want Street Cred in in the muscle car community, just ignore this complete list and do a burnout in a Dodge Challenger.

4. Make sure it's in bad condition

The car pictured does not fit to the previous three criteria, since it’s a Ford Torino with stock alignment, but it’s the perfect example for the condition, because it’s a POS. It barely holds together and any screws are replaced with ropes and/or cable ties. The street cred of it can be proven by the fact that The Dude in fact has a huge amount of Street Cred.

5. Chose the right body colours

Now, this is not a matter of the colours themselves, but how you mix them. No two body panels that are next to each other are allowed to have the same colour. Even better than that is just to rust the car, because then it doesn’t have any colour at all. It’s very important to make your car look as if you don’t care, while in fact you care alot and measure all rust spots daily using a calliper to make sure they fit in.

6. Do not tune the engine

While tuning your engine won’t decrease your Street Cred, it’s certainly not neccessary. It’s just a waste of money, and since you don’t care about your car at all, you want to keep the engine nice and stock. A 1.6 litre 4-cylinder has just about the perfect power.

7. Install a roof rack full of unneccessary stuff

It just looks retro and cool. Even if your car is a 1993 Mondeo, you want a roof rack to make it look straight out of the 60s. And make sure to fit it with stuff you probably won’t ever need, for example wood boxes, jerry cans and tyres in the wrong size, because once again, you do not care at all about what’s on your car.

8. Deep dish steel wheels

Aluminium wheels don’t look retro and they look expensive-ish. Because you want to look as if you don’t care, you want to have nice steel wheels, even though your unsprung masses are heavier than the Titanic. This also rules out the need to paint your brakes red, because you won’t see them anyways.

9. Put stickers on it

Since you’re not getting the extra 25 bhp for the painted brakes anymore, you need to get power another way. Stickers usually get you around 5 to 30 bhp each, depending on the size. Stickers of a race track you’ve never been to are important as well. Then you need stickers saying things like “f—k haters” or “louder than your mother last night”.

10. Yellow fog lights

Last but not least, what you need are yellow tinted fog lights. This is important because GT1 cars have yellow lights too, and since your car is as fast as them, you need them too. These lights must be coupled with the head lights. If the head lights go on, the yellow fog lights go on too, as easy as that.