Popular Mods and Where They Came From #BlogPost

We all know that trends come and go. There have been countless car mod trends that have become popular over the years, but where did the ideas come from?

Jake Orr

07 Mar 2016

We all know that trends come and go. There have been countless car mod trends that have become popular over the years, but where did the ideas come from?

Yellow Lights

Popular Mods and Where They Came From #BlogPost

Yellow headlights (usually achieved either by tint or by yellow HIDs) come from racing origins. The concept originally came from France, and was used for GT racing. The idea behind is that yellow lights create less glare and allows faster classes to identify the GT cars at night.

Negative Camber

Running negative camber on street cars is arguably the most popular current trend. While this tends to hurt performance due to a decreased contact patch size, its roots are performance oriented. Slight negative camber is used in racing, and the theory behind this tactic is based on increasing the contact patch through corners. As weight shifts to one side or the other, the tire is actually forced into having optimum grip.

Taped Headlights

The taped X’s across headlights are another trend that originates from racing. Taping headlights is often required as a safety measure in case the car is in a collision. Taping the headlights reduces the likelihood that glass or plastic shards will scatter across the racetrack which could cause tire punctures for other racers.

Fat Tires

Fat rubber has been something that has been popular for both performance and aesthetic benefits for decades. This trend became especially popular in America in the 70s with muscle cars trying to mimic the drag racers running enormous slicks. Obviously, there are performance benefits from running a wider tire as well.

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Comments

i don’t have anything important except this post has 420 likes

it has a big block :D

i would like to know where did the idea of ‘’slamming’’ (lowering ride height) come from?

common sense?

Race cars are lowered as far as the given track’s terrain will allow in order to lower the center of gravity and decrease turbulent air flow underneath the car, and people decided to do it for performance gains. After a while, it became a styling choice, and some groups defined that lower cars were better, until people started deciding that the lowest was the best, and lowered their cars to heights that actually can’t handle the street terrain, resulting in the trend of slammed cars and low-riders.

Big wang gang, because why would you not have a wing bigger than your kitchen bar?

The typo “big wang gang” is just so much funnier though

So where did Honda civics being riced come from?!

Actually yellow headlights were just standard in France. Then people noticed that it produced less glare and wasn’t as tiring to look at than crude white.

Yellow lights ‘Allows faster cars to identify GT cars at night’

That makes no sense for two reasons.

Faster cars are overtaking and thus won’t see their headlights, but more their tailights.
Faster cars seeing if their lights are yellow are irrelevant once they’ve overtaken them. It would make more sense if you said slower cars need to identify faster cars at night, especially if like le mans, there are the same cars but a slower class of cars.

Sorry Jake Orr, but you need to learn a little more before writing any more articles buddy.

just asking.

the yellow headlights were used by the french during WWII.. so they could see which vehicles where ‘theirs’… they only forgot that the germans could also see the difference between the vehicles. so it wasn’t a very big succes.