Punks, posers, and street racers of Los Angeles: Get used to this view. That’s right, my 300ZX is now fitted with two (2) of the finest, shiniest exhaust tips the Pep Boys on Sepulveda had in stock yesterday, taking the car to an elite level of tuning rarely seen on these streets.

After about 200,000 miles of break-in by the previous owner, I finally felt like my Z was ready for some real performance upgrades. Coincidentally, major legal action I’d been hustling on came though as a windfall–I mean I returned some and walked out of that joint smelling like cheap plastic and carrying over 27 U.S. dollars in cold, hard cash.

I kept right on walking, too, because you don’t just take that kind of coin home just to have it get squandered on dinner or some bullshit prescriptions my doctor keeps trying to force on me. Especially when one of CA’s best speed shops is right across the street.

My dudes Manny, Moe, and Jack knew I was coming and had some great ideas laid out for me to get my Z sorted and slaying by Saturday night. In fact, I was spoiled for choice. So many Plasti-Dip colors, even some of the air filters have shiny pieces now, and surely sticking one of those chrome breathers arbitrarily on my engine somewhere would give me a nice HP bump.

Fortunately I know my way around cars well enough to cut through the crap, and narrowed my selection down to two options: A pair of seven-inch exhaust tips, or a pair of nine-inch exhaust tips. Obviously that’s not the kind of decision a real car guy can take lightly as there are major performance implications for both choices. Most critically, the nine-inch tip is two inches longer, whereas the seven is two inches shorter, when compared to the nine.

Sorry about the technical jargon, but what matters is I made the right choice in the end. The nine-inch tips would give the Z the extra two inches of tip it needed to stand out amongst the fastest cars in town, and since I was freshly flush with cash (you remember the 27 dollars?) money was obviously not an object.

After gingerly slipping these two chrome tubes over similarly-sized non-chrome tubes, I installed four stainless steel M5-sized screws to an exact torque of three ugga duggas and fired the car up. The neighborhood was shook by the sweet sound of 160 neck-snapping horsepower now being belted through nine (times two) inches of rapidly rolled industrial-grade stainless steel. And you know what it sounded like? Victory.

See you on the street, suckers.