My Cobra Sport Non-Resonated TY50 Slash Cut Exhaust Review
By: 50+ year old who adores cars, not massively extroverted.
Writing this as I found it difficult to find all the information in one place when I was shopping about!
Purchasing
Got it from AmD Tuning on Ebay as they had a £50 off for car stuff at the time when bought with Klarna, £669 delivered, wasn't a stock item so had to be fabricated, ordered 19th June, received 4th July. Cobra cardboard packaging was damaged in transit but the exhaust was well enough protected inside.
Cobra confirmed after I emailed them that the TY10 (GT86) and TY50 (GR86) exhausts are identicle, just different internal references for their website.
Quality
Big bits of solid metal, looks well made, I'm no welder but I have no complaints.
Fitting
Got it fitted at a friendly local garage, surprisingly difficult to find someone to fit an exhaust they didn't supply.
It went on OK, but for some reason the supplied gasket didn't fit as it was too big, however the original gasket was only a year old and was fine to be reused (I think someone else posted a similar story on this forum..)
Took a bit of wiggling and adjusting to get the tips properly lined up on both sides with the rear diffuser, when you tightened them up they would pull out of line to had to be adjusted again, took some fiddling to get perfect.
I took the opportunity while it was in the air to install the STI hangers from Blackhawk Japan (5x SUBARU CUSHION 44066AJ011) as they were meant to reduce any drone even further if it existed (£40, £20 for the hangers, £20 for shipping!)
All torqued up correctly, however by the time I got home the right hand side exhaust tip had worked loose and moved back into the car a bit, re-positioned and re-tightened the big ol' jubilee clip (and the one on the other side just in case) and 2 months later it's never moved again.
Sound
I'll get this out the way, the cold start is obnoxiously loud, so for the 10 or so seconds it's doing that I'm hiding under the dashboard. I try and avoid starting it up early in the morning and apologised to my neighbors when I saw them for the first time after it's install.
However, after the cold start it settles back down to nice low grumbly burble, almost OEM+ on tickover, I won't say barely audible, but definitely unobtrusive.
The sound as it pulls away and accelerates through the first half of the rev range is lovely, with a nice boxer sound to it, at higher revs this is lost slightly but hard to tell how much from inside the car, I've not heard it from outside myself but it doesn't sound essex carpark loud to me.
On downshift blips there is occasionally a lovely natural sounding overrun pop which makes me smile every single time it happens, 2 months later at less than motorway speeds I still find myself driving with the windows down to listen to the soundtrack.
Motorway Drone: There isn't any, at least none that bothers me (for reference I had a '99 Impreza back in the day and eventually got rid of it because of the insufferable exhaust drone on motorways), fantastic.
Coming home late at night when I reverse into my road at low speed / tickover it's pretty quiet to the point where I'm not worried about it disturbing / waking anyone up.
Overall
I'm really happy with it, I don't like the cold start, but everything else is great and has brought the car to life for me so it's absolutely worth it. I'm definitely a sound guy and the original exhaust is "uninspiring" (even my wife said so "oh, it doesn't make a very good sound does it?"), whilst the new one sounds more like the car looks, so I'd do it again in a heartbeat, and I'm glad I chose the non-resonated version vs. the resonated, as I think apart from the cold start I'm not sure the resonated wouldn't provide enough of a change in tone in driving, but that's speculation on my part.
Anything I've forgotten or questions let me know!
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