Performance Unlimited Blog

Are you a stick man or an auto fan? Are you a lady who would prefer to drive down Route 120 in McHenry manually shifting the transmission, or do you want the car to do all the work? If McHenry is representative of the nation as a whole, approximately 13% of cars sold leave the showroom with manual transmissions. That means 87% drive onto the road with transmissions that do most of the work in terms of shifting gears. It’s generally a matter of a personal preference.  While a majority of drivers want a transmission they can engage and forget, some are staunch adherents to the world of manually shifting the transmission. Chloe, a resident of McHenry County, said, “I prefer automatic because I don’t have to think about it. But I know how to drive a stick. It’s just been a long time.” Ken, another McHenry County resident, however, is firmly on the other side of the fence: “I am wildly a stick man. I have owned nothing but stick shift cars for more than 40 years. In fact, I have only ow...

According to the State of Illinois, the state animal is the ‘White Tail Deer.’ But, here in Wonder Lake, we know better. We know that the state animal is the road construction sign. Seen most often in the spring, summer and fall, the road construction sign is found out and about foraging for frustrated drivers on Illinois roads. You will usually spot the road construction sign near some of their brothers and sisters – orange-and-white-striped road cones. Sometimes, you’ll see them near their one-legged brethren, the caution sign that is propped up by a road construction flagger.  Throughout the state and beyond, as well as in Wonder Lake, you’ll find the road construction flagger accompanied by road construction workers and their assorted road construction machinery.  Inevitably, these indicators of road construction specify that drivers slow down and use the greatest possible caution as they drive. This is because none of us want road construction workers, or flaggers, to be ...

Some kids just love to play in the mud. They see a mud puddle and their eyes glow. They just can’t resist jumping in creating soul-satisfying splash. Then we have some ‘kids’ here in the McHenry area who never grow out of it. That latter group graduates from playing with Tonka toys in the mud to using bigger, and more expensive, toys in the mud. Those bigger toys are called “off-road vehicles.” With off-road vehicles, a muddy landscape is their natural environment. You can drive them on the roads of McHenry but they and their drivers are never truly satisfied until the detour from the pavement and onto the hills and valleys of nature’s random roadways. They dream of streams to cross, logs to jump and ravines to navigate.  The exhilaration gained by taking an off-road vehicle, well, ‘offroad’ is just about the pinnacle of pleasure for offroaders. They pamper and baby their off-road monsters getting them ready to go offroad. But, once they hit Mother Nature’s trails, it’s not about c...

It’s almost mid-April here in Johnsburg, IL. Even if the winter of ’22-’23 throws a fit or two before passing into the record books, at this point, we’ve got the worst of it licked. We could get two feet of snow but it won’t last long. Temperatures may fall but they’ll bounce back. But it’s time to think about the effects of winter on your steering, suspension and alignment. Winter is hard on vehicles, even mild winters are trouble. And however this Johnsburg winter was for you, it gave your car, truck or SUV a test. But now you’re looking forward to summer. Warm weather is on the horizon and, no doubt, you want to make the most of it. Expansion and contraction caused by temperature changes will cause cracks and potholes to appear in the pavement. Blocks of ice and snow appeared on the road. Both of these tended to jostle and bump your vehicle. They may have knocked your alignment out of whack.  If there was a weak link in your steering or suspension, winter is liable to find it. W...

Think of all the cars, trucks and SUVs out there you can hit with your vehicle when pulling out of your Richmond driveway should your brakes fail. It’s a target-rich environment. Of course, who wants to hit anything with your car, truck or SUV? Hitting things with your vehicle is the kind of thing most of us prefer to avoid. From Richmond to Timbuktu, accidents happen all the time. We all prefer they don’t happen to us or our loved ones.  One way to avoid accidents is to drive safely and pay attention to the road. Many accidents occur because someone took their eyes off the road for a moment just as something happened that would require them to react.  A child chases a ball into the street. The person in the car, truck or SUV in front of you almost missed their turn and decided to hit their brakes rather than go around and come back to their route. A deer runs across the road. A box falls off a truck in front of you. A car speeding in the other direction loses control and come...