While in the shed doing some more cleaning up, the old rear wing was sitting on the shelf – I wonder if it would work on the front for Albany?

It does look a bit gay, but if it makes the car faster……

Hmm, no, I’m not sure that I can do this…..

Maybe I’ll make a front splitter instead and see if that gets me the front end downforce that I need to balance the car out.

One day its going to happen (a wing on the front), but maybe not now.

After the race to get the rear end of the car chopped off, a new frame, firewall, fuel tank, etc etc all built – I had made quite a mess….

So spent some time after work and over the weekend at night to clean up.  It took a total of 14hrs!!!  Yes, the mess was that big…

I also re-organised a few things to make better use of the space around the middle of the shed – ready for the next car build 🙂

Added a shelf for the Tig welder to go on, to keep it off the floor and off he bench when I am working on larger peices.

Added some more shelves to the wall to put the containers of nuts and bolts, mounted the spray guns on the wall, plus lots of other little bits that I had planned to do a year ago.

Just a random shot….

Now, the next job is to get ready for the Albany events, and for this I need to make some storage space on the trailer – so its time to mess the shed up again 🙂

The day didn’t start well.  Race car battery was flat.  No Probs, just get the jump pack – flat too…

So after getting the road car down to the shed to jump the race car – can’t find the jumper leads…  Used some large cable, the earth lead from the welder and some vice grips got it all hooked up and the car started.  Jo put the road car away while I loaded the race car.  Then I stalled it half way onto the trailer.  Had to go get the road car, jump it again, etc….

Then tore the front splitter off getting it onto the trailer.

At this point, thinking great – what a day….

Out on the track, the car was fairly good.  Just struggled all day with the front end not having enough grip.

After some suspension and wheel alignment changes for the last run, I finally had enough front end grip to push. It was still far from perfect, but it was much better than it had been.  If only I had not torn the front splitter off it may have had the front end that I needed…..

Ended up with a 60.4.  A good time for the first ever run with the car in its current state.  Its funny to think that the first time I went to Waneroo with the Silvia as a fairly normal car and did a 65 second lap, and that was fast for a normal car!   In this game, a 5 second per lap improvement is massive.

The new fuel tank needed a new fuel filler.

I made this one out of some pieces of alloy tube, some plate and a welder 🙂

Next up was making a new rear window – out of lexan again.

Here is the first mock-up of the fuel filler in the window.  Still needs paint.

More soon…

Wow, where to start this week…..  So many things have been done recently.

I’ve cut out a section of the front bumper, and raised it up higher.  This creates a diverging ramp under the nose of the car, speeding up the airflow creating a low pressure under the car, sucking it to the ground (well that’s the theory anyway!)

These next two pics show the ramp a little bit more clearly.

The sections in front the wheels stay low to the ground, to divert the airflow around the front tyres, reducing drag.

It was then time to keep working on the rear floor, making supports to hold the floor up.  Now that there is nothing left in the back of the car, I had to make mounts that connect the floor to the chassis.

This one is to hold up the back edge of the diffuser.

These ones are to mount the other end of the diffuser, just in front of the back wheels,

Next on the list of things to do is to build the new firewall.  This will be a new section behind the drivers seat – think of the inside of a single cab ute.  This will seal off the passenger compartment from the fuel tank, exhaust, diff etc that is now exposed in the rear of the car.

The middle upper section will be clear (lexan to be precise), and due to the complex nature of the roll cage it was too difficult to make a single lexan sheet that would span the whole width of the car.  So instead i made two side panels to go around the bars from one side, then the lexan can join these panels from the other side.

The next step was to make the lexan panel.  After cutting it all out, I painted the outer edge black, where it would be glued and bolted to the car.

The next item on the list was a new fuel tank.  I wanted to build a new tank that was lighter and would not fuel surge even with as little as 1/2 a litre of fuel left.

When I built the last tank I was still driving the car to places like Collie for events, so it was sized accordingly (28L to be exact).  Now that its a trailer queen, it only needs 8-10 litres max to complete 5 laps at Waneroo.

Here is the first part of the tank.  The tube is to ensure that there is no surge, with the larger part at the top to ensure sufficient capacity.

The bottom section in more detail.  The bottom outlet is the feed to the fuel pump, the upper one is the return from the motor.  These outlets are spaced out to make sure the fuel stays as cool as possible (the fuel returning from the motor has been heated from the heat in the engine bay), but at the same time making sure that the fuel being returned to the tank can’t get caught in a corner of the fuel tank that is not near the fuel outlet.  Yes, trying for the best of both worlds again.

My welding on alloy is getting better and better all the time too.  🙂

 

This is how the tank will sit in the car.

Had to re-jig the fuel lines as well.  The tank is now a lot closer to the front of the car now, so I had to shorten them all.

 

One last view inside the tank before the top goes on.

Wow, I’m tired after that post!

Been working the new floor.  For the next event there will be a new front and rear sections.

The front end I’m going a different direction to where I was headed, and the rear end was just the old one from 2010 that I plonked back on.

The new rear floor is much wider than the old one, and tucks in much closer to the rear wheels / suspension.

Its a bit hard to tell, but this the new front, the centre section is raised at the front, to channel air under the car, sucking it to the ground.

You can see here how much wider this new one is compared to the old one.  I covers the suspension arms etc, attempting to keep the air flow under here clean.