So, though I’d talk to myself about the things to clean up on the car before the next event.

On the list is:

• Redo part of the steering column to better angle the two uni joints to smooth out the steering action.
• Fit the wider fibreglass front guards and fix them up a little.
• Some more body work on the car, getting it closer to being ready for paint.
• Try and finish off some more of the under car aero.
• Finish off the air cleaner ducting and the rad ducting.

Probably a lot more too, but that’s the plan for now…

We had a decent event, on a hillclimb that was fun to drive.  All day could not get enough rear end traction, and at the end of the day we lost out to a few of the 4wd cars.  So 6th outright (0.05 seconds away from 3rd :/) and 1st in class was all that we could manage.

As usual, lots of things to do different for next year, in terms of car setup etc.

Albany, 6.30 am, hail, thunder, lightning, and heavy rain, what a great way to start a day of motor sport!

Luckily, the last of the front passed over at 7.30 and after that it became a beautiful 20 degree day.

For practice the road was still very wet, was impressed how well a full set if slicks still gripped in these conditions, I thought it was going to be too wet for them.

By the first run it was almost 100% dry, so it was game on.

First run was a 36.5,  fastest outright by 2 seconds, going OK so far.  I knew this would not last as the others grew in confidence, but I was happy with that for my first ever run here.

Ended up finishing the day with a time that would have won last year 😦  With some faster cars here this year, I still managed to get 2nd outright and to win my class.

So in all it ended up being a good day.

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.

…gives you wings apparently.  In my case 1/2 of the Anzac day holiday gave me a wing…

This first pic is from inside the boot.  The wing needs something strong to push down onto – if you want to take full advantage of it.  So its mounted into the rear subframe, where all the suspension is mounted.  The idea is that every gram of down force that this thing produces gets fed straight to pushing the tyres onto the road – rather than the force going into flexing the rear body work.

And the other side.

Close up.  This shows the mounting plate where the alloy strut (see pics a bit lower down this post) mounts to the car.  It bolts on under here so that it can be removed if required – but it keeps the bolt heads etc out of the air flow.

Here are the alloy struts.  They go through the boot lid and attach to the mounts shown above.  I choose to do it this way to keep all of the mounts etc out of the air flow that is running over the car.

There is a single hole at the rear edge of the wing, where it can pivot.  The holes in the front edge allows the angle of the wing to be changed, meaning that I can create more or less downforce as required.  This change may be based on circuit characteristics or just to even out the balance of the car i.e if the back is sliding at speed, I can add more angle, and therefore more downforce to the rear to balance it out.

With the wing sitting in place, set about about half way through its range of adjustment.

A shot from further back, so better see the scale of the wing in proportion to the car.  I’m not sure if I haven’t gone too far rearwards with the wing to make it look right.  We will see when the wheels are back on and its out of the shed.

LOTS more to do before Wanneroo!  I did a list last night of the things remaining to be done – its a little scary…

No just kidding, that last picture was the first mock-up, but it was waaaayyyy too high!  It was over 30cm above the roof line.

So I kept working on it and think I’ll end up with a height like this.

Again, the mounts are just scrap pieces for mocking it up.

The real mount will look like this (except wont be made of cardboard – just in case it rains).

And on the car, will look a bit like this

Just need to source some thicker alloy to turn this carboard cut-out into a real wing mount.

Once I have that, I can position it on the car and make the framework that will run from the rear chassis up to the underside of the boot lid to support the aerodynamic loads that this wing will generate – well over 100kg of force when on the Porsche that it came from.

After that’s all done, will need to start working on the front end to make it generate more downforce to match what the rear end will be capable of now.

Here is the final (well I think it is – I’m still not 100% convinced of my own decision…)

I also spent a bunch of time trimming up the metalwork that is going to stay on the car.  I want small tubs to remain over the wheels to keep water, stones etc from filling up the rear  of the car.

A view inside the car.

Inside the wheel well.

Then spent a bit of time making the fuel filler flap lighter, sealing it permanently shut as the fuel filler will be on the other side of the car with the new fuel tank (once I build it :))  Also put the rear bumper back on, some of the rear trim and the boot lid – ready to start on the rear wing mounts.

Still trying to work out exactly where to run some of these bars, to make it all look right.

Not sure about this layout….

Another view of the mock-up, from above this time.

View from the rear (standing inside the boot actually :))

I’ve now welded in most of the bars, with the one running up to the rear strut towers still having a question mark over it.

More soon.

So, after a couple of good events, there is now a 6 week break until the next event.  So i figured I’d just quickly cut the rear of the car out….

The first step was to remove the fuel tank and then cut the boot floor out.  Quite funny really considering the amount of time I spent making this new floor and welding it all in a few years ago (I removed the spare wheel well to fit the fuel tank in a better location)

The first bar work was the rear end, joining the subframe to the rear cage structure.

The next part was to join the front of the subframe to the rest of the new chassis.  At this same time, I decided to replace the original part of the subframe that supports the nose of the diff.  This took a lot of weight out and it also made the rest of the chassis a better structure by running up to the nose of the diff.

The next lot of bars were more about supporting the suspension pickup points than supporting the diff or the chassis.

Another view above.

Below you can see the floor, and the bars supporting the nose of the diff.  The next step is to remove this floor.  At the moment, it is in the way of a bar that I want to run to one of the upper suspension mounts.

More soon.

The event went well, the car worked good – just need to get the boost control a bit better to make maximum use of the power that she can make.

Finished 4th outright out of the 80 odd cars.  Made a mistake on the last run – tried a different line that did not work……  I don’t think it would have been enough for 3rd place, but it should have been a faster lap (was faster everywhere else in the lap, just lost it all on the one corner and following straight)

I have now bought a new solenoid for the boost controller – hoping that will help to control it better.  Will have to do a quick test run before Waneroo.

Next on the agenda modifications wise it to:

• Tube frame the rear end
• Clean up the aero underfloor of the car – was only very roughly put together for Collie
• Mount the new rear wing that has been in the shed for the last year (see previous posts on the acquiring of the wing)
• Add some more front downforce to balance up the new rear wings extra downforce.
• Fit some stiffer springs as an experiment.

Some more posts and pictures of these mods as soon as I get out to the shed to make them 🙂

Got it back on the dyno last night and found and fixed the miss fire!

One config option in the ECU settings was not correct, change that and its all good now.  Still have no idea how it ran on Friday practice, all Saturday at the hill climb, then decided to stop on Sunday without anything being changed…..

Off to Busselton tonight for the next event.

Been in Melbourne for almost the last week, back in Perth now, so I’ll have to get back into it tomorrow night, searching for this ignition issue and fixing up some of the items that I never got finished before Collie.

The Busselton sprint is less than two weeks away now!

I’ve got a bunch of Aero changes that I’d like to make, but they may have to wait until a touch later in the year.

After Busso the next big task is a new paint job, as she looks very beat up right now.

Today was the sprint at the Collie circuit.  Today was the opposite of yesterday…  When we started on the first practice, it was misfiring above 5500rpm.

At each run, we tried different things, replaced different parts, etc and never found the issue.  It may have killed a coil, more investigation required.

In order to set a lap time, I did one lap flat out, but short shifting before 5500 rpm in each gear.  We did a 49.1, which was still good enough for 4th outright, 2nd in class.  Ohh what could have been if we had a working motor…

I’m knackered beyond belief, going to sleep for a few days…

The hillclimb at Collie was run today, and we had a good day.  Finished 2nd outright and 1st in class.  Not too bad for its first event 🙂

I’ll get some pics etc when I get back to Perth.