Blue Bayou S13 - VQ30DE Endurance Build (Tons of pics and video!)

[knate]

Blue Bayou Racing

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Follow our Facebook Page to see the latest with the car! https://www.facebook.com/BlueBayou24/ (www.facebook.com/BlueBayou24/)

In this saga we start with Hawaii 2-4-Oh (KA24DE hatch):
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And continue until today's version of Blue Bayou (VQ30DE, race suspension, aero, big brakes, fuel cell):
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Have you ever wanted to get sucked into a hobby that requires a large portion of your time and money, then delivers all of its rewards in a just few bursts per year? With endurance racing that's what I got myself into. You can read here about all of our success and failures, as well as some tips and tricks we learned over the years with endurance racing. It is an absolute blast to do and I highly encourage you to check it out!

I've been meaning to write a build thread for years.. and have just never gotten it together. Now that I have a ton of material, I guess it's time to make up for it. We started with a KA hatch, then KA coupe, then swapped to VQ30, then race suspension, aero, brakes, etc... We've always been a bit behind the curve in horsepower compared to our competition, but we've still managed to be quite successful over the years with such a great-handling platform.

How it all started for me:

As a kid I always thought Lamborghini's and Ferrari's looked cool, but was never interested in how they worked or how fast they were. But as soon as I got my driver's license, suddenly I was interested, and started learning everything I could about cars. My very first car was a 1985 Nissan 200SX, a rear-drive four-cylinder. This was a true 80's car, with a digital dash and voice prompts ("Fuel level is low.."), like the picture below.. complete with the bar-graph tach.

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The 240SX was the next obvious car to become interested in, as it was like my first car only better in every way. My 200SX was angular in every way, yet the 240SX was smooth and new looking. I got my first 240SX in 2002 while I was going to college, a car that I still have. This car eventually developed rod knock, which turned into putting in the 2.0 turbo engine, paint/etc, bigger turbos, blowing that up, and eventually an LS1 that is still in the car (used primarily for drifting).

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By this point, I had done various autox and track day events, as well as gotten into drifting. I had always been curious about racing, but in the Northwest ITE was the closest my car would fit into SCCA at the time and that would be way outside of my budget.

Building a Race Car:

In 2009, ChumpCar held their first race at Portland International Raceway and this got the ball rolling. A friend, my dad and I kicked around the idea of building a race car, and since we all owned 240SX's that was the logical choice. Rear-drive, cheap, and we already had plenty of spares and leftovers. In 2011 my dad agreed to let us use his stock daily driver. We got a roll cage donated by building the car at the PIR swap meet in the ChumpCar booth (Thanks to Russ at Racetech!) The downside was this meant leaving the car alone until about a week before the race, then trying to go from street car to working race car in a matter of days. Below is some of the last minute prep in the garage the day of tech. We chose the name "Hawaii 2-4-Oh", and everything was absolutely down to the wire including installing our fire extinguisher in the line at tech.

TECH TIP #1: Figure everything will take at least twice as long as you expect! When building a car there are always unexpected twists and turns that pop up.

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Maiden Voyage (4/9/11) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

We had various failures in our first race, as to be expected in a car that had never been on the track and just barely slapped together. Our car ran too hot, our brand new fuel pressure gauge just started leaking right out of the gauge face, I thought the car caught on fire when our brakes started smoking, and my dad pit when he couldn't see out of a fogged visor thinking he couldn't open it. This was my dad's first ever time on a race track, and he entered a race track that was hot! Very intense, not the best way to do it! We finished 28th of 56 teams and had the 17th fastest lap time (1:39.9). Not too bad for a first outing!

TECH TIP #2: The race track is unforgiving; if a part can fail, it will on track. Replace ALL hoses and belts, and anything rubber that you are able to. It's really sad to see someone spend hours putting a junkyard engine in a car, only to have a hose under the intake manifold end their race.

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Mysterious Failure (4/10/11) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

For the second race it was sopping wet, a pretty typical condition for Portland. Nathan Feigion was in the car and you can see where the drifting experience really pays off. Unfortunately while he is driving the car suddenly loses power, and we spent hours trying to diagnose the issue. The car didn't want to rev over 4000rpm unless you gave it easy throttle, which led us down the path of fuel filter/fuel pump/exhaust restriction/etc. In the end it turned out to be a failed ECU, which we didn't have a spare of. After borrowing a spare from Paul Newman's Revenge (thanks guys!), we were back on track. We finished 41st out of 52 cars at this event. We had a blast and all loved it! My dad had rented his race gear, figuring he would just do this first weekend and we would rent out spare seats. However after the weekend, he decided he wanted to race with us every time.

TECH TIP #3: Bring spares of everything you can fit! It's like the Umbrella Effect, if you bring it then you probably won't need it.

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The Long One (10/29/2011) - 12 hours - Portland International Raceway:

This time we had a chance to get the car prepped for the event, which was good as this would be our longest race at 12 hours. We had a laundry list of things to do, building a new exhaust/lexan windows/gutting weight/etc. We were using an open trailer, so the door windows actually got reinstalled after the race to keep the interior from getting too soaked. We had installed a new light setup, HID bulbs in Hella projectors. This actually worked surprisingly well. One thing we tried was hanging a tinted piece of lexan of over our wink mirror, but this was a flop. Headlights would show up in multiple mirrors plus the tinted plastic, so even with one car behind you might see 6+ white dots in the mirror. This was enough for me to decide to get rid of the wink mirror and move to a convex mirror. We were running factory brakes with Axxis Ultimate brake pads, and we found their limit. We ended up having to swap pads during the race, pulling it off in 12 minutes. It's not fun changing brakes when they are this hot! We still managed our best finish yet at 14th place, and dropped our fastest lap from a 1:39.9 to a 1:37.4!

TECH TIP #4: For night races, put a piece of masking tape (or two) across the top of your visor. You can block the rearview mirror when needed, but easily look up and check the mirror.

Our custom headlights:

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The brake pads..

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This is the custom rear lexan we put in, this definitely helped reduce drag on the car!

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Here's a pumpkin that I carved for a contest at this race.. Frankenstein in a crash helmet:

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Left to right: Ken, Nathan, Nate, Dave

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The Soaker (10/30/2011) - 6 hours - Portland International Raceway:

My dad (Dave) started the race, and struggled in the wet conditions. It was sopping wet all day, so drifting experience really helped here. We had a reasonably clean race and managed to bring it home with a 7th place, our best finish yet!

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Lots more to come!

[knate]

The Dream (2/1/2012) - 7 hours - Laguna Seca:

Like many, ever since I was a kid playing Gran Turismo I was a fan of Laguna Seca. I still remember the computer trying to drive the Shelby Cobra would crash every lap in the Corkscrew. I had driven the track so many times in games, I felt like I really knew the track, but there were a few things that struck me when we arrived. I hadn't realized how much elevation really changed going down into the first corner, and the enormity of the Corkscrew itself. The very first time driving over the Corkscrew it was really just, "Ok, from what I know I should be pointing here... woooo!!" The games really did help me dial in my laps much quicker.

We upgraded to an enclosed trailer for this event which was a big plus! Much better for packing spares and keeping things clean and dry. We put some KYB GR2s on the car, which helped to tame some of the floppiness of the previous shocks. We also slotted the shocks to give some extra camber.

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The Disaster (3/31/2013) - 10 hours - Portland International Raceway:

We started this race in the rain in 26th place. Nathan Feigion ran an excellent first stint and got us up to 5th place! I get in the car and we are fighting back and forth for 1st place in the rain with the front-wheel drive cars. This is the best we have ever ran and it is looking great for a podium! It's still wet when I pit in 2nd place to turn the car over to Dave. A dry line has developed, but is still quite wet off of that dry line. While coming down the straight at PIR, a car pops out to try to outbrake a bunch of cars. However those cars are on the dry line, so it is a very overly optimistic move. Dave never sees it coming, and gets slammed in the front end while going into the chicane. The right front strut tower is moved over a foot, our day is done.

Crash at 7:00 in this video:

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Now we need to decide what we do about the car..

[knate]

Building Blue Bayou:

We had a few issues with our first hastily-built car we wanted to address:

-Roll cage had X-bars in the doors, difficult to climb in/out
-Roll cage was too close to my head. We tried cutting the floor out and lowering the seat, but it was not enough.
-Lots of weight left on the table. With ChumpCar rules we could cut/weld just about anything, but adding horsepower was not in the cards.

With these items and a smashed chassis, we decided to look to the spare 240SX coupe chassis for my drift car. This already had a roll cage in it, but the design was not great. It also had the rear fenders cut out for massive tires, but we would be running factory tires. We rolled the drift chassis into the shop and got to work. We had never built a roll cage before, but had done enough reading to be confident if we took our time we could make something safe we would be happy with.

We bought a tubing bender and a pile of tubing. We also bought a plasma cutter, which I cannot recommend highly enough! It seems a lot of people think plasma cutters are only for bigger shops, but I think this tool should be right in line behind a welder. Every single time I use this thing I am so happy that we bought it. It is SOOO fast, easy to use, and compact. It also does not leave a sharp edge, which makes it perfect for chopping out sheet metal in a race car.

TECH TIP #5: Buy a plasma cutter, you will thank me! They aren't that expensive any more, and save so much time!

In a dual-purpose move, we chopped out the A-pillar and ran the roll cage up in this area. This drops weight from the factory structure up top as well as getting the roll cage further from my head. With the old car, I was constantly bumping the cage, with the new one I have plenty of room. Here you can see how the A-pillar bar was ran.

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Since our strut tower moved so far when we got hit.. we also wanted to help support the strut towers, so we ran the cage up to them as well.

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We made use of the old roll cage pad to make a little bit of footwell anti-intrusion, and moved to more of a Nascar-style door bars tied into the sill.

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Here you can see we put the bars as far out as possible (touching the door skin) in order to make the car easier to get in and out of. We also tried to tie the cage as much as possible into the sheetmetal to stiffen the chassis.

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Roll cage finished and painted:

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We got some quarterpanels from the local junkyard and welded those in.

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I never liked how unfinished our car looked with no dash, so I put a modified factory dash in.

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I also redid the entire wiring harness, simplifying and shortening the factory harness down. This was so much more work than I had expected. Hours with the factory manual, removing circuits one at a time, then consolidating relays, shortening wires, re-purposing fuses, consolidating fuse boxes.. over 40 hours just in wiring. While I did save weight and money, it just wasn't worth it.

TECH TIP #6: Either do basic simplification of factory wiring, or rewire from scratch. Completely re-engineering the factory harness is not worth the time!

To help with our cooling situation, I made a vent in the factory hood.

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We set up a makeshift paint booth, and I tried spraying a car for the first time ever. With a race car, less pressure if I screw it up.

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While it's far from perfect, I was pretty happy with how it came out. The biggest issue was I put three coats of paint on the rear quarterpanels and only two on the rest of the car and it was super obvious next to the door.

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I cut the lexan rear window with a skill saw, masked the back side, and spray painted the edge with black to give a little more factory look.

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I was super happy with how they came out!

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I borrowed our new team name based on the Mitsubishi paint named "Blue Bayou", this was my original sketch of the logo:

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We are not from the South, and I know nothing about any real bayous, it's just a play on "Blew by you". I thought this was obvious enough, but I've had a variety of people come up to us saying that they hadn't realized this for a long time. There was even a Reddit thread about it that blew up:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/c0matc/which_two_and_two_did_you_just_recently_put/er672bn/

Here she is all done up and pretty!

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This is a time lapse video I put together of this build:

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[knate]

It shows potential! (4/13/2013) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

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This was the first race with our new chassis. We had done a lot of work to strip weight out of the car, and had shed around 100 lbs between the old and new chassis. The entire drivetrain/suspension was just transferred over, so that portion was exactly the same. With the lighter/stiffer chassis, this thing is good. Surprisingly good! Nathan Feigion starts the race in 23rd place and starts working his way through traffic. By the time he is done with his stint, he is in 2nd place and has ran a team-best 1:35.0!

I get in the car and make it up into 1st place with a fastest lap of 1:34.7, a whopping 2.7 seconds faster than our previous fastest! The car feels great as I slowly put a full lap up on second place. We have never before been in the lead of a race, much less have a lap up on 2nd! By the end of my stint I have been in 1st for 43 laps, and it's time to pull in for a driver change. We have a great pit stop, put my dad in the car, and send him out.

Immediately we get back on the radio that the engine is running on three cylinders. What? No... that can't be right.. it has been working so perfectly! We did check the oil during the pitstop, and the dipstick is right next to the distributor.. Did a plug wire get pulled out? We call my dad into the pits and start checking the easy stuff. Plug wires all look good, everything seems seated good. Fuel injectors are plugged in well, nothing obvious.. but we do figure out that it's cylinder #3 not firing. Let's send him out and come up with a plan. We don't have a spare cap or wires with us, so Ken drives to grab some while Dave circulates PIR, running 1:43-1:50s.. we are down to 5th and sliding. Ken gets back with our parts and we try swapping #3 plug wire and spark plug. No help... send him back out again while we regroup. We are now down to 10th. We suspect we have a failed fuel injector. We have a spare fuel rail with injectors in it, so we decide to swap the entire setup out. 20 minutes later, we are back on four cylinders! However we are also in 21st place.

Ken gets in the car and he starts moving through traffic again. We finish the race in 16th. We are happy we triumphed over our fuel injector issue, but we know we have the capability of running up front. We finished with the third fastest lap behind two modified V8 cars. We start the ritual of swapping out brake pads and check things over for the next day, then get some rest.

TECH TIP #7: If the rules don't have a minimum weight, take advantage of that! With ChumpCar rules we had very limited modifications we could do to the engine, but cutting out weight was open. Losing 100 lbs (a lot of it high in the chassis) and gaining the stiffness was worth over 2 seconds for us! (I'm sure we had some driver improvement as well..)



The First Trip to the Podium (4/14/2013) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

We send Ken out in wet conditions, and he starts in 25th place (random starts in ChumpCar). PIR is notoriously tricky in the wet. Old racing surfaces with a lot of rubber worn in, flocks of geese that like to deposit poop that is more slippery than baby oil, and the track is absolutely flat. Zero elevation change. A fellow Nissan team with a Z31 300ZX (Red Square Racing) goes hard into the wall right in front of us. It is treacherous out there, but Ken keeps moving through traffic and in one piece. By the end of his stint the track starts drying out.

Dave gets in the car and heads out on a mostly dry track. Things are looking up as Dave gets into 6th place until.. it starts raining more. With the least amount of experience on track, Dave is struggling in the treacherously slippery conditions of PIR. The front-wheel drive cars are now walking away from us and we drop down to 9th place. The track starts drying out again as Dave pits to turn the car over to me.

I have a lot of ground to make up, but the sun is out, the track is dry and I can really push. We are six laps away from a podium finish, but I start the work of unlapping ourselves. We have good cornering speed, but quite a few cars can outpull us on the straights. I run a 1:34.8 as my fastest lap, and turn the car over to Nathan for the last stint two laps away from the podium.

Nathan also has dry track and starts laying down some great laps. With 44 minutes left in the race, Nathan passes the 4th place car to put us on the same lap. At 27 minutes to go, he passes the same car again for 3rd place! Our team is ecstatic, this is our first trophy! The welded together scraps making an alien from the movie 'District 9' is unique and so awesome looking! it's so cool... we want another one!

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Left to right: Nathan, Nate (me), Dave, Ken

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You can see in the picture below that Nathan just beat my lap time at 1:34.7, starting a friendly intra-team competition for fastest lap.

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TECH TIP #8: After a race weekend, go out for pizza (or whatever favorite food)! If the race went great, you are celebrating. If it didn't go well, you are drowning your sorrows. Either way everybody wins!

Video from the race:

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[knate]

Learning a New Track (8/24/2013) - 10 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

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This was our first time racing at The Ridge Motorsports Park in Shelton, WA. The track just opened 2012, but I missed last year's race because I was in Europe for work. On Friday we did a practice day, but it didn't work out very well with the track being crowded and slow. At tech we get our first glimpse of the awesome trophies. The 1st place trophy is a massive Predator, definitely the coolest one I have seen yet. Knowing that other teams were racing here last year and we are newbs, we know chances are extremely slim of a trophy at this track.

At the beginning of the 10 hour race, our pitmates Son of Andre (#16 V8 Mustang) are putting in such fast laps they are lapping the field easily. We can see that unless they have major mechanical issues there is no hope of catching them. We set our sights on a top three finish and start pushing. Dave is out first, and he is doing a great job of whittling a 2:20 down to 2:10. He brings us from 28th up to 14th place. When he pits, we are already four laps behind Son of Andre as their fastest lap is a 2:01. While in the pits, there is a red flag. Car #128 had rolled and is pulled off the track (this is key later).

Nathan Feigion goes out next, and starts putting in some fast laps. He gets us up to third place before pitting.

I go out next, and get to second place, two laps ahead 3rd place. Around 2pm, there is a car off course in turn 8 and they are stuck, really stuck. There is a local yellow flag, but no safety vehicle yet. We circle around again, and turn 8 is still yellow, now with a Safety Truck. I slow for the yellow behind a pack of cars, when I hear tire squeel and BANG! I am suddenly rotating 90 and come to a stop with the engine stalled. I look in the mirror, and with the massive impact I expect to be staring at the bottom of my trunk. Amazingly, all I can see from the inside is that the taillight internals popped out of the clips on one side. (I have a camera pointing exactly this direction in the video)

I restart the engine, and start to straighten on course when the red flag comes out. The corner worker tells me I have a gashed tire that is completely flat, and they will need to flat tow me. However they only have one truck that can flat tow, and since I can limp they have me follow the flat tow of #60 (the car that hit us) to the pits. The driver came by our pits to apologize, no hard feelings. We have to wait until the red flag is over, then we swap out the tire. The fuel tank has a softball sized dent, but no leaks. The tire has a 1? chunk missing from the sidewall, but the wheel is not bent. Sheet metal is smashed in that corner, but the suspension looks straight. We can't believe how lucky we are that we have no leaks and a driving car. #60's front suspension is demolished, it will be many hours before they have their car together.

I get back out on course with the new tire. Our lead on 3rd place has evaporated, but we are still in 2nd. We had made sure to set the tire pressure correctly before putting it on the car. Unfortunately there are two tires.. and the wrong tire was grabbed. So for the next twenty laps I deal with a car that wants to oversteer at the thought of trailbraking and I am pushing hard trying to get a gap on 2nd. When I pit I am told the tire has nearly 45 psi!

TECH TIP #8: Set the tire pressure on all your spare tires!

Ken Feigion goes out next, and he is having an epic battle with Socket Monkeys (#39 Civic). Every lap when he passes the pits, Socket Monkeys is in direct tow behind him. This continues for around ten laps with Socket Monkeys not able to get by and Ken not able to create a gap.

It is towards the end of Ken's stint, and we see Son of Andre in the pits early with cooling issues. They are venting steam and refilling with water as their four lap lead dwindles. We get on the same lap at one point. We look at the clock and see that there are two hours and 15 minutes left in the race. Son of Andre will have to pit again, but will they need fuel? This is going to be a race!

Nathan Feigion had our fastest times, so we send him out for the last stint. He is battling hard with Martini Racers (#10 VW Golf) in traffic and they are excellent at sneaking through traffic. It is back and forth for a good portion of the session, when Son of Andre comes into the pits for their last driver change. They have a two lap lead, but they need fuel. This is going to be close! If we can pass them in the pits, we might be able to stay ahead in traffic. If they get out in front of us, the car is too fast for us to pass.

We radio Nathan when Son of Andre is about to leave the pits, and he is just entering the straight. We are all on pins and needles watching, and the Mustang exits the pits just ahead of us. We are disappointed, but hope that with a fresh driver getting warmed up Nathan might be able to put some pressure on. This seems to work, as the Mustang is not up to their typical lap times and making some mistakes. Soon we are watching the downhill section, and we see our car exit first! Martini Racers are also pressuring from behind, and Nathan begins to slowly stretch a lead.

Car #128, that had rolled earlier, is allowed out to make some parade laps just to take the checkered flag. Nathan had already lapped the car once when we got a scare on the last lap. We hear that we were called in for passing #128 during a yellow. After some discussion with the officials they luckily decided to cancel the black flag as it was a car that shouldn't have really been out there running. This is a really close call for us, but this allows us to take the checkered flag in 1st place!

For a ChumpCar podium we had to bring the car to impound, but we were not prepared for a podium and had to borrow two jack stands from Paul Newman's Revenge (thanks!) Then when those jack stands were too tall for our jack, we also had to borrow a jack from 2nd place Martini Racers, who are always great competitors and great guys (thanks!)

The car is mostly straight... except for this corner. You can really see in this picture how bad the paint doesn't match having three coats on the quarter and two on the door..

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This is the massive and awesome Predator trophy, I love this thing!

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Look at the awesome details here, how many hours does this take to build?? Way better than a generic chrome trophy..

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We were also voted "Corner Worker's Choice" for the small trophy to the right, as they were entertained by drifter Nathan's "Amazing Saves" into turn 2.

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The highlight video:

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[knate]

After the Ridge race we had some damage to try clean up. We picked up a Porta Power and try to straighten the sheet metal a bit. We did some pulling with a bracket on the outside, some hammering from the inside, and some Porta Power work. We also swapped the fuel tank as it had a softball sized dent.

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We got the corner a lot straighter, as well as installed a new fire system.

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With the corner mostly where it belonged, I took the car for a short trip to the gas station.

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I couldn't resist getting a picture from the unmolested side as well!

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Penalty Laps Are Painful (8/25/2013) - 6 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

With ChumpCar, we had an MOV (Margin of Victory) penalty coming to us. Even though we had only finished 15 seconds ahead of 2nd place, we were given 2 penalty laps. Given that we barely made it up front by the skin of our teeth, a 2 lap penalty was a massive uphill battle for us. We start the race in 27th and make it as high as 4th place. In the end we are technically in 5th, but dropped to 7th based on our penalty laps. Our fastest lap was a 2:05.9 compared to Son of Andre's 2:00.5, so we are definitely not up to their pace.

Another New Track (3/22/2014) - 7 hours - Pacific Raceways:

At Pacific Raceways event Nathan and Ken Feigion decided to not drive, so it is my dad and myself driving with Nathan . This is a track I have done one track day years before but my dad has never been here. I put my dad in the car first so he has a chance to do some yellow flag laps and scout out the course a little. In our random draw for a start, we start in 5th place, what a great way to start the day! On lap 5, my dad radios in that he has lost a tire. Ugh, terrible.. these are brand new Direzza II Star Specs that were working quite well. We throw on a spare in the pits and drop all the way to 36th place. Well this just soured our race.

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Pacific Raceways is infamous for the amount of race cars that it eats on the back side. It is one hungry track.. while my dad is driving he comes to 5a looking at the bottom side of a car on the side of the track. Never a good situation!

I get into the car in 26th place and start to get used to the track. This is a busy track. Normally there is a nice long straight to relax, check gauges, and reset. At Pacific Raceways the straight has a kink where you cross over to the end of the drag strip. That means you are lining up between cement barriers to get onto the straight, where you then move over to the left to prepare for a very fast turn 1. There is also some good elevation change dropping down a very tight 3a and 3b before you make it to the dangerous 5a and 5b corners with Grand Theft Auto style ramp curbing and a steep dropoff to the right.

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For the next session my dad gets back into the car in 15th place. This time there's another car off this time in 5b, stuck partway up the hill. My dad finds that this track can be tricky to find safe places to pass, and without a lot of power the uphill sections and straight are difficult to make it past people.

I get in the car in 11th place, and this time I'm already warmed up so I start trying to see if I can improve on my lap time. I am pushing hard, but maybe just pushing too hard. I only get to within 0.5 seconds of my previous fastest. I get up to 8th place by the time the checkered flag is waved. Not bad for a first time and having a punctured tire! During the race we had tried to get the tire repaired, and found that it was a 2" long piece of a wheel weight that had gone all the way into the tire, and just doing a partial lap was enough to completely destroy the tire inside. So unfortunately with the tire looking brand new on the outside, it was now garbage.

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It Was Fun While It Lasted (3/23/2014) - 7 hours - Pacific Raceways:

My dad starts the second race of the weekend in 33rd place. Not quite the luck of the draw from the first day, but hopefully no flat tires today. The Flying Lumberjacks go off in 5a and nearly go down the steep dropoff! While they did not go down the steep area, this off does end their race.

I get into the car in 26th place and soon after I get into an epic battle with Kyle in the General Leif Volvo. He carries more speed than I do into turn 2, but I am able to pass him back later in the lap. He then proceeds to pass me in turn 2 again, and this continues for many laps. We were giving each other room, fighting hard but fair. What an absolute blast, this is what it's all about!

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General Leif pits, and I begin to focus on trying to beat my 1:43.8 from the first day. While in 11th I pass The Gray Cloud RX-7 and am now looking at the gap in the cement barriers to transition to the main straight. I shift into 5th, and something doesn't feel right. The car doesn't pull very hard in 5th normally, but this feels weak. Suddenly I realize that I have not been checking my gauges on the straight. I look down at the coolant gauge, and the engine is hot. Way too hot. I see around 260*F on the gauge and immediately know our day is done. I missed it, and I killed this engine. I limp back to the pits, and the car cuts out as I roll back to the pits.

We later found that the radiator had failed, and reviewing video showed that the engine had been hot for 20 minutes while I did not check the gauges. I was looking at lap times while trying to push as well as keeping an eye on the cement barriers, and our poor KA24DE paid for it.

TECH TIP #9: Check your gauges EVERY lap on the straight. It is also very helpful to put big warning lights in the car the light up when the engine gets into the danger zone.

q0LVisBexQM

[knate]

In our story we are now into 2014, and I had swapped out the 2.0 turbo in my purple drift car and put in an LS1. So we now take a little interlude for some drifting and drag racing.

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We got a chance to drift at the Ridge as a demo (Nathan Feigion in the blue hatchback, me in the purple coupe).

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NASA (National Auto Sport Association) finally came to the Northwest and we were able to run at Portland International with them. Very well ran events, I am a big fan!

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Generally when I make a big power change I like to go drag racing once just to see what the car can do.. then I'm bored with drag racing again. These were my first couple runs, and you can see I'm used to watching for a finish line (not cones) and I stay in it too long. This gives a decent feel for what the car is like to lay into it and how quick it goes through gears, it's fun!

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[knate]

Since I blew up the engine.. we picked up a new radiator and a used KA24DE to get the car drivable again.

And Then There Were Two (8/1/2014) - 5 hours - Portland International Raceway:

Nathan Feigion decided to take a little break from racing, so for this race it was just my Dad and myself. I started the race and got a good random start of 11th. It was a Friday, and even warmer than usual for the normally mild Portland track with an afternoon race start. We hit a high of 90 degrees, and that makes the inside of our blue tin box a sweltering sauna! By lap 8 I make it up to 1st place. I had been holding onto 1st place during my whole stint until an hour and 45 minutes later, the car starts bucking and is out of fuel. I make it back to the pits, sweating through my suit and fully exhausted. We are down a driver and not prepared for our pit stop, so it's 8 minutes when we need it to be 5 minutes. This does not help our day at all.

Dave heads out of the pits in 6th place. A Mustang is cruising up the front straight on the right side.. which is the wrong side. Getting to the corner, they lock up the rear brakes and completely loop it, hitting Blue Bayou with their rear bumper on the passenger door. Well.. that's one more area that's not so straight.. Luckily this doesn't affect the drivability of the car at all and Dave continues. Dave makes it back to 1st place by the end of his stint and hands over the car with an hour and 45 minutes remaining. Normally the car should go for that long on gas.. but it will be tight. We do better on our next pit stop, nearly getting it under 5 minutes.

I head out onto the track in 4th, with the sun just dipping below the horizon. I had taped up the top side of my visor to help with glare. I find that my radio connection was missed, and I don't have a way of communicating with the pits. I try unsuccessfully to find the end of the cable and get it plugged in, then give up on it and get to the job at hand.

TECH TIP #10: Remember to plug in your radio, it's helpful.

With 15 minutes to go in the race, I back in 2nd place. The #557 Mustang of Dog & Pony Show is in first, and are just ahead of me. Their car has more power and our car handles better. I can get really close in certain turns, but the straights are an issue. I know that time is running out, and I need to make the pass. I get a run on them leaving turn 7, outbrake them into turn 10 and finish the race! Unfortunately when I get back to the pits, I find out that I was just unlapping myself.. and we finished in 2nd. Considering the mistakes we had, this was still a great result! For ChumpCar being on the podium means going to impound, then once impound is done we can start on replacing all the brake pads as our Hawk Blues on stock brakes eat themselves alive. It is a light setup and brakes just fine, but it gets old having to swap brakes/bleed late into the evening every race.

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[knate]

That Time It Really Wanted to Overheat (8/2/2014) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

For the second day of the weekend it was a 7 hour race. Having just placed 2nd to the Dog & Pony Show Mustang the previous day, our sights were set on trying to beat that car. Dave starts the race in 14th place while our newfound rivals Dog & Pony Show start up in 2nd! Dave quickly moves up through the field getting to 7th place by lap 5. My dad is still not that experienced on track (these races are his only track experience), but he gets down to a 1:36.4! By the time we are ready for our first pitstop, we pit after Dog & Pony Show and are leading the race for six laps. We add oil to the engine during the pitstop, which is normal for us as all of our KA24DE engines have burned oil.

We drop to 5th during the pitstop and I head out on track. I make it up to 2nd behind Dog & Pony Show, then inherit first when they pull into the pits on lap 109. Things are looking good, but we still seem to be just a step behind the Mustang. I run a personal best 1:34.0 and turn the car over on lap 127 in 1st place.

Dave heads out late in the afternoon. We had planned our driver swaps so that I would end up in the car last when it was dark. Dave makes it through his stint setting another 1:36.4, but he stays in 2nd for his whole stint.

I throw some tape on my visor again to help with glare at night, and get ready to go out. As I am waiting at the end of the pit lane, Dog & Pony Show pulls up right next to me. Man this is going to be close! I get to leave the pits first, but the Mustang catches me on the next straight and passes me. Knowing that this is the team holding us between our second victory, I slot in right behind them and start applying pressure. I can get right on his bumper in turns 4,5,6 but he runs away on each straight stretch. I have my lights on and keep poking out to the side to distract him, but it's just not working. I keep putting pressure lap, after lap, after lap... 10 laps go by with me putting as much pressure as I can, and this Mustang has not put a wheel wrong once! Who is this guy??

I finally am able to get on the inside of him going right into turn 4, but he's not intimidated. We stick side-by-side through 4, then again to the right through 5, still side-by-side in 6 but I am gaining ground. By the time we get to turn 7 I have the inside line and I am able to pull ahead! I take the same defensive line that he has been driving into 10 and keep him behind me... but at this point I realize the engine is getting hot. I radio to my crew chief (Trish, my wife) and she asks if it's maybe just a false reading. Unfortunately no, as I have two temperature readings that both say it's hot, as well as water pressure sensors reading very low pressure. I keep racing, hoping some miracle will happen and the car will cool down..

The engine hits 214 degrees, and I could keep running hard and risk blowing the engine, or I can take it easy and potentially salvage a 2nd or 3rd place finish. There's just too much time left in the race, and so I start backing out of it to see if I can get it to cool down at all. As I slow down and the Mustang disappears into the distance, I have the defrost and fan blasting trying to take it easy. Even this isn't working... so the next lap I slow down even more. Eventually I am cruising half-throttle as the water pressure bobs around from zero to six psi as the water sloshes around. After a few laps of this and me thinking the engine will never cool down, I suddenly get my miracle. The engine drops down to 180 degrees and I start building water pressure again!

I try running a hard lap, and the temperature is actually staying OK! There is 30 minutes left in the race now. In the pits they do some math, and tell me that since my fastest laps are about 1.5 seconds faster than the Mustang, in theory there is just enough time to catch the Mustang by the end of the race. Well that's all well and good.. but the last time it took me well over 10 laps to pass him while on his bumper! But.. I have to at least try. I need to run my fastest laps and not get slowed by a single lapped car and hope that he gets caught up on some lapped cars.

It's getting dark, and I get my head down and start knocking out laps. There's lots of calculating as I come up to cars trying to figure out the best line to pass them without slowing down. I keep getting closer, until I can finally see the Mustang! As I come onto the front straight, Trish tells me that this is the last lap. It's do or die! I see traffic ahead that we will both be catching, this could work out! As I come into the chicane, he is coming up behind a yellow Taurus, and I try to pinch the first part of the chicane to get a little run on the exit. As I am coming up alongside him, HE MISHIFTS! This is exactly the opportunity I needed, and I make it by. I'm in 1st place on the last lap! Unfortunately there are also two straight stretches between me and the finish line, and he is faster on the straight. I need to get a gap! I make it around the Taurus, and then after nearly blowing it with a slight lockup into 7, I also make it past a BMW on the back straight. I make it onto the front straight with enough of a gap and the most incredible feeling I have ever had in a race car! Math said it was barely theoretically possible, and we did it! To give you some context here, I am definitely an introvert and normally a bit reserved with my emotions. But when I pulled next to that Mustang in impound the first thing I did was go over and give the guy a big hug!

Now remember I was wondering who he was? He is Steve Mahre, silver medalist at the 1984 Winter Olympics for skiing. His twin brother Phil won gold at the same Olympics and they have both been racing since the 80's (Koni Challenge, SCCA, etc). Now I know why my amateur racing was not able to intimidate at all! They are both awesome guys, always very helpful and friendly while racing hard but fair on the track!

AqP1Ru1jt7s

[knate]

We only had a few weeks to get ready for the next race, and knew we had some overheating issues. I had added water pressure sensors to our datalogger, and in reviewing our datalogs I found where the car was venting pressure during a pitstop. I chalked this up to a bad radiator cap, since during the race we had seen the pressure disappear, then build back up again after the engine had cooled down. We replaced the water pump, thermostat, and radiator cap.

I also found myself completely exhausted and soaked with sweat getting out of the car in the last unexpectedly hot race (for the NW), so I went after building a cool suit cooler. Following some other directions online, I put together a cheap cooler using an Engel cooler, bilge pump, and a bilge timer.

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Here it is attached in the car:

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And here I am quite proud of my new Cool Shirt:

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Until I realized the shirt was designed for the metal fittings, and I had the plastic fittings and it didn't clip in..

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This groove was too narrow:

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Mr. Generic Dremel to the rescue..

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After being trimmed a bit, the fitting worked perfectly.

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With that cleaned up we were ready for our race at the Ridge! Well, at least we thought we were.. I meant to get a warning light for the temperature gauge, but that didn't happen in time.

Rain at the Ridge (8/30/2014) - 4.5 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

I head out in the car during the yellow flag, but immediately find that the defrost is not working. I dive in the pits, and luckily my dad is able to quickly find a loose connection and my defrost is going again. There is massive spray everywhere and visibility is terrible, but the Ridge has relatively new pavement, and is much better than PIR to drive in the rain. I start in 36th place and start making my way forward in the field. The high horsepower cars are really struggling to put power down, so we really have just enough power for these conditions. I make it up to 11th place, then pit for my dad's turn with a best lap of 2:23.

My dad is out there and gets tagged in the back at the bottom of the hill. He manages to steer out of it without too much issue and continues on. By the time he pits, it's still wet and he has gotten us up to 6th place.

Since it's just the two of us at this race, I get back in the car and there is something wrong with the power. The car really seems to struggle to accelerate on the top end and is just not its usual self. I think it may be something with the knock sensor and the ecu pulling timing. The best lap I can muster is 5 seconds slower than my first sesssion! Luckily with all the rain this is less of a hit than it would normally be, so we manage to pull home a 4th place finish.

Drying up.. (8/30/2014) - 4.5 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

The ECU was showing a knock sensor code, so I dummy out the knock sensor with a resistor in hopes of fixing the power. I set out in the car for our second race, and it's starting to dry up. With the track drying up, I am reminded that the Ridge is definitely a "horsepower track". There are many long acceleration zones, and the 1/2 mile long front straight is preceded by a very slow corner.. so it's really a drag race.

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The car is still down on power and I am getting killed on the straight stretch. I manage a 2:17, but this is not going to cut it with the leaders having ran a 2:04. I'm in 8th but since we have a few more races coming up, I decide to pull in the pits and we do a quick swap of the ECU. Success! We are back down to 36th place but the car now pulls like it used to, and I immediately knock 6 seconds off my lap time getting down to a 2:11. This is still not enough to win a race, but with our 7 minute pit stop to swap the ECU we are out of the running for a podium anyway. At least the car is working, we still have more races. The car works great for the rest of my stint. Temps are holding perfectly and power is OK. I'm still left wishing for power every time I'm near one of the V8 Mustangs, or the BMWs, or V6 anything..

I pull into the pits, we top off with oil (like we do on every pit stop), and my dad gets in. The track now dries up completely, and we are getting dusted by every car with more power than us. Which is most cars. When my dad pulls into the pits, he says that the power just doesn't quite seem as good as it used to, and that it doesn't pull past 5500 as hard as it used to. While I am exiting the pits, multiple tents get blasted over the pit wall and into the hot pits! The wind is really gusting, although it is dry out.

A few laps into my driving stint, I see the temperature start climbing. I radio in that I'm getting to 200F, where the temperature had been sitting rock solid at 180F. Just a few corners later the temperature starts to rocket up and I cruise it into the cold pits for the car to cool down. We discuss thermostat and other possibilites, then I loop around the pits slowly and the temps drop. I decide to take it back out on the track to see what happens. Just like at Portland.. I start pushing on the car again and temps are still right at 180F.. how strange, and frustrating. That pit stop dropped me from 20th to 29th. I get back to 25th with a fastest lap of a 2:08 before the car decides to randomly overheat and I pull into the pits to end our race for the day.

We swap in a known good fuel rail (complete with good injectors) as it seems like our fuel mileage is a little too good.

Please don't overheat.. (8/31/2014) - 9 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

My dad heads out on course for the first stint and sets a 2:07 lap time! He says the car is working good and feels great. My dad is still out on course and after about an hour we radio my dad to ask him how much fuel he has left and he says he has 3/4 tank. What?? That cannot be right.. fuel gauge must have quit working.. The temps are holding rock solid and the car is working good. My dad pulls into the pits in 9th place on lap 44. We can't even get two fuel jugs into the car... how is this fuel mileage possible?

I head out in the car and within two laps.. the car has decided it's time to overheat. I pull into the cold pits and let the engine start cooling down. At this point we have realized that our issues are serious enough that the easy fixes have not helped, and we likely have an issue with the headgasket. That's not something we are going to fix in the pits at a race track (I know many of you have done that, but we are not prepared and motivated enough to do that). We figure we will run as hard as we can while we can, then if it overheats, let it cool down, and try for more later.

This was really a turning point for our weekend. We had started getting really focused on trying to get onto the podium, and to some degree seemed like fun was equal to doing well in the race. Having problems meant frustration. However once we knew there was no hope for a podium and we would just learn and have some fun runs here and there it changed everything. We were now hanging out with family and friends at a race track, with a car that would at least last for a few laps, so if one of us felt like going out, we could. If we felt like hanging out in the pits, we could.

We pulled the spark plugs, and they are WHITE! This confirms that we were running super lean with the other fuel rail, so that comes right back out and the original one goes in. This is super strange, as this was a known working spare..

I head out on track.. and the car overheats on me within a few laps and I pull in. More time to hang out with family and friends! I start chatting with Paul Newman's Revenge, who also drive a 240SX, and they are wondering if I would drive their car to see how it feels compared to our car. Their car has a full 300ZX brake system with custom dual master cylinder and significantly stiffer springs than our factory cut springs. Hey, this is cool, normally I would be too focused on our own race to jump in other people's cars.

I get in their car during the next pit stop, but I sit for an extra long stop as their rear pads were worn out and they had to swap them. What they forgot to mention, is that they had Autozone pads in the back before, and were now switching to Hawk Blues. The bias adjuster doesn't work anymore, because the system requires so much leg pressure to work that the balance bar is bent. The Kirkey seat feels like it is straight up, and is definitely an awkward position for me.

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I head out of the pits, and immediately notice the clutch pedal has a lot of movement side-to-side. As I shift from 1st to 2nd, I accidentally slip the clutch a bit. Oof, I never have this issue in our car, the engagement point seems way too high. Luckily it's yellow when I head out onto the track, but when I step on the brake pedal it just feels like a rock.. and I'm not really slowing down. I start standing on the pedal for all I am worth.. and the car starts slowing down some. Ouch, this is going to be a lot of getting used to! I start to get a little bit of a feel for it, and start pushing the car a little harder, then putting the 150+ lbs of leg force into the pedal for the braking zones. Their engine feels pretty strong (same KA24DE but with a bigger exhaust), but the shocks are terrible. The springs are extremely stiff but paired with stock shocks, so it's as if they don't exist. The car skips and hops in corners that our car has no issue with at all.

My dad had decided to jump in Blue Bayou and try to chase me down. As he was closing down on me, I see our old rival Son of Andre come on track and I decide to see how well I can hang with them. Despite the bouncy suspension and brakes that require way too much leg force I am hanging on behind Son of Andre, and my dad is catching me from behind. I head into the sharp left-hander turn 13, and brake hard. As I crest the hill I am trail braking and there is a slight bump and the back end snaps out. I had been drifting at this track in my personal car a few months prior, no big deal, just spin the wheel to catch the slide... except with no shocks and rock hard springs... the back end just won't grip up. I am at full lock and end up in the world's slowest rotation going nose first into the gravel off to the left. And I'm stuck. I have never been stuck on the side of the track before during a race, and now I did it in someone else's car. How embarassing! The only small consolation was.. most people don't know it was me. After getting pulled out of the gravel I pull into the pits ashamed and give my report on how the car felt. Thanks for the opportunity to drive it though!

Tech Tip #11: If a car works OK from the factory, make small tweaks, don't start from scratch! Our 240SX with lengthened control arms (for more camber) and cut springs is SO much easier to drive than the one with custom steering column, custom race car brakes, custom suspension setup, etc.

We end up 38th in this forgettable race.

Ok, we know you are going to overheat.. (9/1/2014) - 4 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

I head out first and run a bunch of 2:04s, setting our fastest lap at the Ridge! I get up into 6th place before on lap 17 the car decides it's time for me to hang out with friends in the pits. We have a blast catching up with other teams and treating the day more like a track day. We finish a forgettable 28th place but have lots of fun in the process.

Tech Tip #13: Don't take things so seriously that you forget to have fun regardless of the outcome!

Now for our fuel issue.. this was a bit of a head scratcher. We ordered new fuel injectors.. and those also came up as super lean. We finally figured out that the injectors that came with our mystery engine were actually bigger than factory injectors, and our fuel pump was starting to fail. Since the fuel pump had started failing at the same time the bigger injectors went in... it actually balanced out and we won a race with that setup! With a new fuel pump and new injectors, everything was good. We also bought an Air/Fuel ratio gauge so we could catch these kinds of issues in the future.

We also found corrosion on the ECU pins for the knock sensor and believe that is why it was triggering for phantom knock even with the dummy resistor. I believe our ECU was mounted too low in the car and water was able to splash up there.

Video overview of the weekend:

JYuRswaMeYs

[knate]

With an overheating engine, it was time to go through the head and put in a new headgasket. With the head off I put a little work into porting:

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We were also getting much too familiar with changing brake pads after every single race. We were using Hawk Blues and stock brakes with ducting, but we needed more mass. However going with bigger brakes, meant bigger wheels, bigger tires, which would all keep adding more weight to the car. Not to mention when we had spares of everything, it's an expensive changeover. So we keep changing brakes...

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We had an S14 subframe (95-98), but with ChumpCar rules we would have to take points for installing it. Cutting/welding the S13 subframe to match the geometry however was free. The S14 subframe has less antisquat, which gives a little better grip under power. Here you can see my very scientific measuring..

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Here you can see how raised the front of the control arm is on the S13:

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Compared to the mostly flat LCA on the S14:

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This was my solution:

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When putting the engine together we tried to use an S14 front cover.. and discovered that it causes an oil leak..

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We had some room in points, so we put on a header that had come with an engine:

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Then fit the factory heatshield over it:

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We had seat sliders, but they were stiff to adjust and we never moved them. So in order to drop the seat a little more, I made some custom seat mounts:

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We also used an Airbake cookie sheet where the exhaust goes near our heel. This worked fantastically! I kept melting the glue on the heel of my shoe previously.. and it would get quite toasty and uncomfortable.

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We also installed some more lights for our next race which would have some night running:

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With the engine together and running and car cleaned up, we were ready for the next race!

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[knate]

Ugly Rain (10/24/2014) - 5 hours - Portland International Raceway:

With a typical Northwest weather day facing us, we put our wet weather good luck charm on our antenna:

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We also got a sneak peak at the trophies for the weekend, and there is an AT-AT, I want it!

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Dave starts in the car on a mostly dry track in 44th place. He still has a bad habit of holding the steering wheel at the top, but is getting much better overall. He runs a 1:35.9 and is in 14th place, but if it wasn't for the penalty laps (for winning a previous race) we would be in 2nd!

Nathan Feigion takes the second stint and it has started to rain. His drifting experience really shines here as the car sliding a bit here and there does not spook him and get him to slow way down like some of the other racers. Portland gets extremely slick in the rain, but from geese laying their unpredictable marks on the track and rubber worn into the groove. Coupled with no elevation change on the track, it just gets really slippery. As Nathan's stint goes on the traction gets worse and worse, but he gets up into 8th place.

I get in the car next, and while the amount of hydroplaning is definitely very disconcerting, I also have experience drifting on this track with my V8 car. There is a fine line between brave and stupid, and I try to keep from toeing too far over the stupid line and let the front-wheel drive cars go when I am hydroplaning too much and try to keep it on the track. At one point I am coming up to the chicane, a very slow right-hander. I am on the brakes and slowing to turn in a little late when suddenly out of the corner of my eye I catch a yellow CRX that is flying into the braking zone. I turn the wheel to the left, and the CRX goes flying past my nose, missing by inches! Whew, this is nearly the same as what took out our Hawaii 2-4-Oh car!

Towards the end of the race I am in 4th, right behind 3rd (Celica Supra) and 2nd (Jetta?). 1st place is our full two laps of penalty ahead of us. With thoughts of an AT-AT on my mind.. I push forward trying to get by the two cars to try snag 2nd place. After the VW blows the braking zone into the chicane, I'm now just behind the Celica Supra which I manage to be patient enough to get by when he also outbrakes himself into the chicane on a later lap. Both cars are just behind me, but as they battle it out behind me they collide allowing me to take home 2nd place. I got my AT-AT! Still one of my favorite trophies ever, as it is the only 'mechanical' one. With the MOV penalty laps, it would have been *really* close with 1st place.

xz6vPHNkBXM


Rain, With A Healthy Dose of Wind (10/25/2014) - 13 hours - Portland International Raceway:

The next day we have our longest race yet ahead of us, 13 hours long. Nathan Feigion starts this one off on a wet track in 43rd place. It is slippery, but starting to dry some. Nathan is putting his drifting skills on display as he slip-slides his way to the front of the pack, although with a longer race we now had 3 "Margin of Victory" penalty laps.

Dave gets in the car on a mostly dry track, which still has the treacherous damp areas at the edges and wet soggy grass all around it. While he is nervous over the radio, he keeps it together and brings the car back in one piece.

Nathan Feigion gets in the car next, and the rain is back. While he is out there, some severe wind picks up, and starts destroying pop-up tents! We manage to get multiple ratchet straps across ours to keep it from folding and falling apart, but some tents decide to jump the wall and make a run through the hot pits while others just decide to fold in half and give up life where they are. Again Nathan slithers through traffic and keeps us in great position.

I get in the car next, and it has started to dry out. Nathan Feigion gets his chance to drive the Paul Newman's Revenge 240SX. He has very similar feedback to them as I gave, much too stiff without enough damping and way too much pedal force for the brakes. The wind is still really kicking around, which in most cases is not affecting the race much. However at one point I get to the back straight where I see some leaves swirling around in a little dust devil. As the car hits it, I get tossed around a bit and have to correct. Definitely not what I expected to see out on track!

Dave goes out next for a dusk drive, which is one of the most difficult times. He forgot to put masking tape on his visor, so he didn't have the option of using that to block the mirror. Having lights shining in your mirror and constantly changing lighting conditions is always difficult.

I go out next and it is now fully dark. I have my masking tape on my visor, so I am able to help block out the really aggravating bright lights in the mirror. Compared to the last time we drove at night though, we have now switched to a convex mirror instead of the multi-panel 'wink' mirror. This makes it much better! Now two white dots means there is a car, rather than making many different reflections in the wink mirror.

Dave goes out for our last stint, and while we complete 395 laps compared to the winner's 393, we finish the race in 3rd place due to the 3 MOV laps. We were behind the #10 Martini Racers VW Golf and Dog and Pony Show Mahre Brothers, both fantastic competitors and great people to hang out with. Luckily it rained most of the day, so that is the only reason our brakes made it that far! We swapped the brakes in the evening again and get ready for a third race of the weekend.

RmE8fwt1Z5I


Still Burning Oil (10/26/2014) - 6 hours - Portland International Raceway:

I get the honor of starting our last race of the weekend in 9th place. This race our MOV penalty has finally dropped off, so no penalty laps! It is wet and quite slippery out (even more so when some fuel is spilled on the track), and I am struggling to keep up with the front-wheel drive cars on the slick track. The back straight is nearly a game of chicken as there is a partially dry line on the right, and a wide sweeping off camber turn (back straight is really a misnomer). I turn over the car at the end of my stint at 8th place. I haven't lost anything, but didn't make up a lot of ground.

Dave goes out next, fairly quickly having to dive off track to avoid a spinning Miata. It's still slick out there, but just barely raining. PIR is like driving on an ice rink in places with our car able to easily spin the tires in 3rd and 4th gear. During Dave's stint he is braking for the chicane, and locks up the brakes. He manages to avoid a car and use the runoff into the chicane, but it's a close one! The sun is out and Dave pits the car in 5th place, having made up three places!

The rain starts to fall again as Nathan Feigion hits the track. Later Nathan tells me that he "had a moment" in the car on the back stretch. I say, "Oh yeah, me too" but don't think too much of it. His moment was quite a bit different than mine.. While going into turn 8 he shifts into 4th gear and the back end starts moving to the right. No big deal, Nathan countersteers with it to the right and gets it under control. The next turn, turn 9, is known as the back straight, but as I said earlier, it's not a straight. It's a long sweeping right hander with a cement wall on the right, and then grass and cement wall on the left. If you touch the wall on the right, you are bouncing off of there and then through the grass and hitting the outside wall. I've seen it multiple times, often times it totals the car. This is where Nathan has his "moment". At close to 100mph he is steering right, on the drying line next to the wall, and the back end starts moving out on him. He keeps his foot in it, just calmly countersteering, now starting to look at the wall towards his right. As the back tires get into the more wet pavement the car continues to rotate and he has to give it another big helping of countersteer, now looking right at the wall. Easing out of the gas he manages to get it back in line without it tank-slapping into the wall, which is now just inches off the right side of the car as he continues down the back straight. He shifts into 5th, shakes his head a bit, and continues on.

Nathan takes the car home into 3rd place, with the Mahre Brother's Dog and Pony show in 1st place. On this engine even though the head was nicely rebuilt, we are still burning oil and having to add oil at every pit stop. Our next race is at Laguna Seca, so we decide to build an entirely new engine and bring our current one as a spare. It's three days of racing in California, and we don't want a possibility of not being able to race all three days.

r8ShSUwcT5Y


At the end of the day our lucky duck helped us to bring home three different trophies.

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The now all-too-familiar for us impound. Look at those tiny brakes! Also look how filthy the car was.. those are silver wheels. During impound we have to jack the car up and let people look at the car for 30 minutes. Most people were pretty uninterested or baffled when they looked at our little 4-cylinder engine and super tiny stock brakes. After impound we would then put the wheels back on, bring it back to the pits, jack it up and then swap the brake pads out, bleed the brakes, and then typically leave when it's dark and we longing for a nice warm bed.

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Now off to go build a new engine and a way to store it..

[knate]

Every engine we have had so far has burned oil. Enough oil that we are checking the oil at every pit stop, adding a bit, and heading out again. We are jealous of other cars that roll into the pits and don't even pop the hood. Since this engine burns oil after a fresh head, we know that it's bottom end, so we yank it out and keep it as a spare.

Another thing I want to work on is getting more real-time feedback from our data in the car. It is very useful to look at the data later and see why one driver is faster than another, but sometimes I want to know if it's faster to take an earlier apex, but I won't know until I get on a laptop later. I have a Race Technology DL1 with the small display, but trying to read numbers on that in a corner is nearly impossible. I decide to see if I can make something that will be easier to see.

This is my first proof of concept, just learning to drive some LEDs and an LCD display. Initially this is just based off of a potentiometer for input.

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The next evolution is to get it talking to the Race Technology through serial. For this first test I was using horizontal acceleration as the output since it's easy to see it change just by tipping the DL1.

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The further I tilt the DL1, the more the LEDs show.

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Next I got some multi-colored LEDs, a dimmable LED driver, a smaller Arduino, and fit it into an old stereo faceplate carrying case.

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The LEDs are Red/Orange/Yellow/Green/Blue as they go across. I also added water temp, water pressure, and oil pressure warning lights.

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With that project out of the way, we also wired up the car with wireless video. We chose to go with the setups used for RC airplanes mainly due to how expensive it was to use cell phone data for race car video. Being able to see what the car was doing live on the track seemed like it would be really handy with a monitor in the pits. This led to an interesting looking little blue antenna on the car.

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This transmitted back to our pit station exactly what the GoPro was seeing.

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We got our freshly rebuilt engine into the race car:

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So we then moved to making our transport setup for our spare engine. With a little hacking, chopping, and welding, we had a car that would roll into our race trailer.

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We added the shelves to help make use of space:

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At home in the trailer:

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Good use of space and neatly packed with our spares for Laguna Seca:

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[knate]

My friend Matt and I attended college together, and after living on the East Coast for quite a while, he was now living in Boise. As he is an aviation enthusiast and pilot and he flew his Van's RV-6A over to meet us in Washington State. He had done some autocrossing with an RX-8, but had never actually driven on track. He was going to ride down with us while we drove to Laguna Seca.

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This was a three day event spanning Friday to Sunday. We drove down and arrived on a Thursday, went through tech, then loaded our car into the garages. This was our first time having an actual garage and it was really nice! Even though we had nothing to plug into it, it was cool seeing the nitrogen plumbed on the wall where the pros use it. We had racers coming from all across the country for this race, including Tubby Butterman Racing. They have some Hawk Blue brake pads for us they brought with them, but we decide to leave the mostly good pads on the car. Our first race is only a six hour, and with Matt in the car we figure he won't be using nearly as much brake as we do (Bad idea! Bad idea!)

To Finish First, You Must First Finish (7/3/15) - 6 hours - Laguna Seca:

Since the race starts under yellow, we put Matt in the car first so he could have a chance to feel out the car a little before racing. Going from autocross to straight to a race start at Laguna Seca is definitely a way to jump straight into the deep end of the pool. Not ideal, as it is very intimidating. There are plenty of walls, elevation change, and gravel traps at the track. Luckily since it's also one of the most famous race tracks in the world.. Matt knew the layout from various video games.

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Matt was very nervous about wrecking our car and was trying to get used to things while not getting in other people's way or cause any problems. He runs a very respectable 2:00.8 lap time, excellent for never having driven this car or on track before! He's doing a great job of watching his mirrors and giving people room when disaster strikes on lap 16. Matt is going into turn 6 when he downshifts into 3rd, and it's just enough to upset the back end of the car. He tries to catch the slide, but it pitches him off to the right and he spins off track. A camouflage Celica Supra dives off track to avoid him, and narrowly avoids the crash.

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Matt is spooked and wants to come in, so on lap 18 he pulls in the pits. We talked to the Celica Supra driver later who is insistent that we never touched their car, although their camo paint is smeared up the nose of our sparkling blue front bumper all the way to the hood. I don't even quite understand how there isn't really any damage. That was a close one!

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Nathan Feigion gets into the car with a little over 5 hours left in the race. He brings us from 29th all the way up to 7th during his stint, running a 1:51.3!

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Dave gets in the car next and he is struggling a bit. He hasn't played all the video games that we have, so the track is not nearly as familiar to him. He spins early on, which shakes his confidence. However by the end of his run he has done a 1:57.6 and we are in 8th place.

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I get in the car last, so it's all up to me now. Having a new driver in the car our original goal was to crack a top 10 finish. We had dropped to 14th during our pit stop, but I'm pretty consistently below the 2 minute mark so we are looking OK. The car is working great, the coolant temp is perfect and engine power is up to normal. Adequate, but not great, just like normal. It's now lap 150, there's just 30 minutes left in the race and I'm in 10th place. The brakes don't feel right, not stopping as good as they have been. I have a very fast and aggressive BMW behind me, so I point him by, not wanting to try fight with him with unknown brakes. He goes by me, and I tuck in behind him for turn 11, the extremely sharp left-hand turn before the straight. As I get to the brake marker I hit the brakes, AND THE PEDAL HITS THE FLOOR! Since I'm not slowing down, to avoid rear-ending the BMW I yank the wheel to the right and fly off into the gravel trap.

After I get pulled backwards out of the gravel, our undertray scooped up enough gravel they might have wanted to send us a bill! When talking to my dad afterwards he asked me if I had tried to use the emergency brake. I told him, "There was zero time for that! All I could do was yank the wheel to avoid hitting the other car." The interesting thing was when I watched the video back.. I actually start pulling the e-brake, but because I had just swerved the back end starts coming around. Going sideways into a gravel trap is a major risk for rollover. I put the e-brake back down while counter-steering with my left hand to try get the car going nose-first, and mostly succeed. All of this was essentially reflexes from drifting, as I didn't even remember touching the e-brake!

The cause of all this? Me being cheap/lazy with the brake pads, and thinking that the car would make it six hours on slightly used pads. Once the pad was gone, the piston over-extended and blew brake fluid all over when I went for the brakes that last time.

Tech Tip #12: Brake pads don't have linear life. A pad with 100% material stays cooler than one with 50% material, so once the pad is low it goes quickly! 50% thickness is beyond 50% of it's lifespan.

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Now for a late night replacing calipers, pads, bleeding, and sweeping up a massive amount of gravel that we needed to return to turn 11..

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And for the video highlights of the race:
cURQYXNiMEA

[brndck]

This is by far the best new thread on Zilvia in a LONG time!!!

[knate]

This is by far the best new thread on Zilvia in a LONG time!!!

Thanks for being my first comment, I really appreciate it! I've still got plenty of stuff left to write to catch us up to today where we are prepping our VQ35DE..

[Rustys14]

This is by far the best new thread on Zilvia in a LONG time!!!

Agreed, this thread is awesome!

[knate]

Agreed, this thread is awesome!

Thanks, happy to hear it! If you ever have any questions just throw them out there!

[knate]

At Least the Brakes Were Good (7/4/15) - 7 hours - Laguna Seca:

With our brakes sorted out and some sleep we were ready to hit the track again. Matt had told us he didn't know if he wanted to get back in the car again, but we knew we needed him to get another chance so we figured we would talk him into it later in the day. Dave went out first. And for the first time, we got the lucky drop of the flag and we started in 1st place! Dave was feeling a little more comfortable on track, and pulled off a 1:55.4! There are a lot of fast cars (and drivers) out there however, and Dave drops down to 11th when he is stopped for a red flag. Once he can move, Dave pulls into the pits and the crew dives into action. After a little bit of troubleshooting, we find that the water pressure sensor has failed and is leaking. We engineer a quick plug for it and seal it up. This drops us all the way back to 44th place, not looking good for today.

I take the car out next partway into my stint, I am trying to work my way around a gray 5-series BMW. The car is fast, but the driver is erratic and having issues with oversteer. I find out later that he is an experienced Spec E30 driver (experienced.. not necessarily skilled). I can't keep up on the straights, but can reel him back in again in corners. As I follow him into turn 11 I see him go wide and he is going off course. This is my chance! He will have to back out of it and I will have a chance to sail by. Except... he doesn't back out of it. Major Mistake #1: Even though he's fully off track, he stays in the throttle... and comes back on the track fully sideways! I aim left trying to miss his car but the gap is closing quickly. There just isn't enough room, and while I manage to miss his car by about one inch.. I am pointed towards the barrier and there is now no avoiding it. I smash the barrier with the front, then the back, then come to a halt. I now have a smashed car, and the guy that needed to just back out of throttle has a perfectly intact car. But he's not done yet.

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There is a massive cloud of dust on track now and he is sideways on track on the left side of the track. This is off line, where nobody drives. Major Mistake #2: For some reason he panics, thinking someone may hit him, so he floors it trying to turn the car around quickly. The cloud of dust is mainly on the left side of the track as well. Mopar 4 Life (Dodge Neon) suddenly sees the BMW reappear out of the dust onto the racing line and turns left to avoid the BMW.

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And.. here's where we get to Major Mistake #3: Thinking he can drift and can execute a quick donut to get going. He over-rotates, and now is coming back LEFT! Mopar 4 Life is trying to dodge, but the BMW driver thinks he is a Mustang leaving a Cars and Coffee and won't stop until there is some destruction.

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At this point the BMW driver's insatiable appetite for chaos has been satisfied. The Neon slams into the BMW sending steam, glass and car parts everywhere. The BMW is totalled, and the Neon that has been towed from across the country has a destroyed front right corner and a broken windshield. Three smashed up cars due to one driver's poor choices.

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Tech Tip #13: If you go off track, don't try to be a hero and save it. Just back out of it, gather it up, make sure it is safe to enter the track, and get on with your race.

After I get checked out for a concussion (all good) I limp the car back into the garages. Time to fire up some A-team music and get to work! We assess the damage, and aside from all the smashed up sheetmetal, our worst problem is the lower control arm. We don't have any spare arms, and this arm is custom. We had cut and welded extra metal into it to lengthen it for more camber.

This arm is supposed to be straight across the top.. that's pretty bent. On the plus side, the area I had welded up showed now issue.

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Even if we can find a stock arm, we would need both arms, and then we would destroy the outer edge of the tire due to lack of camber. Time to try fix it.

We borrow a torch and try getting it hot and putting 1 Lard-Ton of force into it. That doesn't work.

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We end up cutting it most of the way through, bending it, then welding it back up. We had reinforcement metal borrowed from Wrecked'em Racing and a welder I believe borrowed from Tubby Butterman. Fellow racers are so awesome!!

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We used some chain binders to pull the corner of the car out some and were feeling pretty happy about our progress. It's July 4th, the race is over, and the day is winding down. Wayne from Scrap Attack walks over to see how things are going, and says, "Hey, you guys are using the factory radiator brackets. We never use those anymore as it tends to crack the plastic end tanks if you hit something." I pull off the brackets and sure enough, our radiator is cracked! Thanks for saving us from some more pain Wayne! Unfortunately.. while we have an entire engine with us, we do not have a spare radiator. Time to see if we can fix this one. I had heard of 'plastic welding' using zip ties, so I grab my soldering iron and melt the crack together and use zip ties for filler.

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We had hopes of watching some fireworks and hitting Monterey for some nice food, but instead it was a late night finishing up the car. We managed to get the fender straight enough to fit back on the car and were done for the night. I was a little leery of the radiator fix, as I didn't know how well it would hold up to vibration/heat during the race, but we went back to the hotel to get some sleep.

I woke up at 3am and could not stop thinking about the radiator. As I lay in bed I was trying to think of what I could do to make the fix more robust. RTV on it's own wasn't going to help, but if I could cap it to contain the RTV that should hold up. Unfortunately it was at the post on the radiator where the crack was, so I needed cap with a hole in it. I realize if I use a washer I could hold some RTV in. But if I wait until we go to the track in the morning, the RTV won't have time to cure. At around 4am I slip out of the hotel room, and head to the track. It was a little weird arriving in the dark and working on the car in the brightly lit garages with a ton of race cars and me being the only person there. I put together my washer stack and got it all RTV'd together and used zip ties to hold it down. While I didn't get very much sleep, I felt a whole lot better about the robustness of the fix now.

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ZweIpF8gw6U

[Toxocara995]

I've been reading this thread for the last 2 hours while getting tattooed and I am in love. So we'll written, it's like a novel. Ready for more! [emoji1690]

Sent from my HD1900 using Tapatalk

[knate]

I've been reading this thread for the last 2 hours while getting tattooed and I am in love. So we'll written, it's like a novel. Ready for more! [emoji1690]

Sent from my HD1900 using Tapatalk

Great to hear, thanks! I will get some more posted by the weekend.

[knate]

Will It Hold? (7/5/15) - 7 hours - Laguna Seca:

So after barely any sleep due to fixing the car, I was pretty beat. But I was pretty upbeat about our chances of the car holding together for the final day. Matt in his first ever race weekend, had not gotten a chance to drive on the second day.

After all the repairs, we still didn't know how the car handled or if everything worked. We sent Nathan Feigion out first to shake down the car. He started in 31st place, and the car is working good! Nathan slices and dices his way through traffic, while the temps stay cool and brakes are working great. By the end of his stint, he has made it up to 5th place and ran our fastest lap of the weekend at 1:50.4! For reference, the fastest time of the day was a 1:49.5.

Originally Matt had said that he didn't want to get in the car again, but we talked him into trying it out again now that it wouldn't be completely new and overwhelming. However, we don't do him any favors and we pull a rookie move, we forget to put up his window net. He gets black flagged and looped back around for us to correct it, dropping us to 21st place. Matt is a lot more confident in the car and is pushing it more, which does end up in one spin. He is really getting a lot more comfortable with the car and gets back up to 15th place. Then Matt gets a black flag for passing under a yellow flag. Oops! He pulls in, apologizes, and is off again in 22nd place. By the end of his stint he has made it back to 16th place before pitting. Matt pulls off a 1:57.7, a full three seconds faster than the first stint!

I get in the car next. I push as much as I can trying to beat Nathan's lap time, but I just can't pull it off. I got down to a 1:51.9 during my session, but did manage to get up to 9th place. On the plus side, the car is still driving around the track and the radiator fix is holding perfectly.

Dave is in the car for the final stint. Will the car hold all the way to driving on the trailer? Dave struggles a bit with some understeer, but pulls off a respectable 1:54.3 lap time and brings the car home in 12th. Success! Our only day of the weekend we actually finished the race!

The LED device I made showing "Time slip" worked.. somewhat. The refresh rate is not nearly as quick as I was hoping for, and if it ever lost communication it would just hang at the last value shown. So with the somewhat intermittent updates and not really being able to trust it.. it didn't prove to have a ton of value. On the plus side it did have a cool little startup animation!

Video overview of day 3:

TV_xlQT2AQQ


So after the race we got the car home and checked out all the damage a little more closely. The front was really scraped up, but looked reasonably close.

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With a little "footwork" at the track, the quarterpanel wasn't too terrible:

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We had another race within a month, so we needed to work quickly. We got the car up on the lift, and yikes! That doesn't look right... A couple other tires had this as well, and we had never seen this before. I can only assume we were hitting the curbing harder than normal.

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The track-fixed lower control arm:

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We pulled the engine out to have better access to fixing the damage. Definitely a lot worse looking with the fender off!

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I also did some comparison to my purple coupe.. and we discovered our left front strut wasn't where it belonged...

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I welded up a quick and dirty strut pulling device:

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I also made a backing plate to help pull out the left corner of the car:

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Then with the help of a Porta Power a couple of excavators..

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We got the strut tower brace to match my other 240SX and got the corner looking roughly correct.

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Then I took a spare fender, some hammers, and some carpet, and I got the fender roughly back to the factory shape.

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A little paint on the chassis, and it wasn't looking so bad.

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I also wanted to remake the lower control arms, and then we could use the old ones as spares. I picked up some new arms from RockAuto.

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I cut the arm and added in the new metal to space the arm. Again the reason for extended control arms was this was "free" in ChumpCar points compared to commercially available camber adjustment.

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Next up I added a bridge across the bottom (with my OK at best welding skills on display here).

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At this point I have two extended control arms that would likely be strong enough.

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But to reduce stress on the joint, I then wrap the top with sheet metal and plug weld some holes in it.

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I add some more braces on the bottom, and then I'm sufficiently happy that the rest of the arm will bend before anything I cut breaks (just like the last arm proved).

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A little paint, and they are ready for the car.

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And here is the car all back together. We added a factory front lip as well as a bit more of an air dam below that to try to reduce some drag on the straights. We always get killed on the straights, so every little bit helps. You can also see the aggressive negative camber we need for a Mcpherson strut car to have relatively even tread wear.

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[knate]

These Brakes.. (8/8/15) - 12 hours - Portland International Raceway:

So after all the work to get the car straight again and a factory front lip added, we were ready to race in Portland. Our last event at Portland we had a 2nd, 3rd, and 3rd with 1st place eluding us. So we had a goal ahead of us!

Dave starts off the 12 hour race in 29th place. Dave puts in some solid laps and gets us up into 7th place. He's pushing the car hard, likely a little bit past his comfort zone. While approaching turn 10, he's still on the brakes a bit too much at turn-in, and the car starts rotating at 80+ mph. His countersteer is not quite quick enough, and to gasps of the people in the bleachers.. ("Oh no! Oh no!") he is headed off course... towards a barrier! Luckily he is far enough past the barrier to not hit it, and gets slowed down before getting to the tire wall. If it was raining, the car would be a balled up mess, as cars don't slow down much at all in wet grass. However even with the Brown Pants Moment, Dave makes it up into 3rd place before pitting!

Nathan Feigion is in the car next, putting in solid laps and moving forward in the pack. 19 laps into his stint I hear over the radio, "I think I've got a flat tire or something." Oh no! We aren't quite a prepared Nascar crew... we are in the pits for 6 minutes changing the tire before sending him back out. This knocks us back to 12th place, giving Nathan some work to do. Nathan then proceeds to set our fastest lap of the race (1:33.98) and get us up into 5th place.

It was my turn next, and I have my sights set on a podium finish. At this point we have gotten a trophy every single race in Portland since our first 3rd place trophy and I don't want to break that streak! I put in a straightforward two hour session and pit in 3rd place.

Dave goes out next, and then pits in 1st place! With four hours left, Nathan Feigion is back in the car. On lap 318, disaster strikes. No brakes! Nathan uses a combination of engine braking and emergency brake use to get the car slowed down, repeatedly pumping the emergency brake like Flintstone ABS. The car skids just past our pits with the rears locked up and the front brakes on fire! I hit the brakes with the fire extinguisher, dousing the flames and my hopes of a podium finish.

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We jump into action to repair the car. This is the first time we've tried to do a caliper swap live during a race. And ... as you might imagine, it's HOT!! Like still smoking after being removed and on the ground kind of hot. The reason we lost brakes is our pads were so far gone that the piston popped out of the caliper. Again. Dave swaps the caliper on the right while I change the pads on the left side. I can't grab anything, even just my glove grazing the caliper is enough to send an instant wisp of smoke. I am trying to use a tool in each hand like some kind of caveman salad tongs. We get the new pads in and some new fluid in, and then bleed the brakes. Total time: 15 minutes. Not bad for a first time doing a hot change in the pits! In the picture below you can see the caliper smoking on the ground.

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This brakes thing is getting ridiculous. To have 1st place snatched away due to brakes like this is frustrating. This will be our last race weekend on these brakes.. These Hawk Blue pads provide fantastic stopping power and feel, but in combination with stock brake hardware they just get too hot and disappear (even with our ducting). They used to be fine, but as we get faster we push the car harder.

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I jump in the car last, and we are down to 7th place. I do what I can, but there's no making up for a 15 minute pit stop. We finish in 5th place, not too bad considering that included a flat tire and brakes+caliper change in the pits!

Video overview:
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[brndck]

jeezus that's insane changing calipers and brakes that fast!!!

[knate]

jeezus that's insane changing calipers and brakes that fast!!!

We were pretty happy with it but we are also really slow if you watch the Corvette racing team swap calipers..

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[knate]

Just Keep It Together... (8/9/15) - 6 hours - Portland International Raceway:

On our second day of the weekend, we are on old tires trying to use up our 15 inch to get ready to switch to something bigger. The sun is shining as Dave takes the first stint in the car. He starts in 15th place, and battles his way all the way up to 3rd!

Nathan is in the car next, battling with an SC300 and MK3 Supra turbo. Both cars have more horsepower than us, but our cars light weight helps in the corners. Nathan pits with us in 2nd place behind the SC300!

I get in the car last. I put in a solid session and we finish up the race in 3rd. I didn't quite hang onto the 2nd place, but we got our trophy!

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Highlight video:

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After the race, it was time to figure out what we were doing with our brakes. I want to go overkill, as we really need some serious life. We have been overheating the brakes due to such little mass in the rotors. The front calipers would start leaking about every other race, and the pads needed swapped around every 7 hours. We had originally resisted upgrading brakes, as light weight was one of our few advantages and bigger brakes meant bigger heavier wheels/tires.

We pick up some adapters that will allow us to bolt Wilwood calipers and use 350Z Track rotors.

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The four-piston Wilwoods calipers are significantly bigger than the stock single pistons. I ordered the smallest caliper Wilwoods, which is almost a perfect match hydraulically to the single piston so the rear brakes could be left alone.

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Rotors go from 9.8" (10 lbs) to 12.8" (21 lbs).

We first try fitting them behind some factory 16" wheels, trying to not add any more wheel weight than we have to.. but they just don't quite clear.

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While the 16" just didn't quite fit, some 17x9 fit great:

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In addition to more weight, the pads are significantly thicker:

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Here's an example of how tiny the stock rotors looked in there.

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The difference in tire is pretty significant as well:

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The 17x9s with 225s definitely change the look of the car:

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I tape up the brake ducts to try keep some heat in them, and head out to bed in the brakes. We are running Raybestos ST43 pads, and wow do they squeel! But.. it's a race car and if they are going to last, I can live with that. The brakes were already plenty enough to lock the tires, and the new brakes feel just as strong. The pedal is definitely softer with the extra fluid going from single piston to four piston. Now these should last, next up it's time to see what they can do!

[Zenki_Kouki.5]

great stuff! It's nice to see people doing other types of racing with 240s.

[Alex Mcknz]

I had so much fun watching videos and seeing the progress of this build.

[knate]

great stuff! It's nice to see people doing other types of racing with 240s.

Yeah, these cars may not be as popular as Miatas on the road course, but they do great!

I had so much fun watching videos and seeing the progress of this build.

Thanks Alex! There's still plenty more to come as I get this written.. I am getting closer to our VQ30DE swap writeup in here, while right now we are actually in the middle of a Rev-Up VQ35DE swap!

Follow us on Facebook for the newest updates while I continue to write up this backlog.. https://www.facebook.com/BlueBayou24/

[knate]

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/2/15) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

This is our first race with the new brakes, and a new format for us. This week is a combination of endurance and sprint racing, and we had only done endurance races so far. We also had ChumpTrucks in two for this weekend! These are some pretty wild beasts and very entertaining.

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I take the car out for our first practice runs with the new setup. While the extra grip feels good, there is something unnerving about the way the car handles. When I push the car really hard and get a lot of lateral G's, the back end starts to get nervous. Pushing hard into turn 10 (very fast left hander), the car seems great.. then suddenly a snap of oversteer. We had been running both front/rear swaybars, but when I pull into the pits I decide to disconnect the rear sway bar to see if that helps the back end. As I'm laying on the ground unbolting it, someone swings by to tell me, "Dude, when you were going through turn 10 you were three-wheeling!" Well, that explains it.. and confirms that disconnecting the rear sway should help. I take the car out again, and confirm that the snappiness is gone and have my dad take the car out.

For this first race, Dave starts in 19th place. This time around it was just my dad and myself racing. Dave gets us up into third, and it's now my turn.

The extra grip feels great, although with cut factory springs there is a decent amount of body roll. The brakes squeal any time you touch the pedal, to the point where it becomes completely engrained into my brain and I can pretty much ignore it. I turn our fastest lap ever in the car at 1:33.7 and return the car in 3rd place.

Dave is in the car again, and gets called for a black flag for passing under yellow. I reviewed the video later, and was not able to find it happen. The black flag knocks us back to 9th place. It's now getting dark, and an out of control Acura Integra hits both my dad and a Probe while dive-bombing into a corner. Luckily the damage to our car is minor, and Dave continues on and pits in 5th place.

It's dark now so I get my stripes of tape on my visor and jump in the car. It's time to see if I can turn this into a podium position! The headlights are definitely not as bright as I would like.. but they are somewhat workable. I have to use very specific reference points on the track. Exiting Turn 6 becomes ".. roll in the throttle, aim left.. 1 second.. 2 seconds.. white paint stripe, turn right... Ok, there is the apex of 7.." In some ways I actually do slightly better at night, as it FORCES me to use my markers exactly. There's really no ability for my brain to try to get my throttle foot to lift coming to a corner early.. because I can't see it. I turn a 1:33.4, our fastest ever PIR time before it starts to lightly rain and throw some more variables into the mix. Since most people slow down at night, I was able to work my way back up to 3rd place again. Another trophy! This time it was a very cool looking dragon. And the best part? We did not touch the brakes at the end of the evening!

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Video Overview:

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PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/3/15) - Sprint #1 - Portland International Raceway:

The sprint race addition to the event is an absolute blast! When we have a long race, you never want to venture too far away in case you are needed. But for the sprint race, if there is an issue the race is over anyway, so there is no problem going to the stands and watching. This is also one of the only times we've had that many competitors up in the stands together. It was a great atmosphere and a lot of fun.

Dave takes the Sprint #1 and finishes 9th overall, 3rd place in B class. Classes were done by engine size, and we were in the 2-3 liter class with our KA24DE.

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/3/15) - Sprint #2 - Portland International Raceway:

I get in for Sprint #2, and start of in 7th place. I get a good jump at the green flag, with two Mustangs and a Porsche 924 turbo in front of me. A pesky Miata keeps making his way into the fight, but eventually falls out of it. I slowly pick off one car after another, until the Porsche and I are battling it out. I pass him, he passes me back. He can't shake me but I can't stay ahead of him. Finally as we keep pushing each other further and further, he spins while braking into the chicane. I win the race by 36 seconds, which means we ge a "Margin of Victory" penalty of 36 seconds applied to our next couple races. This isn't exactly fair to my dad, who was out next.

Sprint Race #2 Video:

-rMlPRqbN74


PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/3/15) - Sprint #3 - Portland International Raceway:

Dave goes out for Sprint #3, and he finishes in 12th overall, 4th place in B class.

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/3/15) - 6 Hours - Portland International Raceway:

The next race is a six hour endurance race. The car has been working great, and the brakes are still working nice and strong. I start the race in 19th place in the late afternoon. I have the top of my visor taped up in preparation to act as a sun visor. I am battling it out with various E36s, including #177 Finally Racing. They drive clean and are fast, and are difficult to pass. I finally manage to sneak by them, then it's on to our friendly rivalry with the Dog and Pony Show Mustang. I pit in 3rd place with a fastest lap of 1:34.5.

Dave is in the car next, and the sun is really killer at this point. On the front straight it's directly in your eyes. Dave also employs the taped visor trick and starts putting in some solid laps. The sun sets, and eventually it's completely dark and Dave is still circling the track. He sets a lap time just a second off of my pace at 1:35.5 and pits in 2nd place!

I get in the car and things are going well. The car feels good and I am creeping my way closer to the Lexus SC300 that is in 1st place. One problem however, is my headset never got plugged in so I have no communication with the pits. The Lexus is factory rated at 70 more horsepower and is also a great handling chassis. It's heavier than our car, but this is a bit of David and Goliath. In the dark my headlights finally pick up the black Lexus in front of me. I pressure my way past the Lexus, but then get caught up on lapped traffic and the Lexus disappears into the distance. I can catch them in the corners, but they have the horsepower advantage. I manage to get by them and keep them behind me by the time the race ends, only to find out that I was actually a lap up, and I fought that hard just to give us an extra lap of Margin of Victory penalty. Oops!

6 Hour Endurance Race Video:

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PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/4/15) - Sprint #4 - Portland International Raceway:

It's a new day and Dave goes out for Sprint #4, and he does great! With the MOV penalty of 26 seconds for winning a spring + another 30 seconds for winning the endurance race, he runs a personal best 1:33.9 and finishes 4th overall and 2nd in B class, which would be a 1st place overall with no time penalties!

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/4/15) - Sprint #5 - Portland International Raceway:

I take Sprint #5, and with the 56 second penalty I effectively need to lap the entire field, in 30 minutes. I am very focused, and in the Zone. The first lap I get past all the cars except for the two MK3 turbo Supras. The second lap I make it by them. My brain is calm and my senses are heightened. I am noticing things that I have not felt before. I can feel precisely how much grip I am giving up when I am not smooth enough on the brakes exiting the last corner. I can see the path I want to take through traffic ahead of me as if the other cars are just cones in an autocross course. Well.. moving ones that don't want me to pass them, but you get the point. I feel like I have hit the next level in my driving, and I am extracting that extra little bit out of the car I couldn't feel before. During this session with 18 laps, I turn 10 laps faster than my previous fastest lap! In those 18 laps I manage to lap every single car... except one. And while I don't get a trophy for this race, I came off the track feeling like I had really won something. I had just found the next level in my own driving and ran a 1:31.984, less than a second off of the fastest lap of the weekend in our little 4-cylinder!

Sprint Race #5 Video:

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PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/4/15) - Sprint #6 - Portland International Raceway:

Dave gets in the car for Sprint Race #6. We are now down to just a 20 second handicap for me having won a sprint race. Dave finishes in 4th place, 1st in B class.

PIR Holy Moly! Enduro Sprint Combo (10/4/15) - Sprint #7 - Portland International Raceway:

Well it sure was fun being in the Zone in the previous sprint race.. but I'm not quite there this time. Things are going well, but I don't have Super Feeling or even Spidey sense. I get hung up trying to get past one of the Toyota Supras, and while I can get a good run at him, I just can't get a pass to stick before he walks by me on the straight. I also have a 20 second time penalty, so I need to also put more than a 20 second gap on him and that's just not happening. I finish the race in 2nd overall, 1st in B class.

Sprint Race #7 Video:

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We got a super cool Batman trophy for our 1st place in addition to a little Predator for my sprint race and the dragon for 3rd place the first day. A very successful weekend!

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And here is the best part.. I measured the brake pads after the race. We used up only 3 millimeters of front pad, and essentially none off the rears. That is with 13 hours of endurance races, 3.5 hours of sprint races, and another hour of practice! Finally some brakes that are not a maintenance nightmare, this is the best upgrade we have ever done for the car!

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You can see the rears were hot and working.. but no measurable loss of pad thickness.

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Here's a view of the dust shield turned brake duct. You can also see our camber spacers, currently set to 'MAX' (the other side says 'POOP').

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A new series called Lucky Dog started by Cathy McCause popped up, but with their first race happening in the same month as our Chump Car race, we were not planning on doing it. I was contacted by Mark Scholz, who's rental driver had caused our crash at Laguna Seca. He said his car was not going to be fixed in time for the race, and he wanted to give us his spot. Wow, not going to turn that down. Thanks Mark!

It was originally planned to be my dad and myself again. Then disaster struck and my dad had a heart attack and needed a triple bypass. While the surgery was successful and he was going to be OK, there was no way he could race. One of our friendly rivals #177 Finally Racing put together a Get Well card and signed it with their whole team, forever cementing them as an awesome team and great friends. Now with a new series and a free entry, I asked Nathan Feigion if he would sub in, and he was up for it. So next up will be a late October race at PIR with Lucky Dog!

[knate]

LDRL Howl-o-Ween Derby (10/31/15) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

It was our first race with Lucky Dog Racing, and their first event at PIR (I believe it was their 3rd event ever). We knew we would be racing with a lot of familiar faces, just in a different format. Cathy McCause had been running ChumpCar on the West Coast previously, and we are a big fan of how she runs events, so we are excited! The weather is not great, but asking for dry weather in Portland in October may be asking for a bit too much. I don't mind a wet track, both Nathan Feigion and I have been drifting for years and we have also drifted a fair amount at this track. So to some extent the rain gives us a bit of an advantage. Unfortunately since we just upgraded to much bigger tires on our light car, this doesn't bode well for hydroplaning. This will be the first even with just Nathan and I driving, and we typically are battling each other for fastest lap (for our car), so this should be good.

Lucky Dog does qualifying as they have different classes, unlike ChumpCar. We go out for qualifying, and it is already sopping wet out there. When racing in the rain you have to be aware of the rubber worn into the normal racing line. The rubber makes it so much more slick, that the "rain line" typically just means anywhere that isn't the racing line. The problem is, it's impossible to go around the track without crossing the racing line multiple times, so you try to plan for it and do it where you aren't turning as much if possible. Portland has another unique feature as a track, and that is the Goose Poop. Depending on the day, geese may pepper one corner or another with their "banana peels". We qualify with a 1:55, which is a far cry from our fastest lap (1:31.9) but this still puts us in A, the fastest class. It's wet, but not raining too hard yet.

My Dad shows up for moral support, and even though the doctor says he can't race yet (after his open-heart surgery) he doesn't want to miss the event. It's great to see him walking around!

Nathan Feigion starts the race in 13th place, and the rain has really moved in now. Big puddles are forming and the rain just keeps hammering down. Hydroplaning is a serious problem, with multiple cars spinning on the track due to it. Nathan puts his drifting experience to good use however, and gets us up into 1st place on lap 12. You can see some drivers car very cautious after their car slides, and while we are not be rally drivers, sideways is pretty normal for us. As the rain continues to pound and puddles turn to small lakes, the high horsepower rear-drive cars fall further back and the front-wheel drive cars start to gain an advantage. The extra weight on their front tires and typically narrower tires than ours is allowing them to start catching up. At one point the rain lets up enough that Nathan runs a fantastic 1:35.9 lap!

There's a track here somewhere..

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Lake 10 (formerly known as Turn 10):

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Lucky Dog does their pits slightly differently from ChumpCar, and we are not able to have anyone in the car while fueling. This is the first time we've done a pit stop like this and we are a bit slow. This is the worst weather I've ever tried to race in. It is so sloppy wet out there, and I am really struggling to pass the front-wheel drive cars at times. The "back straight" at PIR is actually turn 9, and when there is this much water it definitely feels more like a turn. The normal racing line is very wet, but off the racing line is so much water that there is severe hydroplaning. Trying to determine how fast is possible on the straight is a little mix of bravery and stupidity. Even though we have the factory defroster on full blast and good wipers, the visibility is atrocious. I have seen cars get written off in various walls at PIR, particularly on the back straight. While I'm trying to go fast, there is definitely the looming danger that the car could be written off if I make the wrong move. The track has a lot of grass around it, and grass does not slow down a race car.

This Camaro was not so lucky and needed a tow.

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I make it through my stint in the car without any incidents (other than a few hydroplaning clean-your-shorts moments) with my fastest lap as a 1:54.0. I turn the car back over to Nathan with us still in 1st, a couple laps ahead of 2nd place, #177 Finally Racing in their E36 BMW. We manage to pit during a very long yellow to clean up an incident, and this fortuitous timing helps us even more.

Nathan puts in another stint filled with hydroplaning, slides and consistent lap times to continue to build on our lead. As long as we can avoid hydroplaning we can really excel out there. Nathan puts in a fastest of a 1:55.3 and turns the car over to me for the final stint on lap 154.

It's still drenched for my last stint, and I put in a 1:54.9 before taking home the checkered flag in 1st place. And to us the craziest part is, by FIVE LAPS! The combination of our balanced car, our drifting experience, and some very fortunate timing for pit stops really paid off.

There was nearly two inches of rain during our race! Here's a quote from the local news:

PORTLAND, Ore. ? A drenching storm took its toll in Portland on Saturday, as nearly two inches of rain over a stretch of 6 hours in the metro area. However, wet as it was, it was not the wettest Halloween ever.

According to the National Weather Service, about 3.69 inches of rain fell in October in Portland. Of that, 1.97 inches fell on Saturday. Normal rainfall for October is 3 inches for the entire month, but the all-time record on Halloween is 2.44 inches - set back in 1994.

After reading these soggy statistics, you might be surprised to learn that October 2015 was actually the warmest October on record, according to KGW Meteorologist Rod Hill.

Driving on the edge of destruction for that many hours is exhausting, so now it's time to go dry up and be ready to do it all over again tomorrow!

Video Overview (only last two stints):

bMh8CNz4SLA

[knate]

LDRL Howl-o-Ween Derby (11/1/15) - 8 hours - Portland International Raceway:

After the deluge on the first day, the second morning the weather is pretty reasonable. It's damp, but at least not a downpour. Today is an 8 hour race, and with 2 hour maximum driving stints that means trying to make it the full two hours to avoid an extra pit stop towards the end. It also means that the pits will be quite crowded at the first pit stop. We are running used Hankook RS3s from they day before, having switched up from our usual Dunlop Direzza Star Specs.

I get in the car first, and start in 16th place at 9am. I get a decent run as there is a mist off of the track and a rainbow forming in the sky. Our buddies in the #177 Finally Racing BMW get taken out int he first corner and we make up a few places. With the mist spraying everywhere and the sun out, visibility gets pretty challenging at times. I make my way up towards the front of the pack, battling with an Acura Integra for 1st place. The track is drying out, and I am able to pick up more speed and move into 1st place. At 11am I pit on the same lap as the #71 Shift Autosport Jetta and #177, who are now behind us in 2nd and 3rd place. My fastest lap was a 1:34.5, good but a far cry from my 1:31.98 record.

When I pull in the pits we don't have any help yet. Nathan and I do a two-man pit stop: fueling, checking oil, and cleaning the windshield. Nathan has a dry track at this point, with cool air and few clouds in the sky. Nathan battles it out with #71 Shift Autosport Jetta for a few laps, maintaining 1st place. At noon Nathan manages to pass #177, putting us a lap up! When Nathan pits at 1pm, we are a lap up on both 2nd and 3rd place. Nathan ran a fastest lap of 1:33.1, nearly a second and a half faster than mine. Our help has arrived, and we have a good clean pit stop. #177 has a slow pit stop, and now they are two laps behind putting Shift Autosport in 2nd.

I go out again, and get quite a bit of good clean laps in. I run a 1:33.4 before the rain sets in a little after 2pm. It rains just long enough to make things slippery, then starts to dry out again. I finish up my session in the damp full of slipping and sliding, and turn the car over to Nathan at 3pm two laps ahead of #177 in 2nd place and 3 laps ahead of Shift Autosport.

When Nathan gets in the car, it's getting quite a bit more wet. It's now extremely slick all the way around, so he spends much of his time drifting and avoiding spun cars. Nathan does a celebration drift out of turn 12 and we finish in 1st two laps ahead of #177 Finally Racing! Our first weekend with Lucky Dog and our first time ever with a double-win in a weekend!

After the race one of the drivers of the #177 BMW said, "In the dry we had a bit more speed than you, and we both struggled when it was really wet, but in the damp your car is a monster!"

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Video Overview:

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[knate]

In January of 2016 I went on a work trip to Europe, and got a chance to go to a very nice museum in Brussels, Belgium. They had a ton of amazing cars there!

Lamborghini Gallardo race car:

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2013 Alfa Romeo Disco Volante Touring Superleggera:

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2015 Lamborghini Veneno (very rare!):

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Maserati MC12:

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Amphibious car:

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Electric car (replica) - First road vehicle faster than 60km/h

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Lancia race car:

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[knate]

I also had been driving a beat up automatic 240SX and the transmission had failed on it. Rather than fix that car, since it was already not in good shape, I decided to put together a new 240SX street car.

I had this chassis which was fairly straight, but it had no engine and had a sunroof. I'm tall, so sunroofs are no good.

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We also had another chassis that we had picked up to make our next race car out of.. but it had a bent/separated frame, so it was sitting there doing nothing. So I stole a piece of it's roof:

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Then I cut the sunroof out out:

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I tacked the new piece on, using my tape/measurements as a reference:

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I also welded in the factory bracing so it would work like factory:

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I smoothed up the welds:

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Then it was time for filler..

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.. and some primer:

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Then fast forward a bunch more hours later.. and some black paint is laid down:

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A little prettying up of the engine:

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And with the car all together and some Hyundai red paint:

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I put in manual belts, bluetooth stereo with mic, Bose stereo system out of a Maxima, etc.. a fairly comfortable street car.

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[knate]

While moving some stuff around.. took a picture of our very cool looking trophies:

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Now that we were racing with Lucky Dog, we had less limitations on what we could do to the car. The rulebook was basically open, but not so much our wallets. So we looked around at what we could do on the cheap. I had a Whiteline sway bar that had been taken off of my car when I put the V8 in it.

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I also had some RS*R "race" springs that had been on my personal 240SX before the coilovers. After installing the Whiteline front bar, we reinstalled the factory rear bar we had disconnected for the rain at the previous race. With McPherson front struts we were looking for a little less body roll (and camber loss). We also picked up a set of our tried-and-true Dunlop Direzza ZIIs and got those mounted up.

We checked our brakes.. nope! No swaps needed.

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LDRL Racecapturing The Ridge (4/23/16) - 7 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

Nathan Feigion starts the race and we are in 39th place. It's random, and OK to be that far back, I'm confident he will move his way forward, there's lots of time. There are also a lot of cars with 49 cars starting the race. It's a bit damp out, but the sun is out and is drying up. The Ridge is a horsepower track, with multiple long acceleration zones, and we are a momentum car. Many of the cars here can run away from us on the straights. Nathan runs a fastest lap of 2:04.9, and gets us all the way up to 6th place by the time he pits.

And the big news of the race, my dad is healed up! Dave heads out on track for the second stint. Dave is warming up to the track and getting used to things again, but he is still consistent enough to get us up into 4th place with a fastest lap of 2:06.1!

I get in the car next and am getting frustrated by so many cars pulling away from us on the straights. It's dry for the first part of the stint, then it starts raining. The Ridge has pretty good drainage and is newer than Portland, so it doesn't get nearly as greasy as Portland does. I just barely edge out Nathan Feigion's laptime with a 2:04.6, but I have gotten us up into 1st place!

Nathan goes out on course (now in 7th after the pit stop), and the heavens have opened and decided to dump out buckets of rain. Visibility is an issue, brake lockup is an issue, and hydroplaning is an issue. Nathan makes his way past a few cars and gets up to 3rd place for a trophy! #177 Finally Racing won the race (with a fastest lap of 2:02) with the #40 SC-YA SC300 getting second place (with a fastest lap of 2:03).

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Video overview:

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[knate]

This very cool car was out there for the weekend. If I remember correctly it was a Porsche 914 converted to single seat.. I believe it may have been a single rotor RX7 engine. While I was very intimidated by how awesome the car looked, but it turned out to be a little slow with a fastest lap of 2:22.

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LDRL Racecapturing The Ridge (4/24/16) - 7 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

Sunday morning we are still wearing Saturday's shoes (Direzza ZII) and haven't touched anything else on the car. It's so nice to not have to mess with the brakes! I start the race in 19th place on a dry track. I'm again frustrated by seemingly every car's ability to disappear from us on the straights, but we can make up enough time in the corners that our lap times are competitive (well, if ~3 seconds off of the fastest lap of the day is competitive). With a very busy track I get us up to 6th place with a fastest of 2:03.5 and turn the car over to my dad.

Dave gets ready to go out on track, and *just* misses getting out before the pace truck and a very slow lap. Oh well, you win some and you lose some. And here we basically just lost a lap. This knocks us all the way back to 25th place. It's a long race.. we can make it up. Dave continues through the dry track, eventually getting us back up to 6th with a fastest lap of 2:06.4.

Nathan Feigion is in the car next, and after a couple days of hard driving on them.. the Direzzas are getting greasy. Nathan is really trying to manage the traction, but these tires are pretty toast. Nathan has made his way all the way up to 2nd place with a 2:01.3, it's looking like we may be able to get another podium! Nathan has caught up quickly to the #3 Rainbow Unicorn E30 BMW, and they recognize us as a faster car. They point Nathan by on the straight.. but stay in the throttle. And they start slowly walking away. We really need some horsepower here! Rainbow Unicorn is now entering the fastest corner of the track (corner 1) while watching his mirrors to see if Nathan is going to come by him. Rainbow Unicorn brakes for the corner and Nathan looks to the inside to pass in the corner, just as Rainbow Unicorn locks up the rear brakes and spins directly in front of Nathan!

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With the spin happening directly in front of Nathan, he is unable to avoid and contacts the BMW. The right front tire gets cut and goes flat, and Nathan pulls into the pits. We swap the tire to a Hankook RS3, and I get in the car to head out on track. As soon as I move forward, I hear something strange. It sounds like something is grinding, so my assumption is something is bent and rubbing in the right front. We can't see anything, so I head out on track.

We are in 6th place with a little under two hours remaining. I can still hear some kind of rubbing happening, but the car is still fast and nothing feels wrong. I'm trying to make up places when I get hit with The Meatball. The Meatball is a black flag with an orange circle, which means something is wrong with the car. They tell us there is a brake problem of some sort. Back in the pits, we find that the left rear brake caliper had come loose, and was dragging on the wheel. It was still gripping on the rotor, just partially off of it. While we are in the pits we swap out the rest of our mismatched tires, so I am now running on the Hankook RS3s. I get back out on track in a disappointing 17th, and now my goal is to see what kind of lap time I can pull off with the used RS3s. We finish the race in 13th, and I get my lap time down to a 2:01.8. Still not quite enough to beat Nathan! I'll blame it on the RS3s being old and the bad aerodynamics from the smashed bumper, it can't be my driving!

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This was the race that fully finalized in our minds.. we needed more horsepower. There's a lot of options out there to gain horsepower though... decisions, decisions!

Video Overview:

AdIWCLleq2s

[knate]

We started looking into options for increasing power on our car. One of the major considerations was that we wanted to run Lucky Dog as well as ChumpCar, which meant we didn't want to increase power too much or would have a bunch of penalty laps tacked on with ChumpCar.

1. Turbo the KA24DE

Pros: Nathan Feigion was making of 400whp out of a turbo KA, we have experience with turbos

Cons: Engine bay heat is a constant problem cooking anything and everything, transmissions don't really like turbo KAs

2. Lexus 1UZ-FE V8

Pros: Able to be mated to KA24DE transmission, shown to be successful solution in 240SX, relatively cheap engine

Cons: After a team was blatantly cheating with this engine it looked like ChumpCar was going to put a hefty penalty on running this, too much fuel consumption for factory tank

3. VQ35DE from 350Z

Pros: Great engine, plenty of power

Cons: Would be a huge pile of penalty laps, too much fuel consumption for factory tank, expensive

4. VQ30DE from Maxima

Pros: Very reliable engines (many well over 200k miles), cheap/easy to find, just enough power without causing penalty laps with ChumpCar, fuel consumption probably OK for factory tank

Cons: Front-wheel drive only, uncommon swap

After some deliberation, we decided the best option was to go for the VQ30DE from the Maxima. It's a newer design engine compared to the KA24DE, makes just enough horsepower we don't get into big penalty lap issues, yet should still give us a big enough gain to be worth it. A good VQ30DE should make 190-200whp, and the average KA24DE makes 120-125whp so we were looking at nearly a 75 horse gain. That should keep those BMWs in range!

The first step, was to find as complete of an engine as we could. Piecing things together gets expensive fast. We started looking for donor cars, and stumbled on a great find. We picked up this 2001 Maxima for $100. It started and ran, but sounded a little rattly in the midrange (potential bearing issue). However it had the ecu, wiring, key, gauge cluster.. all the things we needed to make an engine run.

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I stole the seatbelts and Bose soundsystem from the car and put it in the street 240SX. I've already more than made up the $100! We then picked up a low mileage manual engine with the flywheel/clutch for $450:

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Turning the engine sideways meant turning it into a baby 350Z engine. We picked up the transmission (most expensive part of the swap at $675), 350Z exhaust manifolds ($40), and a 350Z oil pan ($100)/starter ($50) for the purpose of turning the front-wheel drive engine to rear-drive. One question we had during this project was, "Would it sound like a Maxima or a 350Z?" It was basically going to be a 3 liter 350Z engine, but is it the exhaust manifolds that give the Z it's distinct sound? Or the variable cam timing that we wouldn't have?

Our low-mileage junkyard engine looked nice and clean inside:

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One of the first obvious issues we would run into, was the intake manifold. Rotating the engine to RWD would put the throttle in the firewall. We played with the idea of flipping the entire manifold 180 degrees, but the one valve cover is shorter than the other and this just wouldn't fit.

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This plastic manifold is the main reason why this engine makes 222hp and the older model made 190hp, so I want to use it. It has a very trick variable length runner design. Nissan calls it VIAS, Variable Induction Air Control System. Basically it's a short runner/long runner setup, and the short runners are normally blocked off until around 5200 rpm. This way the engine can make good torque as well as good top end power.

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The "power valve":

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My idea for getting everything to fit... was to cut everything up, flipping some things around.. and fitting it all back up again.

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At the same time we got to work trying to mock up the engine/transmission in a donor chassis. Since Blue Bayou was working, we didn't want to touch it until we had some of these details worked out in case we didn't get this done before we wanted to race. The first things we discovered, was that the sway bar and steering shaft would both be tight:

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We also needed the coolant hoses to be at the front of the engine, so we picked up a Pathfinder coolant piece. It has a thermostat for the block, something the Maxima also had.

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Mocking up how the intake would sit together:

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I beveled the edges of the manifold (fiber-filled Dupont 66 nylon) and made some brackets to hold it together.

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Then my first pass was just with a soldering gun, melting the two together.

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Then I started laying in some filler material, and as luck would have it, the Harbor Freight zip ties I bought were made of Dupont 66 nylon as well.

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With a little porting, I actually had a straighter shot into the manifold than the factory setup had.

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After getting it together and cleaned up, I was really happy with how it was looking:

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We also picked up a 350Z manifold and toyed with the idea of using that, but we decided we would wait for the dyno to decide which manifold was better. I assumed the torque out of the VIAS manifold would win, while the horsepower may be a tie.

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For the back of the engine we were going to run the Maxima flywheel, since it has a unique pattern that is different from the 350Z flyweel. However the 350Z flywheel/clutch is significantly thicker than the Maxima setup, so we spaced the flywheel out by putting the automatic flexplate spacer behind the flywheel (~1/8" thick).

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This also meant the starter moves in relation to the flywheel, along with the fact that the 350Z and Maxima flywheels are slightly different diameter. We found the perfect mesh for the starter gear, and found where that needed to be spaced and positioned. We then greased the starter and filled the area in with JB Weld so that the position would be repeatable and then popped the starter back out.

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We also needed to space the throwout bearing closer to the clutch by around a half inch, so we lathed up a spacer and extended the throwout bearing holder:

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Then after determining the spacing we needed, we added the large washers to push the throwout bearing out:

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For the radiator I was looking for a factory option. We needed inlet lower left and outlet upper right, which is different than factory. After researching a bunch of different Nissan radiators, I found the 1995 Infiniti G20 radiator was what we were looking for.

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The radiator dropped right into the factory mounts and had the hose points where we needed them, and wasn't too tall (like most of the options I looked at).

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For motor mounts we bought a generic LS1 mount kit, then hacked them up. Since the engine is normally front-wheel drive, the plates to bolt to the engine were very different.

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After a little optimizing/painting:

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The transmission mount was a GM poly trans mount grafted into the factory cross member:

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To help solve the steering issue, we shortened the steering knuckle:

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The final piece was rotating the steering rack backwards, which required modifying one of the mounts:

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The shifter was too far backwards, so the aluminum bracket was cut off and shortened. This also means the shaft for shifting was shortened.

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We picked up an aluminum conversion driveshaft, which looks nice and pretty in there.

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To give room for the coolant pipes on the left side of the engine, we made a custom bracket to rotate the alternator down. We figured moving the weight down was a good thing, and it just fit better. We needed to measure and track down a shorter belt after this though.

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At this point everything was mocked up in the other chassis, and it was time to get to work on Blue Bayou. The first thing we wanted to do, was to get a pre-dyno with the four cylinder. With our bets ranging from 120whp to 125whp.. we made a whopping 161whp! Our first thoughts were that the dyno was optimistic, but the operator said that most 240SXes put down around 125 on this dyno. This was a fresh factory style build, with some custom porting, a header, and an intake. Factory cams, etc. So on the one hand, that's a great number. On the other hand.. that means our V6 might only be a 30whp gain..

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Our 161whp KA24DE freshly yanked out of the car:

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Our VQ30DE setup ready to go in. I don't remember exact numbers any more, but we were hoping this all aluminum setup would be lighter than the iron-block 4 cylinder, but we gained at least 25 lbs, mostly due to the transmission.

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With a little plasma work, the shifter was in place:

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Resting in it's mounts:

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The exhaust we built as equal length as we could, using a 2" to 2.5" Flowmaster collector:

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We picked up some swaybar spacers, as our swaybar would contact the oil pan under compression if we didn't..

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[knate]

And then there was some wiring.. the 240SX has a speed sensor in the transmission, but the 350Z has it in the differential. Since we had a 350Z trans and 240SX diff, we had no speed sensor at all. I already had built a unit that was reading data from our DL1 datalogger, so I figured I might as well use the GPS speed from that to drive the speedometer. This was my proof of concept showing I could drive the speedometer using an Arduino (and a circuit to help translate voltages from 0-5v to -5v to +5v)

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I discovered a chip in the ECU (car computer) used for idle had fried. Apparently this is a common issue with the Maximas relating to leaking active engine mounts. I picked up another ECU/key from an Infinity J30. The key itself I ziptied into the antenna that sits around the lock and wired the immobilizer into the ECU as it expects. This way I was able to get around the anti-theft (NATS) and get the car to start.

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Then I discovered I had completely miscalculated my room for the throttle, and there was no room for the idle control motor anyway, so I had to make a blank plate:

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Then I got even deeper with the wiring.. and it's looking like a bit of a mess at this point:

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The 350Z oil pan does not have a provision to hold the crank sensor position sensor for the Maxima, so we need to make a custom one. We checked the gap on the other engine, and the sensor runs very close! Here you can see us setting it up with feeler gauges. It got another bracket on the right side.

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It's close!

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This is what the engine looked like when we first fired it, but it started!

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This is what it looked like when we were bleeding the coolant:

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One thing that I never figured out, was that the VIAS system would not activate. I don't know if it was from the many check engine codes that were tripped or something else, but the ECU would not trigger it. I just got an RPM switch from Summit and used that instead. In our videos you can see the blue light kick on at 5200rpm where I had it set to trigger the VIAS.

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The intake manifold required a little "clearancing" of the hood:

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We also finally swapped our brake pads after putting over 50 hours of racing on the Raybestos ST43s! As you can see they are tapering, but not nearly used up. New pads are so thick!

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And our car was ready to race again!

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Video overview of the V6 swap below. You will hear in the video at the end, it does sound like a baby 350Z engine!

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[knate]

So for my engine swap impressions.. it is quite a bit of work to turn the front-wheel drive setup to rear-drive, and mostly makes sense for horsepower or dollar limited series of racing. For the money it's a decent upgrade, but having a 400whp V8 240sx, I was slightly underwhelmed by the 190-200whp car. It's certainly smoother than before, and the power pulls all the way to redline with no noticeable dropoff in torque towards redline. The KA24DE drops off hard enough that it was pointless to run to redline.

We sadly never did put this engine on the dyno, as I was a little depressed by some of the lack of gains. This dyno below is NOT our car, but the same engine type to show the general powerband. In this example you can see between 5000rpm and redline, it only drops about 20 ft-lbs of torque. At redline it's still making more torque than our KA24DE ever did. Our KA24DE drops roughly 50 ft-lbs in the same span, giving a very noticeable lack of pull up top.

Our old KA24DE dyno (note the torque dropoff, power peaks at 5500rpm):

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VQ30DEK dyno (NOT our car, just an example, but power peaks at redline):

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We decided to experiment with running no manual steering. It saved some time and a little weight, and we figured it was worth experimenting with. While obviously the steering was heavier, it wasn't too bad catching a slide.

One of the most striking things I noticed up front, is that with the combination of the new trans and stock differential, the gearing is much shorter. So now everything was a gear higher. Definitely a little mental gymnastics.. only downshifting into 4th for the chicane feels very weird! I am also used to being able to shift by sound and feel, and with this engine I can't feel the drop off in torque to know when to shift, and I'm not used to the sound. So occasionally I bump the rev limiter, which hits pretty hard since it's still pulling at redline.

Another thing I noticed was that once I was in 6th gear, there was quite a bit of driveline vibration. The driveline is going pretty significantly fast at this point, but this was not expected. We tried doing various tricks on the lift like using a band clamp rotated to different positions to see if we could affect it, but we only seemed to be able to make it worse. Eventually we shipped back the driveline to be checked out, and they sent us another one. This one still did it, although not quite as much. Oh well, hopefully it doesn't wipe out any bearings.

Unfortunately my GPS to speedo connection did not work out. Once I had the Arduino reading and translating all the information from the datalogger, it wasn't fast enough to still do the pulsing for the speedometer.

Here's some of my first laps from the track day getting a feel for the car:

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To compare my fastest laps with the 4-cylinder and 6-cylinder, I was hitting just 3mph faster on both the front and back straights. Lap time difference was a 1:31.61 versus my old fastest of a 1:31.98. The car made cooler noises and felt better, but it was certainly not nearly the bump up we thought it was going to be when we had such a freak 4-cylinder to begin with.

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So after all this work, we are *slightly* faster. The real kick in the gut is that while we've been working on getting this engine in, ChumpCar pulls out of the West Coast. So the race series that got us to consider doing this engine instead of the 350Z engine is now out of the picture. Oops. Would I do it again? Only for certain rules/reasons. The VQ30 in a street car would work out really well, it's bulletproof and gets mileage as good as the KA24DE while making more power and sounding better.

One thing with our old KAs, is that our first three engines burned oil. We were used to having to add oil at every pit stop, and only our last engine did not burn oil. We also got 37 hours, 50 hours, and 49.5 hours out of the first three engines (this one pulled due to burning too much oil even after rebuilding the head). Our last engine was the best and still going strong when we pulled it out at 83 hours. Our VQ has fantastic compression and doesn't burn any oil, so hopefully we get a lot of hours out of this one!

[knate]

We hadn't raced in a year, and showed up to tech on Friday. Even though we are bringing a little more firepower, we start thinking that maybe we brought a knife to a gunfight. In addition to the usual suspects, there are some very rowdy sounding cars. There is a Corvette with the 1994 ZR1 OHV engine and various other cammed V8s that make us real nervous.

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While waiting in line for tech, I am by myself while Nathan and Dave are doing the gear check. I need to move the car forward, and now the car which had started faithfully since the first try was not wanting to start. The car would crank, but just wouldn't fire.

By now a few people from other teams start taunting: "What a pile! Failed in the tech line, one less car to beat tomorrow! Hahaha!" I don't say anything.. but they are really ticking me off. It's bad enough to put that many hours into the car and have it start failing. I'm thinking, "Oh you just wait for tomorrow." I finally get the car to fire and make it through tech. I try to look into why the car hadn't started and find a failed code for the anti-theft system. I clear the code but I'm not able to find any smoking guns as to why it had happened. The wiring all seems OK as well as the key is ziptied directly touching the antenna. Well, hopefully it holds up.. it's been working fine.

First Race with the V6 (7/22/17) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

During qualifying our first gremlin pops up. The tach starts dropping out. The car is running fine, but it's difficult to tell when to shift since the torque doesn't drop off with no tach or speedometer.

Nathan Feigion starts the race, having to learn new shift points with completely new gearing. It's a massive field, and we start 20th place out of 78 cars! The sun is shining and it's dry but not too hot out. I start to feel a whole lot better with the previous day's taunting as Nathan is moving up through the field. That Corvette I was worried about.. is just not nearly as fast as I think it should be. By the time Nathan pits, he has made it all the way to 2nd place! We are behind Dimsum Racing, a 240Z with a Honda J30 engine. Nathan ran a lap time of 1:31.3, faster than what I ran on the practice day.

I get in the car, and it doesn't want to start. Crap! Quick.. need to do something smart here. I theorize there may be too much voltage draw since the car doesn't want to start and the tach doesn't want to work. I ask my dad to unplug a few accessories on the right side of the car. It works! The car fires up and I have a tach again! We lost about a minute, so not too terrible. We can make it up. And once I make it out on track.. the tach drops out again. I have a rare off with the car where I try to catch a slide and fail. I'm used to power steering in my drift car where I can flick the wheel, and I am too slow with my countersteer and go off track. Luckily with dry grass it is no harm done and I make it right back on track. On lap 71 a full course yellow comes out. Now normally if they bring out the pace truck it picks up the 1st place car. Occasionally that doesn't happen, and that was the case here. The pace truck just missed the leader, so they pick us up. Well that is unfortunate.. that means the leader basically got a free lap around behind us now. Eventually I make it around and I'm behind Dimsum racing. It's kind of funny, both Nissan/Datsun cars, with 3.0 liter fwd V6s moved to rear drive.

I finally get by him, and now we are in 1st place! I run a fastest lap of 1:33.0, which is well off of Nathan Feigion's pace. What is my excuse this time? Let's see.. I'll go with tires. It can't simply be that he's a better driver! Nathan must have used the last of the RS3s very long life, as we've put around 18 hours of racing on these tires at this point!

After our pit stop Dimsum is now back into 1st place, and Dave is in the car. It is busy out there with 78 cars on the track! Dimsum pits on lap 163 and Dave pits on lap 175 so Dave is in first when he pits, but Dimsum gets us back.

Nathan jumps in for his second stint in the car, and is in 2nd place chasing Dimsum. As the race is winding down, we still have not made it past Dimsum. We think we are going to have to settle for 2nd place, when Dimsum has to pull in the pits for a mechanical issue! This puts us in first and we have now won three Portland races in a row! Nathan ran a fastest lap of 1:32.9 in the last session, so these tires are just done. Tomorrow we will try the Hankook RS4 for the first time!

Video Overview:

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[knate]

Trying Some New Tires (7/23/17) - 8 hours - Portland International Raceway:

Today we finally retired our well-worn Hankook RS3s and put on some nice new Hankook RS4s. It is an even hour race, which means pit stops every two hours for all that are able to make it that long. It means there is less margin for error and less ability to strategically pit where there is a yellow, the window is very small. With some attrition from the first day, we were down to 69 cars for this race, which is still a large field. Our tach is still not working, and I am first out in the car. At the beginning of the race we realize that the camera is not charging.. and I forgot to charge the GoPro last night. Ok, no morning footage.

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The sun is out and the weather is perfect, and I start from 12th place. The tires feel better than the RS3s, there is definitely a stiffer sidewall. I'm not sure the rubber compound is much different though, as my fastest lap was 1:32.2 as I get us up to 3rd place.

My dad is in the car next, he runs a 1:35.0 and slips back to 5th place. The teams ahead of us at this point are Son of Andre (light V8 Mustang), Race Invaders (Ecotec-swapped Miata), Scrap Attack (Honda Civic), and Dimsum Racing (V6 240Z).

I get in the car at the next pit stop, and the car does not want to start. I then shut off all the accessories (including dataloggers), thinking that will help. The car still won't start, and I try turning on the DL1, and the car immediately fires. Is that a clue to what is going on? Or is this random?

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I get out on course and I'm chasing Dimsum Racing. I keep getting hung up in traffic as the very expertly piloted 240Z keeps disappearing. A little while later I am in turn 6, trying to eek every last bit of traction out of the car.. and the Race Invaders Miata just drives around me on the outside. They have a wing, and suddenly I'm jealous. I can definitely see the advantage they have cornering, I may have to look into aero a little more seriously! Due to our issues in the pits, we are a lap down on the leader Dimsum Racing. On a yellow flag restart they are just one car ahead of me. The green flag drops and they are off like a rabbit! I chase them down in the corners however with a few years of technology in the suspension between the 70's 240Z and 90's 240SX. After a lap I make it around them, and now I need to put another whole lap on them to get the lead. I don't have a chance to make up the whole lap before I need to come in.

Nathan Feigion gets in the car next, and thankfully it actually starts in the pits. Dimsum has their fastest driver in their car, and.. as much as I hate to say it, so do we! Nathan is pushing the car hard, and he is getting close to Dimsum. There are very few yellows, and Nathan is putting in a lot of quick laps. With 15 minutes to go, Nathan starts running out of fuel. When trying to rev match for the chicane, enough fuel is leaving the pickup that the car is stumbling and not reving up quickly enough. The factory S13 240SX tank is fantastic for a factory tank, but it is just *barely* big enough for our 200 horsepower. Amazingly this engine doesn't really use any more fuel than the 4-cylinder that it replaced. Technology is great! Dimsum gets called in for a black flag which gives us 1st place, and we get *very* lucky that there is an incident and the last two laps are completed under caution. Multiple cars were running out of fuel, and amazingly we limped all the way to the finish line and won the race!

Now we have a lot of work to do before our next race. While we managed to win both days with manual steering, I ended up with a blister on my palm from 6 hours of racing in the heat and manual steering. So power steering is up next on the mod list. Figuring out what is going on with the electrical system is also very high on the priority list now!

Video overview!

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[knate]

For our steering rack setup, we just put the hydraulic pump on, ran a 89-90 240SX power steering line (to match the side the pump is on), and then put our old hydraulic ran in. Filled it with fluid, bled the air, and were good to go.

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After driving on various spring/shock combinations, it was time for a real suspension setup. We decided to go for a Koni race shock coilover setup, as well as moving to aluminum rear spindles from the 300ZX. Changing the spindles meant going from a bushing on the shock to a fork style mount. We took some very cheap coilovers I picked up locally, and changed from stock to fork style.

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After getting the rear coilovers together with 8611 (single adjustable) Koni shocks in them, this is what they looked like:

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The fronts still had the same style mounting, so they were a little more straightforward. They are an 8612 (double-adjustable) Koni shock.

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After we got the suspension together, we put the car on scales for the first time. This was with driver in place, and some weight simulating the cool suit cooler, and I believe around a quarter tank of fuel. A little heavy up front, but good cross-weights.

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Our next race was at Oregon Raceway Park, and we had never been there before. There was some serious forest fires going on, so the morning of us driving there you can see a very red sun and a lot of haze.

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We showed up on a Friday to get some practice in. ORP is a unique track in that it is designed to be driven in either direction. So for the practice day we ran clockwise in the morning, and counter-clockwise in the afternoon. Our "track walk" was taking vehicles from corner to corner and stopping to talk about the track, and there was ash floating all over the place during this.

As the driver with perhaps the most sensitive butt, we sent out Nathan Feigion to feel out the suspension. We have no experience with multi-adjustable shocks.. just our single-adjustable drift cars where we've just kind of settled into "the middle" because the low end is definitely underdamped and the high end feels too stiff. Nathan went out, asked for more damping, we gave a little more, he tried again, and after a couple of iterations said, "I think that feels pretty good". And that was it. Our car was "pretty good" and ready to go.

The track is a blast! It is draped over the hills of Grass Valley, Oregon. There is constant elevation and camber change throughout the track. I had been playing with the track in a sim previously, but one thing I didn't feel the sim captured very well was how different the braking was. Coming to turn one the track drops out from under you, which suddenly reduces available braking. The in the braking zone for turn 3, the track goes up giving a sudden increase in braking traction. There are definitely a lot more layers of complexity than I was used to, as most of my laps have been at Portland where it is dead flat.

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Feeling pretty good and ready for some rest, we headed back to our motel for the night.

[knate]

A New Track! (9/16/17) - 9 hours - Oregon Raceway Park Clockwise:

Driving to the track the sky has cleared a bit compared to Friday.

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During the practice day we dialed our shocks in as much as we knew how (go out, feel it out, stiffen it, try again) and the car was working well. However with most of the other teams having experience at this track we know it's going to be an uphill battle.

Nathan Feigion is in the car first, and he starts in 9th place. He is doing great and runs a 2:01.0 lap time, which was around our target of where we were hoping to get to. Unfortunately he also has a rare miss, and is called in for passing under yellow. This knocks us from 6th place all the way down to 13th place. Nathan is able to claw most of that back, and on lap 46 he pits with us in 7th place. He tells me that he's smelling gas fumes in the car. We take a look during the pit stop, but there is nothing obviously wrong.

I go out in the car next and while I'm not as fast as Nathan, I am entertained and challenged by all the nuances of the elevation change. The braking grip varies in parts of the track. On the front straight stretch the track drops out from under you while you are braking, so you need to compensate for that and brake just a touch earlier. Going into turn 3, the track rises up which really increases the traction. So in that corner you start braking with medium force, but can really ramp it up when the car crams into the uphill. I notice the gas fumes, but they don't seem to be that bad. I make it all the way up to 3rd place (mostly because of cars cycling into the pits) with a fastest lap of 2:02.6.

Dave is in the car next. He spends his session bouncing around 5th and 6th place. He runs a fastest of 2:08.2 and pits on lap 140.

Nathan Feigion is back in the car for his second stint. It's a long race! He gets us solidly up into 5th place during his stint, spending most of the time there. With all the twists and turns of the track, it can be a little tricky to pass a car with more horsepower, especially if they are trying to hold you behind in turns. Nathan reports his frustration with a car that seems to be trying to block any attempt to pass in the corners, but then can run away every time there is an acceleration zone. Apparently our little V6 just isn't enough. Nathan avoids the red mist and finally gets by the car many laps later. On lap 180 he pulls into the pits, having just gotten us up to 4th place and running a 2:01.2.

I go out for the last stint, and while we drop to 8th for a few laps due to the pits, by the time all cars have done their last pit stop we are solidly in 5th place. The gas fumes are worse than earlier in the day, but I am able to manage it. I run a fastest lap of 2:02.9 and bring the car home for a 5th place finish on lap 233! After 536 miles of racing on an unfamiliar track, we got 5th!

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We do have some work to do before the next day however. We were getting some clunks from the suspension as well as the gas fumes. For the suspension we find one of our locking rings has backed off, so we add a dab of Loctite to it and crank it down.

With the suspension sorted, we turn to the gas issue. We can see that gas has leaked down the filler neck and onto the tank. Is the cap leaking? We have a spare gas cap, so we swap out the cap. We are also concerned about the vent itself. We try putting some air backwards through the vent, and it seems to flow fine. We try extending the vent hose and tucking it as high as we can in the quarter panel. We also taped all the seams of the trunk and tried to tape up any holes near the gas filler.

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We also re-purpose our rain diverter we have on our driver side window to try to pull fresh air into the car.

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We head to the hotel concerned that we may not have found the root cause of the gas fumes issue, but hopeful that we can do better than 5th the next day.

A New Track.. Again! (9/16/17) - 6 hours - Oregon Raceway Park Counter-Clockwise:

It's a new day and a new direction of track. Typically tracks are designed to only run one direction, but Oregon Raceway Park is one of the rare tracks that can safely be ran either way. I get in the car first and I start 12th. Right before the race I had talked to Thomas Micich who was driving a Lexus SC300. He said, "Follow me up to the front!" When the green dropped, he slid to the inside and started charging past cars. I miscalculated my gap to him and was not close enough. By the time we got to the first corner I had made up five places, but there were now cars separating us. As I start putting in laps, I radio back to the pits that everything seems fine with the gas fumes, maybe we had fixed it!

However a couple laps later.. I start to get a whiff of gas. Well crap. The gas fumes start to get worse, and I'm having to wipe the tears out of my eyes. I turn on full blast (its only setting), hoping that it will put some positive pressure in the car and help push the fumes out. No such luck. As I am now very distracted by the gas fumes, I now start getting passed by some cars that I had been able to hold off. Am I high on gas fumes? This is a new direction of track so I don't have a great reference of lap times, but my fastest is a 2:03. Is counter-clockwise supposed to be faster or slower? Another car passes me. If I pull in the pits, I don't know what to do with the car at this point, we tried to do what we could come up with last night. Another car passes me. Is my driving degrading? Or is there something wrong with the car? It feels like it's not quite accelerating like I expect it to. Do I hear a misfire? I make a mistake and drop a couple tires into the rocks and dirt. Ok, I'm now convinced that I'm both affected by gas fumes as well as I definitely can hear a misfire. It's time to pull in the pits.

When I get out of the car I head over to the restrooms. When I look at my face in the mirror, I am baffled by what I see. There are white stripes going from my eyes to my ears. I have never seen anything like this. As I stare at my own face, looking like Tonto with war paint, it suddenly hits me. The white stripes are salt stains from my evaporated tears! Wow, I did not realize my eyes were watering that badly. I wash my face and head back outside.

We start troubleshooting the misfire. We find that when we disable cylinder #5, nothing happens. Ok, we found our dead cylinder. We check spark, it has spark. The fuel injectors are freshly rebuilt so it shouldn't be those, right? We ohm the fuel injectors, they are all similar. Ok, at least not a broken coil on an injector. We try removing the upper manifold to see if the injectors are firing. Looking down into the lower manifold.. the fuel injector is squirting fuel. Wait, what? So that cylinder has fuel and spark, but is still not firing right? We try swapping spark plugs around with another cylinder, no change. We try moving the #5 fuel injector.. and the problem moves with the injector. I guess it must be too little fuel, even though it is firing. We have 12 fuel injectors.. on the table.. at home 126 miles away. Well, I guess that's like not bringing the umbrella because it's not *supposed* to rain.

Dave decides he wants to get some practice in the counter-clockwise setup, so we take off the trunk hoping the interior will get some more airflow. Now that we know the problem with the engine, we unplug the bad fuel injector so that the cylinder won't be firing lean. Dave heads out on track.. but he is getting swarmed by faster cars. A combination of being unfamiliar with the track and being down on power is not good. He gets us up from 47th place to 46th place, but pulls the plug after we had put in just 35 laps for the day.

Not the most successful weekend we have had, but ORP is definitely a blast! We will be back one of these days to try to redeem ourselves.

Video overview of the weekend:

paPpi7zcX7c

[Bluejayde]

Maybe I'm old, but I enjoy your writeups even more than the videos. Keep it up!

[knate]

Maybe I'm old, but I enjoy your writeups even more than the videos. Keep it up!

Great, thanks! What do you guys think of narrating over it like this versus the normal videos?

[knate]

Addressing the Gas Fumes

Our first priority after all the gas fumes was to figure out what had happened. We dropped the fuel tank and started checking things out. This is a familiar sight for most people that have tracked a 240SX, the tank inner baffling broken loose. We found that this had bounced around and pulled off the vent tube internally. We thought maybe the vent hanging down in the gas might have caused it to push gas out of the tube during cornering. And maybe once enough gas was in the tube, the tank wasn't venting properly and pushed out of the cap? It didn't quite make sense, but at least was a direction.

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It's never fun getting this baffle out of the tank, it usually involves mangling it with pliers until it fits out the hole.

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We also hooked up a check valve and two small fuel filters to try to make sure fuel was not able to make it out of our vent.

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While we had the tank out, we discovered some soot marks on the tank, and tracked down that our muffler was leaking. It wasn't quite this open until we started cutting, but the hot exhaust on our gas tank was building pressure faster than the vent was releasing, which opened the safety valve in the gas cap. The combination of raw gas making it out as well as the constant venting of vapors was what made our last race so horrible.

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You can see the top of the muffler was letting go as well.

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This is what we picked up to replace it.

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We also put some heat shielding on the gas tank, all of these together should solve our issue!

Aerodynamics

Next up to make our car faster was to take care of my wing jealousy. Adding some kind of aerodynamics to the car had been on the "To-do" list ever since the very first race.. but we were finally doing it. My goal was to generate as much efficient downforce as I could with a very limited budget. Wanting to avoid drag scratched a spoiler, and while I looked very long and hard at getting a profile cut from foam and laying fiberglass on it myself, I just didn't have the time. I found some decent reviews of the "NRG" style carbon fiber 3d wing. It looked like an OK profile and people were saying that with just the wing they were getting high speed understeer, so I figured it must be doing something. I really wanted it to be mounted strong enough that I could move the car around by the wing and it not be flexing around.

I decided to try mount to the chassis, and the logical point was through the bolts in the rear frame rails that hold the rear bumper.

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I took the aluminum bumper from our engine donor Maxima and hacked it in half to use as the vertical supports. Then I made some steel plates that would pass through the trunk. To try get some clean air, we mounted the wing about the same height as the roof.

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While this isn't all bolted together, you can see the bracket going down into the frame rail as well as the small bracket going back to the tail light area.

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The next thing I was trying to work out was how to cut the little slices in the trunk at precisely the right spot. I couldn't put the trunk on with the brackets on, and I didn't want to have any more cut than I had to. This is where Nathan came up with a brilliant idea to use a laser projector.

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I lined up the line exactly with the bracket while it was bolted in, then took the bracket off, laid the trunk on it, and the laser line was exactly where I needed to cut the trunk!

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We opened them up until we could slide the trunk on, and there it is!

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However after some tugging on the wing supports, there was still just a little bit of flexing. I put together a little aluminum structure tying into the strut towers, and now I could pull the car around without seeing any flexing.

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These kinds of pictures can be hard to find online, so here is the profile of the NRG wing. The trailing edge is pretty blunt, but this is an OK wing shape. There is a pretty drastic difference in the middle and ends for Angle of Attack, but they don't make a constant chord version of the wing so I'll live with it. If I set the middle to a pretty reasonable angle the ends are likely not stalling.

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The end plates that the wing comes with are small and incredibly thick. I picked up some carbon fiber sheet to make my own.

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After reading around for a few hours, I settled on this shape. The most important piece is that they extend down further than the originals, and are larger which should help the wing be a little more efficient and make more downforce.

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I really like how it came out, and it looks like it should do something!

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Now if I didn't want to understeer like crazy.. the next step was to try balance it out. I picked up some 3/8" birch plywood and we cut out a rough shape.

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We tried to extend as far back as we could, which ended up making sense to end at the subframe for mounting.

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We also discovered that our sway bar and oil pan were a bit too low for the height we wanted to run the splitter.

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We built an aluminum frame to attach to the frame rails as well as the subframe.

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Again using an aluminum bumper from the engine-donor Maxima, we made some brackets for supporting the splitter. You can also kind of see that we used a router to round the edge of the splitter.

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Bumper brackets with supports finished.

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I had also read to treat a splitter as a consumable, so we made a second copy and primered them both.

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After painting black and attaching our brackets, it was getting close.

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We mounted it on the car and it had no problem supporting the weight of one Nathan! After this we added some plastic to the front to seal off the area between the bumper and the splitter.

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Our swap bar we had previously relocated with brackets, but that rotated it down and in the way. To get around this, we bought the Sikky sway bar, which has plenty of clearance for the engine in the factory position.

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Here are some shots of the car ready to rock!

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[knate]

Data

One thing had been troubleshooting after our first race with the V6 was with the tach dropping out. While during the race I just unplugged as many accessories as I could thinking we had a voltage problem, what I discovered was that it was actually an issue with the datalogger. The tach signal from the computer was being drawn down by the datalogger and the signal would go low enough the tach wouldn't recognize it any more. The rpm switch still worked and the datalogger was logging the RPM, but the tach was more important than the datalogger. Due to this problem, I decided to remove the tach signal from the datalogger when we went to ORP. There was also a datalogger I had been interested in that better real-time feedback called Race Capture. I finally decided to pull the trigger and pick up a Race Capture system and got that wired in.

Major pros for the Race Capture system are the ability to connect to a tablet for data display (expensive option for most loggers) as well as the ability to do telemetry (not even an option for most systems). I had previously been using a Race Technology DL1, which is a great unit with very comprehensive analysis software. Unfortunately with the DL1 it feels like everything is nickel and dimed. You want to use the general purpose output pins? Need to pay to unlock. Want to sync video? Need to pay for a license. Want to use the second built-in serial port? Need to pay to unlock it.

Data is so incredibly useful, I really feel it is one of the reasons we were able to go from a new team placing 28th our first time out, to winning races. If you have someone fast on your team, you can compare laps and see what they are doing that makes them faster. If you get a chance to have some local hot shoe or pro driver, that is the ideal to see what the car is capable of and what you are leaving on the table. I saw Randy Pobst drove a 240SX at Daytona in an endurance race.. one day I hope to get him in this car.

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Another thing I didn't mention before, is I had finally figured out our issue with the car not starting. While I had ziptied the key directly to the side of the antenna, it needed to be centered. Once I shimmed it into the center of the antenna, I have never had an issue with the NATS (Nissan Anti-Theft System) again.

The First Race with Aero (7/7/2018) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

The weather was looking glorious for our July race. Not too hot, but clear and dry. We were pitted next to this amazing looking Mustang with hand-made fenders! Lots of horsepower, but a very unfortunate choice of tire (no grip).

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We went out for qualifying, feeling the car out. The power steering is a little light for my tastes, but it does it's job. Our brakes feel a little soft, but they always have after putting the Wilwood calipers up front (more fluid to push). We qualify in the fastest class A, which is where I like it. If you are in B class and towards the front, you are always in danger of being bumped to the very bottom of A class. In A class, the only thing to watch out for is running "too fast" and getting to the Super Dog class, but our car is never fast enough to hit those times.

Nathan Feigion takes the green flag in 20th place. Not to worry, it's a long race. Settle in and start putting in some consistent quick laps. Nathan makes quick work of the traffic, getting up to 6th place on lap 9. Our previous lap record at PIR was a 1:31.3, and Nathan is already demolishing that. By the time he runs a 1:29.4 on lap 35 he is in 1st place, and has put in eight laps faster than the previous record. The aero and suspension are definitely working! Nathan pits in 1st place on lap 53.

Dave goes out in the car next, and we are currently in 2nd behind the #37 Red Line Oil Racing BMW. Dave fights back and forth with the #4 Miata until the #37 pits and we are back into 1st place. Dave runs a very respectable 1:31.8, his fastest lap ever! Dave pits on lap 113.

I get in the car for the 3rd stint, and the car feels really good! I hadn't driven anything with any downforce before, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I don't have that sensitive of a butt for this kind of testing, but in the medium speed corners (65-70 mph) it was a feeling of, "Ok, and it's going to start letting go right.. oh wait.. it didn't.." It took some learning to trust the car was going to stick and keep pushing a little more. If you were to just plop me in a car blindfolded and have me drive it (after removing the blind fold of course), I don't think I could tell you if it had downforce or not. But even with my insensitive butt I could tell this was working better than before. The higher speed corners (80+ mph) were where the car really seemed so much more stable and confidence-inspiring. The car is a blast to drive, but towards the end of my stint I notice the right front is developing a vibration and the brakes are getting a little softer. Uh oh, this isn't good. I run a personal best 1:30.5 and pit in 1st place on lap 180. At this stage of the race Finally Racing #177 BMW, Preying Mantis #67 BMW, and the Race Invaders #13 Ecotec swapped Miata are all in the hunt just behind us. After I pull in the pits we inspect the right front, but we are not able to find anything obvious. The wheel spins fine, and the slop is difficult to gauge because these shocks can rock at full droop.

Nathan heads out with the #67 BMW hot on his tail. The vibration is getting worse and the brakes are getting softer. Nathan is having to pump the brakes up at this point to get them to work properly. #67 has their fastest driver in the car (Cody Smith), and he gets around Nathan. At this point we know the failure is a right front wheel bearing, and we need to just get it to hold together to finish the race. Nathan backs out of it and gets it to hang on to the end and we finish in 2nd place!

So now that the race is over, it's time to figure out what to do about the bearing. We are using aftermarket conversion 5-lug hubs, and since we have never had a wheel bearing failure we haven't prepared a spare. My personal car uses S14 hubs which use a different bearing. Nathan Feigion's drift car uses conversion hubs and luckily is not too far away. He heads back home to yank a hub off of his drift car while I prepare Blue Bayou for it.

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These were Timken bearings that had been repacked with Redline CV-2 grease. Apparently we're putting a lot more load through the suspension with all this extra grip..

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These ball bearings are not quite so smooth and round any more!

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After we got the new hub swapped in there, we were ready to race another day!

So is aero worth it?

These charts are not entirely apples to apples, but this really shows some of the difference of aero. You can see how the lateral forces (top graph) for blue (aero) are higher all over than red (no aero). The speed chart on the bottom really shows how much the minimum speed is brought up in some of the corners. While you can see the slower acceleration on the straight from the drag, it is much more than made up for in the cornering speed.

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Video overview:

OTCeigydMxM

[TheRealSy90]

I honestly didn't know you could pack s13 wheel bearings, I thought they were sealed units lol.

[knate]

I honestly didn't know you could pack s13 wheel bearings, I thought they were sealed units lol.

Good point! They are technically sealed, but can be disassembled. I think it's only important when you expect to put a ton of heat into them like we do. I did actually video the whole process the last time I did it, so I can put together a "How-to" video.

The rears don't see nearly as much heat. I recently took apart our rears to replace as they are unknown mileage units we put on used, then raced for ~200 hours on them and they look just fine. Some of the grease is a bit brown, but most of it is still light colored.

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[knate]

Along Came the Rain (10/27/2018) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

Nathan Feigion moved down to California, so we were now a father and son team. Being an October race in Oregon, this means one thing. We are going to get sopping wet. We had put on some Dunlop Direzza ZIII tires, as we have had good luck with the ZI and ZII in the rain.

Dave starts the race, and while there was some morning moisture on the ground, it's actually fairly dry. Dave starts in 4th place, but there are a pile of quick cars out there that he's in the thick of. He drops back to 6th, as the #94 PROMotion BMW is screaming from 14th all the way up to 1st place. Unfortunately as soon as they hit 1st place, they also hit a wall. Speculation around the pits is that a suspension arm broke on the front straight at 120+ mph, pitching the car sideways and into a cement barrier. Luckily the driver is OK, but the car is absolutely toast.

Here if you look down the wall you can see the kink where the car knocked the cement barriers back, and the smashed car in the distance.

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This is what was towed back to the pits:

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A sobering reminder of how quickly racing can all go wrong! After about an hour of cleanup and fixing the wall, Dave hit the track again now in 5th. Dave is starting to find a groove and starts putting pressure on the Son of Andre #16 Mustang, our old rivals that we managed to squeak past for our very first win. Dave pits on lap 49 after running a fastest lap of 1:31.2.

I hop in the car and after our pit stop we are down to 14th place. With cool weather and an overcast track, I start pushing the car. I have to fight my way around Son of Andre again, and while they have significantly more straightline speed, now with our aero I'm able to drive around them in the corners, and eventually make enough gap that they can't pass me back on the straight. Eventually I make it up to the Race Invaders #13 Miata (with aero and Ecotec) but I am a lap down. Our cars are extremely similar speeds, but they have just a tiny edge in straightline speed over us. If I can stick in their draft I'm able to stay with them on the straight. I finally make it by them, only to be hung up by another car a few corners later and they sneak through again. I chase them down again, get my lap back, and keep pushing. Towards the end of my stint, it starts raining. Portland gets extremely slick in the rain due to the amount of rubber worn into the normal racing line. This means you have to try to stay off the line, then prepare to cross it with as little lateral G's as you can manage, then cross again dancing back and forth. While you are on the line it's like being on ice. On lap 112 I pull in the pits, having ran a 1:29.7 while it was still dry out. By the time I pulled in, I was running 1:54-1:58s.

Dave gets in the car for the third stint, and the car won't start. It seems the battery just doesn't have enough juice to do it. We are running a very old Odyssey battery, and apparently we've been leaking out some electrons onto the track. Our fuel man Kyle and I give him a push start, and he's off again. Dave has struggled in the past racing in the rain. While in the dry he is able to get within a couple seconds of our lap times, in the wet he's definitely a bit off pace. And it is now getting properly soaking wet out there. Dave pulls a short stint, turning the car over to me on lap 134 in 2nd place behind Race Invaders.

Race Invaders has a couple laps advantage over us, but we also have a couple laps over 3rd and 4th place. I preserve our placing during my stint while slip sliding around and we finish the race in 2nd place! Towards the end of my stint I had radioed back to the pits asking for more air pressure, hoping to reduce the amount of hydroplaning I was having to deal with for the sprint race.

Video Overview:

S8XoyGCYir4

[knate]

Night Sprint (10/27/2018) - 45 minutes - Portland International Raceway:

Immediately after the 7 hour race we start getting prepped for the sprint race. The rules for the sprint race were simple, one required 3 minute pit stop. I had really been struggling with hydroplaning during the previous race, so I had asked for some more air pressure. We clean and Rain-X the windshield, and I am ready to head out. With my dad not really enjoying sliding around in the dark, we decided that I would do the whole sprint race.

On the pace lap, there are five cars ahead of me. It's not quite dark yet, but the track is sopping wet with puddles and it's drizzling. I am lined up next to the #185 Winning Bigly Miata.

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As we roll up onto the front straight, the Rum Runners CRX jumps out of line and takes off.. but the other cars don't react. I hesitate, as I can't see a green flag. I don't have a call of green on the radio, but I assume the CRX must see something I don't.. and I jump on the gas.

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As the CRX is disappearing into the distance, I can see they have a flashlight on a green flag they are waving up and down.

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I'm now in 2nd place, chasing down Rum Runners. Front wheel drive cars tend to do well in the water, and this is no exception. They have some kind of an issue and we inherit first place! Unfortunately I also have some bright lights right in my mirror. As I try to keep the back end of my car from going faster than the front, the Nissan Maxima of Pyrotect Ghost Riders pressures me and I don't have the traction to hold them off. First place was short lived.

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A few laps later, and now it's getting quite dark. My headlights are a few lumens short of what I would like, and I'm sometimes having to rely on streetlight reflections from across the freeway to see the track. I'm into traffic now, and it's still raining.

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I decide that it's time to do our pit stop, so I pull in and get my windshield cleaned. I get to pit out, and they tell me that the timer has died. He asks, "Do you think it's been three minutes?" I reply, "No, I think about another minute." Less than 30 seconds later, he waves me out. Well now it's really inky black out there. The LED lights really illuminate anything reflective like the brake markers, but are doing a terrible job of sending light down the track. It's now just finding specific markers that I can see and muscle memory to make it around the track. All this time I'm also dealing with puddles of water that I can't see.

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I get passed by the #777 Lucky Fuss Racing, a BMW campaigned by Greg Fuss. He runs a very impressive 1:52.6, fastest time of all and in a rear-drive BMW! Greg Fuss is the husband of Cathy McCause-Fuss, who owns and runs Lucky Dog Racing. Even though we finish 2nd, Cathy wouldn't let her husband win a trophy so they gave it to us. After a very long day and some stressful night driving, I am ready for some sleep and hoping for some better weather tomorrow.

[knate]

The Bad Call (10/28/2018) - 7 hours - Portland International Raceway:

I wake up early, wishing for another hour of sleep. Last night I was up late emptying memory cards, charging radios, and looking at data. I jump in my Acura TL to head to the track with it still dark and raining outside. I get a few miles down the freeway, and it's as if the heavens just opened up. In the Northwest we mainly just get drizzles and regular rain. But this was not that at all. This was monsoon level, I can't see where I'm going type of rain. As I'm slowed down 45 mph on the freeway to try see and avoid hydroplaning, I think "If I have to go this slow in my front-drive street car on all-weather tires.. how am I going to be able to race??" I was fighting hydroplaning so much with the Direzza ZIIIs last night, I just need something that will divert water better and not hydroplane so bad. I think about my drift car on it's full tread Direzza DZ101s, and I get an idea. If I steal the tires off my drift car, I should have better hydroplaning resistance. I immediately call my dad to let him know my plans and head back home.

Direzza ZIII on the left, DZ101 on the right. DZ101 has a lot more paths for water to travel through. This is genius!

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"I'm just borrowing them, I promise they will come back later.."

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We get the tires/wheels swapped out quickly in the rain and I am feeling quite proud of myself. At the track the starting order is generally decided by who manages to line up first, and for the first time ever we get right up on the front row! The driver's meeting rolls around, and Cathy mentions that the weather looks like it may clear up. Huh... that's not what I saw just earlier this morning when I checked. Hmm.. now I'm second guessing. The DZ101 is not as grippy of a tire, if we aren't worrying about hydroplaning then it won't be as fast as the ZIII will be. Do we swap back? We are on the front row.. that would mean cycling all the way to the back. After some angst over the decision, we decide to leave the tires on and just see how it goes.

The race starts... and it is not going well. The DZ101 are a 320 treadwear tire compared to the 200 treadwear of the ZIII. My dad immediately reports that the tires are no good and he is sliding all over the place. He drops from 2nd to 15th place on the first lap. None of our help has arrived at the track yet, so if he pulls in, it will be a two man pit stop changing four tires. And we are not exactly a NASCAR pit crew... this will be disastrous. And all because I thought it was worth starting on the front row! I start preparing to do the swap, and Dave pulls in after dropping to 32nd place. We get all four tires swapped out in a reasonable 8 minutes, however that is also giving the entire field a four full lap head start on us. Well there goes any hope of us continuing our 10 race streak of podium finishes in Portland!

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Dave is immediately ten seconds faster on the new tires, and starts running quicker and quicker. The track is starting to dry out. My genius idea of swapping tires is looking really silly right about now. Dave starts making his way back through the field, climbing all the way up to 13th place by lap 56 when he pits. Unfortunately at this point, our fuel man Kyle is not at the track yet. Kyle is rock solid on fueling, and does nearly all of our fueling, which means we are not as in practice. And it's a two-man pit stop again. Dave starts filling fuel, the first jug is in and he goes for the second. Normally we would go to the third jug, and may use most of the last jug. But in this case due to our long pit and the track starting wet, we haven't used that much fuel. We are at full flow when the tank is full, splashing fuel all down the side of the car. We have a pan there, but it doesn't catch all of it so we get hit with our first fueling penalty. When it rains, it pours... well at least figuratively, as the track is nice and dry now.

I get in the car, and go serve my time penalty for fueling. We have now dropped all the way back to 20th again! I push all I can during my stint, knowing we have a big hole to climb out of. I get all the way up to 7th place running a 1:29.7 before I pull into the pits on lap 112.

During Dave's stint while he is driving the normal racing line through 12, a red Miata decides to try stuff a pass in right before the apex in Randy Pobst's "Vortex of Danger". He tags Blue Bayou with his front bumper in the very right rear of the car. You can see the Miata in the right mirror (this is during the impact).

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As you can see in this shot, it was front fender to rear fender:

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Unfortunately, this now means a black flag for contact, which costs us another two minutes. Dave runs cleanly for the rest of his stint, getting us up into 6th place. Dave pits on lap 171, having run a fastest lap of 1:32.4.

I get in the car for the last stint, and boy was this an interesting one! I run a 1:30.1, then a 1:30.2 as the track is dry and things are going well. A few laps later some drops of water start to hit the windshield, and it looks like something serious is moving our way.

A view of turn 4 on lap 181, nice and dry:

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As I turn onto the straight for lap 182, the track just looks white ahead in turn four. The pavement is dry where I am, but I can see what looks like a two foot high mist from all the water hitting the track. I've really never seen anything like this before!

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A view of turn of lap 182, just one lap after the dry view earlier!

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As I roll onto the back straight of PIR, the rain intensifies a bit.. then stops. I'm on dry ground again. What the heck.. this is a serious leading edge to this rain storm! As I head down the straight stretch again, the leading edge has moved past the finish line and I can see very distinct bands of wet and dry pavement.

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After a couple more laps of this, the track is fully soaked again with puddles. We later find out that during this crazy burst of weather, just across the freeway a tornado touched down and overturned a few semi trailers.

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In the map below, you can just see Portland International Raceway below the overturned trailer pictures.

https://www.weather.gov/images/pqr/2018_pdxtornado_overview.jpg

After all this craziness, I finish the race on a wet track in 6th place. As it turns out we were four laps off of the podium, my initial call to put on the DZ101s as well as my stubbornness to give up our track position at the beginning of the race to change tires really cost us that podium. Lesson learned, rubber compound is way more important than siping, especially if it's not full wet!

We still went home with two trophies, and my son absolutely loved the sprint race trophy with the skeleton on top! He inexplicably named it "Green leg", which I still have no idea where that came from.

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Video overview:

vGbRmMLgKQA

[nick_d_240sx]

I've been following all these posts and videos! This is great! I went to a chump car race once at PIR a few years back when my brother in law and his team were out there. What a racket!
Gotta have a solid car out there to compete w/o breaking down! Congrats on the wins and just finishing the races!

[knate]

I've been following all these posts and videos! This is great! I went to a chump car race once at PIR a few years back when my brother in law and his team were out there. What a racket!
Gotta have a solid car out there to compete w/o breaking down! Congrats on the wins and just finishing the races!

Thanks Nick, I appreciate you following along and commenting! What team was your brother there with?

Being able to finish a race is a big thing, there is usually about 15-20% attrition per race.

Parts will fail in racing that may not fail in a street car ever. For example I've been messing with 240SXes since 2003, and I had never had an ECU fail. Our first race weekend out with our car.. ECU failed. And in a weird way, it ran but didn't want to rev properly like exhaust was plugged or something, which really threw us for a loop.

In general though, if you maintain the car properly these Nissans can take SO much abuse and just keep ticking..

[knate]

We had a few things to take care of before our next race. One was that the power steering system had acted up towards the end of the July race. The other was that our gearing was currently way too low.

Our electric power steering had cut out in the heat of the race, and in listening back on video I could faintly hear it beeping around the time that it gave up. I tried doing a bunch of searching around the internet for beeping electric power steering, but apparently that's not a common issue. From what little I gathered, the system seemed to be overheating, and then giving up. I had initially mounted the controller to the roll cage along with the thermal paste, but it was attached to steel instead of a large aluminum column like it was designed. I needed some way of getting some heat out.

Since the box is up under the dash fully protected from any moisture, I drilled some vent holes in the cover of the electronics.

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I then took an old graphics card fan along with it's heat sink, and attached that to the bottom of the controller along with some thermal paste. I wired it to be on any time the power steering is on. That should do it. It had acted fine during the October race, so I think we should now be just fine.

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The next issue was gearing. And that was really two issues. I was still struggling a bit with the weirdness of downshifting into 4th gear for the very tight chicane at Portland, it just doesn't seem natural. The other much bigger issue, is that our driveline vibrates at high speed. We actually went through great lengths to try to help this, and even sent back our driveshaft to get a different one that had been more finely balanced. Oddly they accidentally made the second one an inch shorter, but we weren't making a ton of power so it still worked with a little less splines engaged. However no matter what we did, the driveshaft started to resonate once we got deep into 6th gear. You can actually see/hear it in video, it starts to really shake the camera and you can hear the resonance. The fix? We needed taller gearing to match the 350Z transmission! The 240SX has a 4.08 final drive, and the manual 350Z has a 3.538 final drive.

We were running the helical limited slip from the 99-01 Silvia (Japan only), but in the S13 (89-94) 240SX pumpkin with factory 4.08 gearing. This differential works great, I just wanted different gearing. The 350Z pumpkin is a massive amount of rework to get it to work in a 240SX. It's been done, but I wasn't interested in changing axles, mounting, etc. After poking around various R200 options, I finally stumbled on exactly what I needed. I found an S15 entire pumpkin complete with a 3.692 final drive on Ebay! With my wallet a little lighter, we got to work.

This is the front mounting ear of the S13 240SX, it is solid mounted in the front and rear.

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Here is our S15 differential getting drained and cleaned. We had already popped the cover, so the four-bolt S13 one is laying there. Here is where I got a little lucky. This differential with it's speed sensor on the front of it, is about an inch longer. Now our driveshaft would be perfect! You can see the front differential mounting ears are much larger openings, they are intended to hold a rubber bushing.

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I hoisted the differential into place, and the top of the differential hits before the ears touch. This is going to need some spacers.

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After using my patented "Differential Spacing Device", I determined that I needed 0.562 inches of spacer to get the pinion matching the previous differential.

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After bribing our machinist friend Greg, we got some nice aluminum spacers turned to fit the hole. Then topping that all off with some industrial thick washers from the hardware store and we were fitting nicely. And since our speedometer has not moved since we put the VQ30DE in, maybe someday this speed sensor will be useful... for now we were running out of time and it was ziptied out of the way. I start torquing all the bolts to spec... and disaster strikes. One of the front mounting bolts goes soft when torquing.. it has pulled the threads. I only have a couple more days I can work on this car before our next race at the Ridge. My dad and I start brainstorming to see if there is a way we can fix this without swapping the entire subframe, as we just don't have the time to do that.

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First up is some exploratory surgery. We do have a spare subframe that can serve as a donor, can we get the captive nut removed from it? I plasma in, not being shy about how big the hole is, mainly just not wanting to damage the nut. The cage that holes the nut has an opening on the front of the subframe... this may just be possible.

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With some more careful plasma surgery in place on the subframe in the car, I open up a hole.

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With the help of an old farmer's cow magnet, I extract the stripped nut! I am then able to slide in the replacement, torque it down properly, and cover up the hole. Success!!

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Another issue we had been having was our 5th gear synchro was getting pretty crunchy. We had initially thought we were buying a CD009 350Z transmission, which is known to be the "one to get". It turned out that the years that G35s and 350Zs got CD009s were off a bit, and we ended up with a CD008. I started looking around to try find a CD009 to replace, and found someone parting out a 2006 350Z with some rod knock. After hearing the engine run (and knock quite loudly), we made a deal to pick up the engine with transmission, wiring harness, and another engine that knocked for $1k. Since these transmissions can often go for $800-1000, I was pretty happy with this deal. These engines may come in handy some day... He needs time to pull the drivetrain from the car, so we'll pick these up sometime after the race.

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Hmm.. these brake pads are finally getting down there a bit. But.. they'll last another race or two.

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Randy Pobst is going to be at this next race at the Ridge, so I am really hoping we can get him into our car. I've been saying for years it would be awesome to get a pro in our car that could tell us what is good or bad about it, and so we could see what the car is really capable of in the right hands!

[knate]

Our next race is in Shelton, WA at Ridge Motorsports Park. Even though I've been here for three different events, I still feel like I'm trying to find the best line through corners. We arrive on Friday to get in some practice runs and feel out the car. Since Randy Pobst is going to be here tomorrow, I want to make sure everything is as good as we can get it.

Since we have only run aero during races, we haven't done much experimenting. Since it's a practice day, the first thing I wanted to do was get a comparison of straightline speed with and without aero on the car. The splitter comes off to go in the trailer, so this was just a matter of taking off the four bolts that hold on the rear wing.

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We did the morning sessions with no wing or splitter, then the afternoon with the wing cranked to maximum angle. We normally run around 7 degrees for the center part of the wing, this was cranked all the way up to 12-13 to see a big difference in drag. In the morning my fastest lap time is a 2:02.1.

Here's some data showing just the straight-line acceleration portion. The blue line is with the wing cranked way up and you can see that it definitely creates drag. However it's only 0.12 seconds slower down the entire straight, and the largest gap in speed was 1.7 mph. For a track with such a long straight, this isn't that big of a difference. My guess is that having a splitter up front actually cuts the amount of air going underneath the car enough that it counteracts some of the drag of the rear wing.

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For this section here, a medium speed sweeper, the difference with no aero to wing at maximum is 1.16 seconds. Now keep in mind I'm still learning at this track and not the most consistent, but that's a big difference.

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You can see the lateral Gs are consistently higher with a 11% higher peak of 1.279G (aero) versus 1.157G (non-aero) in turn 6.

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It's late in the afternoon and I hear our run group called to grid, so I jump in the car, start it up and start to roll forward. CREAAK.. CREAAK.. POP-POP-POP-POP.. There is some kind of strange noise as I turn the corner. My first thought is maybe a wheel is loose, so I immediately back up and ask for a torque check on the wheels. Everything checks out, so I say "It might just be the spring I guess.." The noise is again very loud and it makes a pop just turning left and right on the wheel. While driving straight it quiets down, but still making some kind of noise. I take off from the pits, and while accelerating I hear nothing. As I get into the first corner, the squealing/groaning sound intensifies. Well clearly whatever this is, it has to be fixed before tomorrow.

We jack up the left side of the car and feel the front left wheel bearing, and it spins freely with no noise. There doesn't seem to be any extra play. We inspect brakes/springs/etc and can't see anything obvious. We jack up the right and do the same. Again there's nothing obvious. With the weight back on the front end, we try pushing the car forward/backward with the wheel turned.. and "POP...POP..POP..". It seems like it might be the wheel bearing, but at the same time I have never heard this kind of a sound from a wheel bearing. How could it be a wheel bearing already? Our last set of Timkens with Redline grease had lasted 89 hours of racing before we had an issue. These were brand new Timkens regreased the same as last time, with only one very wet weekend on them. Since it was wet, they should have been loaded even less.

This is my sad and perplexed face. I need this fixed to try get Randy in our car.

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And here is my biggest problem. Not only do I not know for sure it's a bearing, and I also don't have a new wheel bearing. So question #1: How do I verify it's definitely a wheel bearing? And question #2: If it is a wheel bearing, how am I going to get one? It's late Friday afternoon, and even if I can find a bearing I then also need a press to get it into the hub. My drift car uses S14 hubs, which don't fit. Nathan Feigion's drift car is hours away and he is in California. I call him to ask him if I can steal a hub from his car. He gives me permission, but his car is also hours away in a trailer so it would be a big pain. We call around trying to find a bearing, but nobody has one in the area.

Suddenly I remember that when we got our conversion hubs, I pushed out the Chinese no-name bearings and put them in a drawer. My wife is going to be driving up soon, so I ask her to grab the two bearings and bring them with her. Our next problem is a press. We can't find anyone in the pits that has a press and I don't know anyone in the area that would. My dad calls Harbor Freight and they have a press, so he heads off to make the 40 minute drive. I get to work trying to verify that a wheel bearing will truly fix it. I swap hubs left/right after swapping the sound is definitely coming from the other side. Ok, well now I have my answer, and I just need to wait for the press and bearing.

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By the time we have the press and the bearing, it's now dark. And of course the press is in a box in pieces, and we need to assemble it. Kyle arrived with my wife and the bearing, so the three of us get to work assembling the press.

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We get it assembled around 10pm, then press in the bearing and reinstall the hub. We roll the car back and forth by hand.. and it's silent. It's 11pm and time to get some sleep before the race tomorrow, hopefully this no-name bearing holds up!

[knate]

The Rocket (4/27/2019) - 7 hours - Ridge Motorsports Park:

We wake up and find Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox outside. That's always a good sign, right? I'm pretty sure there is some superstition about seeing Babe the Blue Ox before a race being a good thing.

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We are feeling good about our chances, as with the wheel bearing issue taken care of, the car has been feeling great. I ran a fastest lap of 1:59.1 during practice on Friday, just over 2 seconds faster than our last outing.

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My biggest goal for the weekend was to get Randy Pobst in the car. He drives everything from VWs to Volvos to Ferraris on track, and has the ability to feel and articulate exactly what he is feeling. This is exactly what I need to help develop our car! I think it feels good, but what do I know? At the track I found out that there were already teams that had asked at previous races. Well, at least get my name on the list and see what happens.

I caught this Probe on the way to the drivers meeting, I love it!

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Under the hood of the "Tire Dogs" car... that looks mean.

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Driver's meeting

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The Dog Pound

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I go out for qualifying, and in the last turn the power steering suddenly tries to pitch me off the track to the right! That's scary.. I've never felt it do that before. I get the car back in the pits, and I find that if I wiggle the encoder wires the steering wheel twitches. Ok, well there's where my problem is, but there's not much time before the race! I get some tape to hold the wiring still, so hopefully it doesn't have the chance to do this and head out for the race.

I start the race in 27th, but immediately make up some places. Having the practice day before is really nice to get the confidence up in the car and the track ahead of time and I'm able to start the race a bit more in the groove. On the first lap I get up to 20th. On the next lap I get to 16th, 15th, 14th... by lap 38 I'm up to 7th place. While I'm out I am pushing my braking further and further.. until I have a pretty big lockup and go off in turn 11. Teams start cycling through their pit stops, and I turn the car in on lap 52 having run a fastest lap of 2:00.0 and in 1st. Not as fast as practice, but not bad.

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My dad gets in the car, and we send him out. A couple minutes later, Randy Pobst walks by our pit asking if we know where the silver Miata is or anyone from their team. Nobody is there, so we start chatting. After a few minutes Randy says, "Well I'm all suited up with nothing to drive, would you mind if I drove your car?" "Yes!" was my emphatic response. I tell Kyle to immediately pull my dad into the pits so we can get Randy in the car. We had just pit, but I don't care, I'm not going to pass this up!

Randy asks, "How long can I drive?" I had been hoping to get at least 10-15 minutes of him in the car, so I just said, "As long as you want!" He decides he'll go for around an hour. We use the NASCAR style radio plug and Randy's adapter is back with his things, so we won't have any communication. I go over how the controls are set up, and tell Randy that our 5th gear is getting crunchy.. but to just ignore it. The synchros are not great, but it doesn't seem to be a major issue and I don't want Randy babying the car when I need the data.

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I'm really pumped to have Randy out driving our car on track! In 18 laps he has made it from 15th up to 8th place! This video and data logging is going to be so useful. Wait... did I turn on the data logger? It stops logging every time the car starts, and I'm not certain if I started it before or after he started the car. With no radio I can't tell him how to start it and I really need to make sure I'm getting data. I decide to use the pit board to pull him in. And as it turns out.. the data logger was NOT on. Whew, good thing I got that rolling. Pulling Randy in meant we dropped from 8th back down to 11th, but this information is way more important than a podium. On his way up to 3rd place, Randy runs a 1:56.6! Wow! I've never quite felt like I was getting everything out of this track, but THREE whole seconds! This is going to be some very interesting data to see what he is doing differently. On lap 96 Randy pulls back in the pits and my dad jumps back into the car.

Randy has some great feedback! The first thing he says is, "There is a flatspot in the right front that was there when I got in!" "Yeah, that was me.. a little overzealous in turn 11."

Randy's feedback on the car:


Engine and transmission feel great
Shocks are way too soft, need the damping cranked much higher
Too much front brake bias, need some more rear brake
Can really feel the aero working, but could use just a bit more front downforce
Some mid-corner understeer, may need to try soften the front suspension
Feels slighly darty, may have some toe out


Overall he loved the handling of it. He recognized that many cars have a lot more power than ours, but he felt he had a "superior weapon" in the corners. In talking about how soft our shocks were, it actually became the Chasin' Racin' video below, as this was filmed right next to our pits:

yKPd-_LTLSQ

I ask Randy as much as I can about how he is driving the track. This is his first day at this race track, and I'm amazed at what he has picked up already! For example, he was discussing coming down the hill, how if you hug the curbing just enough to keep the inside tire on the concrete, but not enough to get into the rumble strips, there is a little more grip there compared to the blacktop.

While my dad is driving, Kyle Eisenbach of General Leif comes by. We have had some really epic battles in the past and Kyle is always super friendly. Kyle tells me that he had planned to rent a spot with the Purple Haze car, but it broke. He asks if he could rent a stint in our car. Hmm. My default answer to this is always "NO", as I have way too many hours into this car for it to be worth the risk. However, I know Kyle is a great driver that drives very clean and I do trust him. And at least there is no rain, that would really crank up the risk factor. I discuss briefly with my dad on the radio, he agrees and Kyle is now the first person to have asked and gotten a "Yes!" My dad has made it up to 5th place, and pulls into the pits on lap 123 with a fastest lap of 2:04.1.

Kyle gets in the car, and after I give my second guest driver briefing of the day, he is off. Within five laps, he has already run a 2:01.8! He gets from 9th up to 7th place running his fastest lap of 2:00.5. Then on lap 153, he gets us up to 6th place! As the race is nearly over, it starts to rain! So much for the weather being so nice! It's getting very slippery out there, and there are a couple problems. I never even though to tell Kyle how to operate the wipers. And the second problem.. the wiper stalk came loose and is turned down towards the floor. Kyle slips and slides around to take the checkered flag in 6th place while it starts hail!

Kyle did fantastic in the car, for him to get in our car and run a 2:00.5, only 0.5 off of my fastest of the day, that is really impressive! And I'm going to be completely honest, If Kyle had beaten my lap time I would have been disappointed in myself. Only a half more second and he would have done that! I'm perfectly fine with Randy destroying my lap time, that is expected.

What a crazy day. Thanks Randy for the amazing feedback and pointers, and thanks Kyle for driving a clean race and giving our baby back unscathed!

Video Overview:

fHwGx0aI5AQ

[knate]

We made it into Grassroots Motorsports!

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[cured13]

Congrats guys, this thread is such a great read.

What differential you are running currently.

[knate]

Congrats guys, this thread is such a great read.

What differential you are running currently.

Thanks, glad you like it!

We have been running the S15 helical, and more recently swapped to the S15 3.69 final drive. Just Saturday we were finishing up our S14 subframe swap along with the Greddy diff cover.

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[cured13]

Silvia's Helical diff is what I need in my life, haha.
I remember you writing on NRR about installing s15 helical and using Ford alternator bushings as a spacers for ring gear bolts.
Would you share what model/year Ford alternator bushing were these? The Nismo conversion bolts I heard are discontinued now and rather expensive for what they are.

What is your experience with these spacers, did they lasted without problems or are there other bolts from other cars that can be used instead of Nismos?

[knate]

Silvia's Helical diff is what I need in my life, haha.
I remember you writing on NRR about installing s15 helical and using Ford alternator bushings as a spacers for ring gear bolts.
Would you share what model/year Ford alternator bushing were these? The Nismo conversion bolts I heard are discontinued now and rather expensive for what they are.

What is your experience with these spacers, did they lasted without problems or are there other bolts from other cars that can be used instead of Nismos?

You have a good memory! We just went to a shop that rebuilt alternators and gave them sizes.

I have a few more in my toolbox so I just grabbed them. They are 12.03mm (0.4736") ID and 13.14mm (0.517") OD and 18.36mm long.

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After a bunch of digging around.. I think I may have discovered they are actually starter bushings. I found on Summit this bushing which is super close to what I have and should work:

https://www.summitracing.com/parts/smp-x4349

I believe I also found the exact bushing I have as it's pretty much perfect match on all dimensions including length. It's a Delco starter bushing:
https://qpselectric.com/en/bushings/4239-62-1400.html

This diff lasted for quite a few years of street driving, drifting, and racing. It just recently came out of the race car to swap out gearing, so these bushings worked great. I have also heard of people not using any bushing, and just "preloading" the slack towards the acceleration side, but these bushings are cheap piece of mind. I just had to cut them shorter with a tubing cutter, so I actually got two from each one.

[nick_d_240sx]

Thanks Nick, I appreciate you following along and commenting! What team was your brother there with?


TSR Tidrick Sundberg Racing. This might have been over 10 years ago..
https://i.imgur.com/AeVMRYul.jpg

That's great seeing Randy driving your car! Super cool!

[knate]

TSR Tidrick Sundberg Racing. This might have been over 10 years ago..
https://i.imgur.com/AeVMRYul.jpg

That's great seeing Randy driving your car! Super cool!

Nice! Yeah Randy is amazing to get feedback from and tons of fun to have around.

[Toxocara995]

Good point! They are technically sealed, but can be disassembled. I think it's only important when you expect to put a ton of heat into them like we do. I did actually video the whole process the last time I did it, so I can put together a "How-to" video.



The rears don't see nearly as much heat. I recently took apart our rears to replace as they are unknown mileage units we put on used, then raced for ~200 hours on them and they look just fine. Some of the grease is a bit brown, but most of it is still light colored.



https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/prod.mm.com/uploads/2021/05/11/1620758903_image_mmthumb.pngDid you ever happen to put together that how to video? Was up way too early this morning and was thinking about this post out of the blue.

Sent from my HD1900 using Tapatalk

[knate]

Did you ever happen to put together that how to video? Was up way too early this morning and was thinking about this post out of the blue.

Sent from my HD1900 using Tapatalk

No.. but thanks to your reminder I got started on editing tonight. :)