Oh. Hey there. Has it really been two years since I made an update to this? Wow. Well, I guess there’s some catching up to do.
It was about April-ish of 2017 that I got a new suspension setup from AMR Engineering. For about $1,700 I got 250lb springs in the rear and 200lb springs in the front on single-adjustable dampers with camber plates in the front. So far, they’ve been working out really well. On the street, the car is almost magical in its ability to hold corners and on the dirt, it performs amazingly, keeping the wheels on the ground and giving me a ton of grip.
They’re not that shiny any more, of course, but they’re working great.
Next up, I had to fiddle with the rear brakes a bit and those are all new and working well. Although, the parking brake is still a little weak. It’s on my list of things I need to look at.
I found that it was running a little warm so I built an aluminum shroud for the fans. It looks pretty neat:
But don’t get too attached to it. At first I was having problems with it getting really hot on the highway with the fans running. Turns out, I wired them backwards. Derp-a-doo. With the fans turning the right way, things were okay. But only just okay. I could not hot-lap at an event without overheating the car. I needed to run the cooling fans, the heat on full blast, and then spray the radiator with water between runs to keep it cooled down enough. Back to that later.
Anyway, the next thing to break was yet-another-set of axles. Killed the joint hard. I made a bunch of calls and wound up paying about $900 for a pair of axles and new hubs/bearings from A1CVTech. Nick promises me that I cannot break them and so far, so good. These also have new hubs and wheel bearings so that he could use a thicker axle. Funny story about that: The axles came in the day before a Rallycross and Tim offered to help me put the wheel bearings in and all that for the new hubs. But they forgot to send me my good expensive wheel bearings that came with the hubs I shipped them! So, I wound up having to go scrounging parts stores for the stupid Chinese garbage. One of them has already failed and I replaced it with the one of the good ones that A1CVTech shipped back to me.
Towards the end of 2017, however, disaster struck once again and the motor mount failed, severing the brake line.
I had a bit of a go-around with that, but finally got everything bolted up. I think the core problem was this:
The bobble strut bracket had sheared off and I think that was allowing too much movement of the engine which was a significant contributing factor to the side mount breaking. I haven’t had (too much) trouble with that since fixing this.
In early 2018, I did this:
Colleti did some tuning for me and got me from 180 horse at the wheels to 231hp and 324 ftlbs. But, there’s more to that story. When I got it home and off the trailer, I ran some errands with it. When I got back, walking past the front left wheel I could feel immense heat coming from the car. Turns out that the caliper was stuck so hard that I couldn’t turn the wheel by hand when it was up in the air. So, those dyno numbers are with the brakes on.
I also got a new Mishimoto radiator and fans to install to help with the cooling issues. Those finally went in recently and are working out. Towards the end of the year,I had a major problem with the car running really lean and not wanting to restart. Turns out that the positive cable on the alternator had ripped out. I got a whole new alternator from Rock Auto, but it was bad out of the box, so another new one from FLAPS got it running again. As long as the voltage reg connector stays in place, it runs great.
So far, I took 1st in MF at PE #2 and 3rd in MF in the Great Lakes Divisional. Here’s hoping for a good season.