93FD

Ok, it’s been a while since I updated the site. A long while. Doesn’t mean I’ve given up, just that I needed to regroup. My goal this year for the site is to try to keep a weekly log of what’s going on with the car and the events.

To that end… I had several changes over the winter to get the last few remaining issues with the car fixed and to fix all the stuff that was hosed up. I made a pretty big chart in FreeMind to keep track of everything that was going on otherwise i would have been totally lost. (click the chart for a larger version)

As you can see there was alot to change and alot to fix. The main issues were:

1. Fix up the nose that was damaged at Mid-O.
2. Fix the fenders that were pulled out when I ran Damian’s tires.
3. Make the drivers seat more comfortable for me to drive in.
4. Get the car up to NASA tech specs.
5. Fix my massive oil pan leak.
6. Upgrade the braking system.
7. Prep the car for NASA TTS competition.
8. Make the car able to run 20+ min without fuel starving.

Then there was a bunch of other smaller fixes and upgrades… You can look at those on the sheet.

Most of the biggies got taken care of. With the help of the forums, I resealed the oil pan, and that seems to have stopped the leak. The nose fiberglass was repaired with the help of Bruce L. and resprayed brilliant black by a local shop. The steering setup was changed by installing a smaller steering wheel, a 3″ spacer, and then custom mounting the cruise control buttons etc.

The NASA tech specs really only required the updating of my harnesses, as the old ones were expired. Sold the old ones and bought new ones for a net total of $75 spent. Not too shabby. I rented a fender roller and spent an evening fixing destroying my fenders. Great fun. Did get them rolled properly, but it blew up the paint pretty bad so I spent another night repainting them. If I was to do this again I’d save the tool rental fee and just use the shop vac plastic tube that worked just as well.

The braking system did end up getting updated, but not like I originally expected. I had in my mind that I would probably save up and get the Stoptech ‘race’ front setup and run the RS/RZ rear setup to balance it out. Of course, that meant ~ $3000 out of pocket. Ouch! Somewhere in December there was word of a new 4 wheel *balanced* setup being developed by Racing Brake on the forums. They expected it to cost less and work better than all the kits out there. Problem is, it wouldn’t be done until at least mid April, and my first event was April 7-8 with Find The Line at MAM. It likely wouldn’t be possible to get a kit before the 2nd event (NASA Midwest at Iowa Speedway) either. So I could run the stock brakes again and burn up another $500-600 in pads and rotors and have marginal braking for those two events or go with Plan C, Damian’s old Porsche 911 TT setup that he was trying to sell. Given that I’ve driven his car with the setup and I know how well it worked and the timing and pricing I had to try it out. The only issue would be that the brake bias would be off because of the small rear stock brakes. I could fix that by picking up the Racing Brake rear setup though when it became available and hope for the best. In a couple months I’ll know if this was a good choice.

To fix the fueling issues, I decided that I needed to fill the fuel tank with foam to prevent the sloshing. A couple people from the forums also tried this and it worked pretty well for them. In the meantime, one of the forum members was also researching the issue and found another way to keep the fuel in the pickup bucket under cornering. I got in as a beta tester for his product, so I will be able to get that running by the time I hit the first NASA event. The combination of those two should solve this. I think.

That brings us to the last one… TTS prep. This is a long topic that I’ll ignore for now and update sometime in the year. The rules are up on the NASA TT website if you want to check them out.

That is all for now, I will have an update about the first event as well as pics of all the changes on the car soon.