Truenotch

Gutted about the clutch! @Rhyscar had an Exedy HD clutch plate blow to bits behind his standard blacktop 4AGE and there's plenty of stories from others about breaking the plates etc. Hopefully you'll have no problems once you chuck a decent one in there. Looks like the handling on this car has come a long way too. I can see the extra confidence in your vids. Everything should come together once you've got the everything dialled enough to do constant laps. Keep it up.

Cheers @~Slideways~ It looks like a similar colour to yours if your profile pic is accurate. Do you have any pics of the old AE kicking around?

I think that photo is from the 03/04 season of SS2000. Would be nice to see that car hit the track again! It might even comply with the Historic Touring Car rules?

Snuck home at lunchtime to roll it into the sunlight:

I've bought an ex Lynn Rogers NZ Touring Car engine that was for Barrie Thomlinson's Altezza back in 2001/2002. It was built to a strict set of rules, so has limited lift on the cams, no VVTi and standard compression. The cams are fairly long duration and it has double valve springs, H beam rods and a few other good bits. I'm going to get the VVTi working again and install my high comp pistons, throw some new seals and bearings at it and see what it does. The cars went to Bathurst back in the early 00's, so it's possible that this engine went there as a spare. It came in a shipping cradle and has BT4 stamped on the block and head (Barrie Thomlinson's #4 engine). The other 86 is @Mitch.W's notchback. It's come a fair way since his last project update.

Hopefully it makes OK power! Should do decent times if I can get it to the ground.

Fitted a few more parts today. Still haven't rolled it into the sun yet.

Cheers! It's a pretty bright red, so is taking a bit to get my head around. Need to get it all assembled for some daytime pics. I think it might stand out on the track.

Picked this up after work today and spent the evening fitting trim and panels. It's bright! Emmett did an awesome job spraying this one. He's a panel beater, not a painter, but is getting good on the gun now! It feels like someone else's car at the moment. The red on red combo will take some getting used to!

Called it?

Next up was the first round of the 2022 winter series. We'd stripped all the stickers off the car between seasons with the intention of getting it painted. It didn't quite happen for a couple of reasons, so the car went to round 1 with makeshift stickers instead. We had 20 cars at the first round which was awesome! It's a whole different game in the reverse grid races with up to 19 cars ahead of you and only 6 laps to get to the front! Here's some footage from the shortened race 3. This was shortened to 5 laps as we were running out of daylight. I was able to make it from near the back through to 8th. The golden hour made for some nice photos like the thumbnail above. The tight competition made it super close at the front! I ended the weekend 3rd in the points. We got the car home and stripped it back to head to the paint shop. Ooh, shiny!! Round 2 came up pretty quick, so we threw some impromptu numbers on again along with a new windscreen banner to promote our new series sponsor: Hankook Tyres. I qualified 1st at round 2, but unfortunately the meeting was cancelled after one of our drivers had a medical event during a race. This was a bit of a traumatic experience for the marshals and drivers. Thankfully the driver survived and will make a full recovery! The car looked weird without stripes, so I got @Chunky_t to draw up some #1s and produce a few stickers and stripes. The next event was our mini enduro event "24 Minutes of Le Manfeild". The longer format races are quite different to our usual 6 lap sprints. We had to transit the pit lane twice in the race, which added a bunch of strategy to the race. Jack and I battled hard that day! In race two we were inseparable. Jack edited footage together from our two cars to show the battle: This past weekend was round 3 of the series and we had 20 cars again! We expected around 23 as we had a few new drivers, but we lost a couple to sickness. They'll be back for round 4 along with a few others, so we might see a grid of 25+ this season! Added a couple more sponsor stickers this time too. Yet again, big grids made for great racing! And the reverse grids were challenging again. Race two was my best - I started 17th and finished 3rd. There's one round to go and it's going to be a big one! We're running a two day festival with extra classes and special cars on display. If anyone's keen, we'll be running classic car displays on Saturday September 3rd and every car in the show will get a free cruise session around the track.

A few old pics of my car surfaced last year. These are from from ~2001-2003 and show the old N2 look. This is a bit of inspiration during the tidy up.

And off to the panel shop it went. It needed a little bit of bog to straighten out one or two bits. I removed the fuel tank cover and filler neck for the first time since I've owned it.. it's grubby under there! Emmett's been working in the booth already and sent a couple of teasers... I'm really looking forward to seeing the end result! All going well it'll be back home by the weekend

Another couple of years on and this thing has been going strong! I won this little dude at the Toyota Racing Series round back in Feb 2021. The prize was meant to be a back, crack and sack wax... But it never came to be. Next up was last year's Feilding Auto Electrical Winter Series at Manfeild. We've seen really good growth in the class, with a bunch of new drivers and fresh cars appearing in the series! In 2021 we saw a couple of 17 car grids, which was the most we'd ever had. This spiced up the competition and made it a hell of an exciting season. Jerry in the pink 777 battled hard with me all season and we came into the final round with a few points between us for the championship. I had a small lead, but not enough to be able to relax! We traded wins in the first two races, which left the final race of the season. Both Jerry and I started from the back of the grid on the final flag drop of a handicap race and worked our way through to the middle of the pack. He finished ahead, but it wasn't enough. I was pretty stoked to walk away as the 2021 MX5 Cup champ with only 9 points between us at the end. The car came through the season OK. It had a few new battle scars and some of the exterior paint was getting tired. This car has been a racecar since 2011 and has done thousands of competitive ks without much maintenance at al! It's had a diff rebuild, gearbox refresh and a set of shocks in that time, but apart from that it's only needed tyres, brake pads and fuel. We decided it deserved a birthday, so the next job was to sort a fresh coat of paint .

That piston's had a big old lean moment eh. It reminds me of the time my Beams leaned out due to low battery voltage and had a big moment at 8000rpm. My issue was caused by an issue with my alternator wiring causing a lack of voltage, which combined with batch injection, caused bad things to happen. I'm going to throw in my theory that your fuel pump supply might still be a problem? Either a bad connection or undersized wire, which would also explain the melted fuse - I've had fuel pump fuses melt exactly the same way because of undersized wiring.

One job I've been wanting to do for a long time is update the bumper mount to make it quicker and easier to fit. It needs to be removed every time it goes on the trailer, so my requirements were that it needed to be strong and tool-less to install. Nick at SAFEngineering bent up a bar out of offcuts for me and I've used quick latches to attach the bumper to the bar. The flares connect with little 1/4 turn motorbike fairing fasteners. I've also picked up a couple of modified engines to get my engine upgrades moving. One is from a TRD NZ Altezza touring car that ran in the NZ Touring Car series in 2001/2. They had limitations on cam lift and compression, so it's not an all out race build, but should work nicely for what I want to do and still allow full use of VVTi. The cams definitely have some lump to them: I bought a cam setup kit to measure everything up and be able to re-set the timing if the VVTi can't be used for some reason. This allowed us to work out the cam specs, which is around 264º at .050" and 313º at .010" (advertised duration). @CXGPWR is helping me out with the engine project. Thanks John! Now it's off to the panel beaters for a final bit of bodywork and some fresh red . I'm looking forward to seeing it in colour again! And I'm sure Taco's keen to spread his fur all over the seats when it gets back.

Ahh, so that's how it's supposed to look!

Can't wait to see and hear this happen too! Will the Maxpeeding rods be making an entrance before the new 1NZ goes in? Or just go again and see how long it lasts?

Are you trying to steer clear of Jan?

Can I hook a ride from Auckland to Whakatane with someone? I'll be there for a work trip that ends on the Thursday before East Cape.... Just in time to jump in a car and cruise to J5's . I'll look into this today .

I'm also keen on sharing rooms at Hicks Bay and Gisborne. Who's keen to go ins on a room?

Low comp like a fat Kereru This sounds like it could be ignition to me. I had almost exactly these symptoms on the MX5 and the Chariot on the same day. Both run the same style of dual coil setup as eachother and both were solved by clicking the ignition leads down properly. The MX5 in particular was fine until about 1/3 throttle, then it would just fart and crackle on all 4 cylinders and was incredibly slow. Not sure if individual coil packs would act the same, but it's possible?

Anyone in the 14" wheel gang? I have a 60-100/14 road legal knobbly that needs a home. $69 now $58.

I'll send you an invoice.

Was that meant to go in the swapmeat thread @Nominal?