Roman

Nothing at all! It's still in the works and will definitely get finished. But just too many projects right now. Some other Toyotas have also joined the family in the meantime. An early 80s Crown from the South Island that is frigging immaculate (But blown 5m needs replacing) and my brother bought a TE71 liftback with full AE86 running gear in it. (Needs just general tidy up) We've got a good* 5M in the spare soarer body, so will yank that to fit in the crown some time soon. *Still shit but it runs

I'll be there I'll be there I'll be there

Air through the bonnet isnt necessarily a good plan, if you look at my aerodynamic cross section of the carina there is actually lower pressure and not so much airflow there. Take a look at @Truenotch's AE86 project, he has quad throttles on a beams engine with what I consider to be the ideal intake setup. (Apart from no filter haha) After talking to the very talented Mr Robbie Whitley, he has suggested one of the primary reason for quad throttles is that when you start using a very aggressive cam. With a single throttle at part throttle the vaccum in the plenum pulls the air and fuel back out of the cylinder and exhaust gas back through. Which means your motor runs like a sack of shit. But having quad throttles means that the vaccum is lower, and also there is only so much area behind the throttle plate to blow back into so the problem is reduced. Another big benefit of quad throttles is being able to easily change the length of your runners which can push your powerband around a bit... Very hard to do this with a plenum. Also, just re: under bonnet temperatures... The High Performance Academy 350Z gains ~15kw if you tilt the intake pipe up so its getting colder air instead of air behind the radiator. Can make a big difference!

Thanks Matt, I am currently using 5kg front and 3.5kg rear. This is a reasonably nice balance but with a touch of understeer so I might add the rear swaybar on now. Or otherwise get some new rear springs made in 4kg or 4.5kg.

Yes you can get it working but you need to keep the e-throttle working. You also need to keep the factory MAF housing or it will likely run like an absolute bucket of shit. Get the e-throttle working and then use an OBD2 scanner to see what other error codes you are addressing and fix them one by one. Then after a lot of effort to have a car that doesnt run right you will probably give up or buy an ECU. You dont need a drive by wire throttle pedal as it has a TPS and APS on both sides of the factory throttle body. You just need a cable pulling on it then it sorts out the rest.

Yeah back in the day it seemed like there were very few events to attend and needed to find a group and organise them. Now with Playday on track and similar, it's just too easy and no organisational hassles for anyone. Best thing to do is just try talk a bunch of mates into all piggybacking onto someone elses event. Dont be worried about the fast cars on track, I have lots of cars pass me and also pass lots of cars. I would rather be the slowest car in a stint full of good drivers than the fastest car in a group of people who are not experienced on the track. (Have seen some erratic swerving, not letting people past, or other stupid behaviour) I'm moving back up to the North Island in the next few weeks so I'll be keen to get to some more events again. In the meantime I will give Adam (other admin on trackday page) a rev up about keeping it up to date haha.

Carbs affected by heatsoak / lack of airflow through them somehow perhaps? Under vaccum the boiling point of petrol becomes quite low, and the hot intake manifold helps vaporize fuel very well. So I would not imagine puddling to be the first thing to suspect under those conditions. Do your carbs have a return line? Or does fuel just sit in them getting hot.

So when it is "steady state" is it fine though? Like if at 3000rpm constant throttle does it have same problem? Or only in transient conditions.

Perhaps you have the problem where the longer runners mean you need more initial enrichment, as in, when you stab the throttle your engine wants to intake (for example) 400cc of air per cylinder but your runners are say 500cc in volume so you're getting that initial gulp of air before the any extra air/fuel comes out of the carb.

One solution is to use springs inserted behind the pistons that pushes them back out. Causes a tiny amount of drag but makes life less scary. Sounds like an absolute bastard to change the pads though haha.

Today I learn something interesting about caliper placement. The 350Z at work has some big ass Stoptech calipers with some big floating discs on it. Which now causes the problem of pad knockback... When you have a larger diameter disc, when the hub flexes it maginfies how much the outer edge of the disc moves. When you have a 4 pot caliper located on "top" of the disc, (as per 350Z) this means that the disc is being pushed against the pads which pushes the pistons in during hard cornering. A 2 or 1 pot slider caliper is more resilient to this problem because the caliper just moves with the disc. If you put the caliper at the 3 or 9 o clock position instead, with the start of the pad just above or below the centreline of the disc. Then you are much less affected by the hub flexing under cornering and you dont get knockback. (as much) There are kits for the 350Z to relocate the caliper to this position, for this reason. Pad knock back sounds scary as fuck. Coming in hot to a corner then your pedal sinks haha.

If we've been booted out of the venue no worries - We can just have the meet on the street in front of his house.

Definitely keen! Just had some school friends in town this weekend who are only in NZ once every few years. pics look awesome cant wait for the next one.

Sorry guys cant make this today but keen to catch up at some point

Should be fine as Kyteler definitely isnt funny

So Manfield finishes up... And I'm enjoying doing superlap and the camaraderie between competitors. Buuut everything else in life was starting to feel a little stale. I have been daydreaming about moving to the South Island for the last few years, but I'm not a planner person... I figure if I wait until I have a plan, I will never do it. So I made a bold move - To just hand in 30 days notice at my IT Manager job, with no idea what I'm going to do next. I knew this meant sacrificing the remaining rounds of Superlap, and would probably lead to some hard times financially and otherwise. But it was just what I felt was necessary. All I knew was that I wanted to move out of Auckland for a while and start on a fresh page after some tough times over last year or two. A few days after this, I see an ad pop up on facebook... "Remote Dyno tutor/manager at HP Academy in Queenstown" Awww hell yes, could that be any more the ideal career/city change, at exactly the right time?! I applied for the job - and got it Then not long after, thanks to Bigfoot, I had some accommodation sorted too. It was the most low effort career/city change ever! Within the course of a week it went from my family probably thinking I was a bit of an idiot for quitting my job without a plan. (and a fair bit of doubting myself as well) to, "God damn it you're a jammy bastard Dave" To anyone who has along the way thought "David why not just take your car to a tuner instead of wasting your time doing all of these stupid tests/graphs/etc" Well, all of these things that I've done were a major contributing factor towards me getting the job. So there's probably some motivational message there about following your dreams or something. But end result is I'm pretty happy right now, and working at a company where drawing graphs and looking at datalogs etc is par for the course. Which is bloody exciting. So I packed my echo full of essential stuff and drove on down to start a new way of life down here. So far so good! Keeping some relevance to this thread though - My Carina is still back up in Auckland. It's packed full of "want but dont need" items, it's ready to hit the road as soon as I've organized a place down here that has a garage to store it in. I've been learning so much from Andre and the team, it feels like getting an apprenticeship from one of the best engine tuners in the southern hemisphere. I feel like I'm only just smart enough to be on the cusp of understanding some of the stuff Andre talks about. But I think I know just enough, that he doesnt feel like it's a waste of time explaining things to me. I expect that by the time I've got the Carina down here, I'll be ready to redo my tune from scratch using the new knowledge and tools now available to me. Cant wait! A new southern chapter of graphs, nerdiness, and awesomeness awaits the Carina. The next post in this thread, when the time comes. There will be graphs, oh yes, there will be graphs.

The last few trackday events I've done, they have all been on very hot tracks in summer time... lots of grip for R888s which were coming up to temperature nicely, very quickly! Thanks to all this grip I've had, I've been able to wind the brake bias heaaaapppssss more rearwards than I ever have been able to previously. Which is awesome, it stops the car up great. Then, the Manfield round of Superlap... I was greeted by an intially damp, very cold track. First run out, feeling a little too confident... by lap 3(?) I still had almost no heat in the tyres, was pushing it a little too hard, and the brake bias caught me out. I spun off turn 1, ending up stuck in the kitty litter which was embarassing, and I felt bad for delaying the session while I was towed out. I went back to the pits, took a few winds out of the brake bias (it isnt adjustable in the cabin) Second session, wowzers! Track came up to temp nicely and the car was running great. I was still getting familiar with things as I've never driven there before. But had an awesome time. I was driving conservatively as I didnt want to be "that guy" that crashes twice in a row haha. Feeling confident lining up for the third session of the day, and ready to push a bit harder. I get waved out onto the track and my driveshaft makes a clunk noise. Try go forward again... same thing... shit. I head back to the pits, and it looked as though the hanger bearing had crapped itself, so the centre of the 2 piece driveshaft was free to flop around. It felt okay to drive "normally" so I said my good byes to friends at the track and went back to accomodation (Thanks Lachlan) I packed the car up and started driving home. I got about an hour out of Manfield, and driveshaft noise was getting bad going up a hill when it was under load - Boom! The front UJ broke, and the driveshaft went smashing around in the tunnel like a MFer! Lucky I had driveshaft loops in place or it would have made a bloody big mess. Once I got safely to the side of the road, and had a look under the car. It dawned on me that I am 6-7 hours drive from home, with a car that's fucked haha. About 1/2 an hour later, something magic happened! Some other competitors saw my car on the side of the road, and stopped up. They couldnt really help, but wanted to see if they could assist. Then some more competitors came past - this time with their track car on the trailer behind tow vehicle. They stopped up, unloaded their track car from the trailer so they could tow my car home - and drive their track car instead. These guys lived near Hampton downs, but drove all of the way to Glendene in the pissing rain to help me get my car home by about 2am. Which meant they didnt get back to theirs until 3 or 4am after a very long day. Absolutely blown away by the help. Big thanks to Jakke and Matt for being awesome well beyond the call of duty. Sometimes when you're up to your eyeballs in shit, and someone helps you out - The sort of thing you remember for a very long time. Some good memories and good friends, made by a bad situation.

Love your work NickJ! I need to get schooled up on some Arduino stuff.

I dont have anything in particular to say right now, except for that I've started working at HP Academy in Queenstown. I have learned a mind blowing amount of stuff from Andre and co already. Motec M150 is just some next level shit. Sheezus. With the M150 you can write your own code for the firmware, today we were trying idea of IMAP / EMAP as a load axis. (intake manifold pressure divided by exhaust manifold pressure pre turbo) Which is a bit of a mind bender to me but apparently this compensates for VE changes etc relating to altitude and turbine efficiency way better than just MAP or MGP. Next step is to take the GT86 for a hoon up a mountain and see how well the AFR stays on target. I'm not sure if it's obvious from this post yet but holy crapping Christ. What a company to work for. The other day Tony Quinn's Pikes peak car was in for a tune before heading off again. It runs a VR38DETT mid mounted, runs two turbos > two intercoolers > two plenums (connected with a balance pipe) Looking at the intercoolers with the thermal camera we found a 20 degree temp difference left to right. Some more poking around from there and we found that one of the intercooler hose clamps was loose, so intercooler on that side had lower mass flow so lower temp. TL;DR: This thing is a fucking weapon, Andre got another 100hp out of it just with tuning. Same boost. ~950kg and now ~605hp atw with plenty of head room. Just stopped there because he wasnt sure if it will still be drivable, going to Highlands for testing on Saturday.

Yeah! Keen sounds good.

I think your car is safe for the next 10 years then

I've loved to piss and moan about how I think these are annoying and a stupid idea. But after having a driveshaft fail at 80ish kph on the weekend, Oh boy am I glad I had these loops fitted! My brake and fuel lines would have taken a hammering if not for these - They are a good idea, even in my case where all factory parts were used within factory power levels.

I'm all about the road trips! Depending on housing situation it might be a month or three until I've got anything Oldschool down there. But always keen to go for a wander or explore somewhere new.

I'm moving to Queenstown in a few weeks! Looking forward to meeting some South Island OS crew.

I had good success with insulating my fuel rails, with plastic washers under the bolts. Rather than steel bolts going into hot head > rail directly. I actually bought a fuel cooler to help address this problem but didnt need to after that. Previously the whole thing would be too hot to touch if I had say 1/4 tank or less on a hot day.