Esprit

Yeah I had a solid day in the Lantis. Lot more fast cars out there now (DC2s, SW20 Gen3s etc) so harder up the front. Qualified 8th in the first race and was up to 6th before throwing it away on a botched passing manoeuvre and finishing 9th.

 

Second race started 12th, worked my way up to second, chased down the leader and had a great gap to the big group scrapping over third place, before a safety car closed everyone up, and then I got mugged by all the more powerful cars in the final three laps to finish seventh.

 

Think I ended the day fifth or sixth on points, and sit fourth overall in the series.

Good luck Michaelme come say hi tomorrow, I'm in the black Lantis #24

So we'll be racing about 11:15am and about 4:15pm

success!

Prepp'd right, POR15 will stick to most things for decades. I POR15'd the weathered floorpans on my Triumph TR7 back in 2000, still look like the day I did them almost 14 years later.

AAh, you've got an SW20, for some reason I thought you had a DC2,and I was gonna ask why so wide on the rear

Assuming you won't be running any wider, just an inch larger in diameter?

What pisses me off, is if it was an armed robbery or armed home invasion, or if soemeone in town had a gun pulled on them, it'd be headlining news.... because it's just a carjacking though, it doesn't even rate a mention

Well it's been a while since I've done a proper update.

Had the Exige out on track a few weeks back at the Club Lotus NZ twilight trackday at Hampton Downs. Had a couple of fun sessions, and despite me not driving it too hard and the brakes protesting a little (the discs are well due for replacement) it still managed to lap in the 1:14s easily, within a second or so of my best times.

On the way home the car started making a bit of a jangling sort of noise I knew all too well. I suspected that engine vibration had broken another manifold support bracket but inspection last weekend showed that the bolt that secures it to the block had come out and disappeared. It was about a 3 hour job to replace the bastard because it's probably one of the least accessible fasteners on the whole car! With only minimally skinned knuckles I managed to sort it.

With that fixed, I was going to take the car up to the "Caffeine and Classics" monthly meet up in Takapuna. On the way up there though, I noticed the slight grinding/rubbing noise I occasionally get from the left rear was back and probably worse than ever. Everything felt fine though but I decided to go home. It's one of those annoying problems that you can't replicate on the jack just by spinning the wheel but a half hour of rolling the car back and forth in the garage pointed to it being the left outer CV joint making a little noise.

The CV joints were one of the things I didn't do in the rebuild, I simply cleaned out and re-packed them with grease as well as cleaning up the salt corrosion and painting with POR15, so with all the track abuse I've given it,it made sense that one was likely to be on the way out.

So, with a new CV joint here from EliseParts, I got to fitting.

Here's the old CV off the car and on the bench:



I was going to paint the new CV as I did the old one, but given the car doesn't see a lot of the winter running these days, I figured it'd stay looking okay as it was. It doesn't match the other side now, but I'll probably replace the right hand CV too before long as preventative maintenance.

It all went nice and without a hitch really, which is nice. I thought I'd post up some photos of the wheel well area so y'all could see how the finishing job I did has held up over the last few years. While the car certainly isn't a daily driver it's certainly done a number of trips away and a dozen or so trackdays in the last couple of years, and it's been about 5 years since I did a lot of the initial work on the wishbones etc and they've held up really well I think!







Just need to give everything a quick spanner check and torque up before I take it out for a test drive in the morning. The Club Lotus Christmas Breakfast is on in the morning and the show/shine, so I might head along there to test it out

I've not seen a schedule yet.

Definitely the Tea, Richy is the Crumpet

Mmmmm Tea and Crumpets!

 

Hopefully be there Friday to get back in the groove, definitely be there next weekend, having some fun

Meh, I'd use the LT77, they're as tough as nails, still common and cheap enough and bolt straight up. They'll handle as much power as an RV8 will put out, unless you're looking at spending in excess of $15k building a mega horsepower engine. Hell, even some of the early TVR Griffith 500 5L engines run through an LT77 with no worries, making massive torque.

If you didn't get a de-embrittlement done on the springs immediately after plating, they're probably toast as they'll crack in service. Also, blasting springs tend to stress relieve them and make them soggy as hell. Springs should be painted or powdercoated and that's it. The rest is looking good

Haha Glad you enjoyed seeing it! Maybe I will start a thread for the roach if I've got some free time... although obviously we can't mod it a whole hell of a lot!

 

 

 

Our 2kCup work in progress paying homage to the '96BTCC season.

Well it's been a couple of quiet months for the Lotus over here. I always use it little in the winter, and despite it being an unseasonably warm/dry one over here I've had a bunch of other things on my plate which have kept me otherwise occupied.

Now being a mortgage-slave, I can't really afford to abuse the Exige in the way I'd ideally like to, so I've decided that the Exige will become more of a toy than a track hack and will come out for the odd trackday here and there and also for some road fun. That way I can avoid breaking it and having to sell organs to get it fixed! However, I still have a track-fun itch that needs regular scratching so I've decided to go racing on the cheap, so a friend and I have decided to field a team for the 2kCup here in NZ (www.2kcup.com).

This is basically a class for cars valued and purchased for less than $2000, sub 2 litre standard, normally-aspirated road cars. The idea is to basically buy it and race it completely unmodified. Some small modifications are allowed, and any changes to the car are limited to swapping out factory-optioned bits. Engines must be 100% standard, rollcages and race-seats and harnesses etc are optional to try and keep costs down and the cars are all slow enough that they're not really needed anyway.

The sensible cars at the front of the field are SW20 MR2s and Honda Integra DC2s it would seem. Liking a challenge and to do things a bit differently, we decided to go completely left-field and contest it in a Mazda Lantis Type R... which is somewhat boat-like in comparison to the opposition! Our aim, however, is to have the best sounding car in the competition! Such a shame we have to run a stock exhaust system as it sounds hilarious with a straight-pipe!

When we picked her up, she smelled like an ashtray, had various bits spraypainted matte-black, had completely the wrong suspension fitted and even had the remnants of stockings stretched over the lights as makeshift-tints! Beautiful! We christened her "The Cockroach"





We set about tidying her up, getting it road-legal again (another series requirement) and sorting out the suspension:



We also dropped as much weight as we could legally do, by removing things such as the sunroof (as the Lantis-R was available without one), so I decided to turn my hand at making up a carbonfibre sunroof-patch by making up a fibreglass mould:



... and then using it to lay-up a carbon sandwich panel on top of, which turned out pretty passable for a $2k junker!



Initial track testing has shown that while we probably won't be in the hunt for the championship, we're about on the pace of the lead bunch and hopefully can have some good battles.... it's a laugh being on track and not having a care in the world about blowing it up or bending it! It means you can rag it mercilessly!

Of course, having the new garage makes it a hell of a lot easier to do this kind of project and not having to worry about storing the Lotus or having cars in the way of each other when you want to work on one or t'other is nice!

It's actually looking kind of emptyish at the moment as I've suddenly become the focal point for all my friends wanting to do jobs on their various machines!



Back in on SEXIGE, it's still running really well, although I've still got a weeping gearbox casing which will need sorting in the mid-term. Given that the box needs to come out, I've decided I'm going to save up and fit a lighter flywheel and twin-plate clutch since the engine in this kind of tune really deserves something a bit less ponderous than the standard setup, and because I've already had one single-plate clutch fail on me, my trust in it is a little dented. I'll get them sorted out and over here before I pull the box off and apart to get the porous casting sealed up, which should fix the leak. It's only an annoyance value as in traditional Lotus fashion, the leaks always make a hell of a lot of mess for very little oil!

The only other issue I've had recently is a case of running rich and a bit of a hot-starting issue where it's prone to flooding. After polling the sensors it seems that my TPS has gone, as last month I noticed it sitting at 14% throttle on idle, and while it's usually not that bad, a test drive today showed it to be sitting anywhere from 0.9% to 6.2%, which isn't right. I pulled the old one off and have a new one on the way to re-fit, which should hopefully save me the hassle in future of being stuck on a petrol-station forecort rapidly flattening my battery trying to fire it up!

TPS Removed:


And the offending item:


And the car as she sits now:




First day of spring here today so looking forward to putting some miles on her this summer and the odd track outing too

This is a great thread. I had thought about getting the loom for my car made up by a shop, then I heard that for the new V8 series they were charging 8k a loom, so major change of heart, selfy coming up sometime soon (ish)...

And that's for a loom they've got a pattern for, as in I bet if you were to order a loom of similar complexity, for a different race car, the loom would cost about $11k+

Did Richard @ MSEL do your loom George? It looks amazing.

 

I so badly want to buy some Motec gear but I just can't bring myself to spend half the value of my entire car on a dash.

My work was done by Glenn Suckling at GDS Automotive. He's as methodical as they come, takes his time (which costs money) but he took the time to get it exactly how I wanted it, even when the way I wanted it was confusing/illogical/difficult because I was trying to achieve a certain look or feel. MoTeC stuff is nice and I'm glad I've got it now that I've spent the money, but in hindsight, I think I could have saved a buck or two here It's lovely to use and customise though, I've added all sorts of nice little tweaks to my control, and know that I'll never run out of I/O as I can just expand as necessary. Not that this car is getting any fancier than it currently is, it's just nice to have the option

Rookie, you're right. Same with stuff like MoTeC, the price tends to be the price. I was happy in the end with my wiring/ECU install, because at least it was all being done by one bloke who'd stand behind his workmanship, and I was happy to pay for that. Given the wiring was the one and only part of the build that I wasn't taking ownership of and didn't have an intimate knowledge of (I'm colourblind, wiring isn't my forte!) I wanted to make sure that it was up to the quality of all the work I'd put in up to that point.

Couple of my Autosport connectors were about $250 per side, (2 sides for each connector) and I had three of them, so you can see how it adds up.

The benefit of it all is the loom integrates all the factory stuff (like the rear lights, alarm sensors etc) with a whole bunch of other stuff I've added like a gearbox cooler pump and temp sensors, fuel pressure sensors oil temp/pressure sensors etc, with the easy ability to expand into the system should I want to add more stuff later on. It's also proven extremely reliable.

In the end, on a $100k car it's not silly, or on a dedicated race car build at the top level it makes good sense. But on most builds you can do as good a job with off-the-shelf connectors you can get from RS components etc and standard wiring/shrinkwrap. The labour etc that you put into it and the skill of the loom installer will make much more of a difference to final appearance than fancy connectors and loom gear.

I think my loom cost in excess of $4k on its own. The connectors, DR-25, etc added up to about half that, before it had even been assembled. That, combined with about $10k of MoTeC gear made it an especially spendy couple of months, given that I'd budgedted about $5k for ECU, wiring and installation!

Yeah, most autosport connectors are similar to mil-spec but are generally lighter construction. Cars generally don't use mil-spec connectors these days as they're far heavier than they need to be, and don't need to be explosion proof, corrosion proof in salt water etc.

Nice info! And those looms are very pretty!

Warning, it does get VERY expensive though, I had my engine and rear looms (and some datalogging stuff up front) done in similar fashion and it got spendy real quick. The loom was done in DR25 and Deutsch Autosport connectors were used along with Deutsch Mini-DT for all the new stuff, with Tyco connectors being used where the loom needed to interface with the OEM stuff. The loom was made to be backwards-compatible with the original engine/loom/ECU should I ever wish to revert to 100% factory spec.

vsd can be used to switch single to three phase probably cost less than getting three phase hooked in.

blow using just 100mm for a 2 post unless you have heaps of reinforcing  and have had the hardness increased on your concrete.

digging a footing and casting a big plate in there with the bolts sticking up would be the go.

shit if it goes wrong probably only one end of the car would stove the ground?

It's all about how you spread the load though. Your house weighs many, many tonnes, yet is supported quite happily on a 100mm slab, because the weight is dispersed throughout the edge.

We do robotic installs where a robot needs to be anchored down to a massively thick slab, but you can work with a thinner slab if you spread the load out. If you're using a 100mm slab you simply need to make up some arms to spread the load wider to gain back the margin lost through having a thinner slab.