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UTCC 2017 and Hyperfest

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TSiAWD666

Supporting Vendor
2,648
899
Aug 15, 2003
Herndon, Virginia
Last year
Last year's UTCC and Hyperfest event ended in a mixed bag. I was so stressed with what happened I stepped away from the car for about four months and didn't feel like updating anything. I'll try to keep this short but since I added nothing in the UTCC 2016 thread I wanted to include some info here.

Here are a couple on-track pics from that event:
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The first day of UTCC, by honestly a bunch of dumb luck, went well. Despite the front of the car's alignment going wonky suddenly not allowing me to turn right very well (more on that later), my turbo manifold heat shield mounts breaking fairly quickly, and the turbo manifold to turbine bolts constantly backing out resulting in lag and burning/melting stuff, we clawed out a 2:01.724. That's pretty slow mind you as the year before I ran a 2:00.1 and I felt I left a bunch on the table back then.

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I didn't expect anything from those results, and I was still stressing about the turbo bolts and the screwed up alignment (which felt like it was getting worse) since I still had time trials the rest of the weekend. Also, as most of you likely weren't aware, that while there are lots of award categories in the UTCC a Mitsubishi Eclipse fits in very few of them in recent years. The only one I think I even fit in was the Ultimate Production AWD category, but... I had no chance at this as there were these two AWD cars in the mix:
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(that's something like an 800whp GTR, I actually forget the real number but it was high, with a Nissan Nismo GT3 aero package)
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(a TTU Evo from another region, I think he said 600+ whp?)

So at the end of the day I'm sitting at the awards dinner in the far back with my back to the awards ceremony enjoying my beer, barely paying attention... when I hear "blah blah blah blah JOHN FREUND!" I knee-jerked a "WHAT?" quite loudly, causing a bit of laughter from the crowd. I walked up and they handed me this:
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I was just laughing for a good few minutes trying to figure out how the hell this happened. It turns out both the Evo and GTR broke! There was a Subaru STi that should be competitive with me but he was still breaking in his car and ended up not being close. I heard the GTR had electrical issues and called in favors with Nissan to get permission to pull parts off the track's GTR pace car (yeah I guess they have that much money and pull) and still couldn't get in a single lap. Lucky me! Honestly I'm not proud, but it's still kind of neat, a nice memento of all the years I've been doing this event :)

Ok so moving on to the next day. The rest of the weekend was Time Trials in the TT2 class with NASA. I had been dealing with the turbine bolts by re-tightening them every session, though they fried the turbo bag and changed my brand new tial wastegate from a bright anodized (and pretty!) red to an orange color from the hot stream of exhaust gas spewing out. Even melted some of the timing cover and blew the melted plastic all over the side of the power steering reservoir. Well in three sessions I forget what I ran but it got slower and slower, back to a 2:04, as the alignment issue got worse. In the very last session of the day this happened:
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Pretty neat way they get dead cars on a trailer :) If it's not obvious what happened there, the culprit was this:
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Yeah. Tire exploded at 130mph on the back straight. Car handled it just fine, nice and smoothly, and I pulled off leaving a huge debris trail on the track I was told later. When the tow truck guy came up to my car I asked sheepishly "Is the fender still there?". He looked down for a sec, back up and said "NOPE!". Damage basically was the entire fender lost, plus the corners of the bumper cover and sideskirt, along with the wiring harness in that area. Here's the car packed up ready to go home:
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So because of that incident I missed the awards ceremony for that day as I was still out on track with my car. The next day I found out I still somehow won 2nd place in a field of seven cars, winning myself not only a free Hoosier tire but some Hawk bucks:
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So that was it for 2016 for racing. I didn't post any videos because the times were slower plus some of the key ones somehow were corrupted anyway.
 

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That is some seriously rough luck. :barf::cry:

Will you be able to replace Brilliant's aero kit? Surely they kept the molds...

Your car is really amazing and it's awesome you go track it. Hope this doesn't keep you down and out too long.
 
By the looks of it in your gallery, you got that damage sorted out.
Good to see it restored! I see the suspension is getting some love :thumb:
 
Will you be able to replace Brilliant's aero kit?

^This.

And any idea why the tire went? There are no clearance issues that would cause it to rub on something I assume?
 
Ah sorry, I wasn't finished, just ran out of time last night to continue :)

I didn't explain my theory on what happened with the tire. Overall I think this was... my fault. The problem with the alignment I learned on the second day while troubleshooting was that the bushings in the driver's upper a-arm anchors were torn to all hell. We couldn't see this with the car in the air, but I had the hunch this was something with a bushing so I put the car on the ground and looked around at bushings while a friend moved the steering back and forth. The a-arm was wiggling around like crazy up there. I'd had this problem before with the bushings in these SPC a-arm anchors though they'd lasted a few years before whereas these only lasted like three weekends. These were my only remaining set, and while I had already put in motion a solution to this problem I didn't have that completed. So normally someone would stop driving but... I was having too much fun even if the car handled like shit in right turns and was trying monstrously to pull left. I mean I was still easily driving 2:04 on track, it wasn't THAT bad was it? So what did I do? I kept on driving!

Yes, I'm stupid, but I really was having fun and I hadn't been on track in sooooo looooooong. So I think I overheated the tire because I think the tire was being pushed outwards causing massive toe out on just that side. So for anyone reading this... don't be stupid, when you see a problem in your suspension or anything else for that matter... calm down, step back, be an adult, and don't go back on the race track :) I mean seriously... 130mph... I could've died. Haha I'm pretty stupid and lucky.

Road to Recovery
Here's the summary of the damage:
1) I needed four new tires for this set of Hoosier R7's. Yay for AWD. Why? the other tires were worn enough that I couldn't replace just one, or two on one end.
2) I needed a new engine bay wiring harness for a 99 turbo due to specifics in the ABS. The tire had shredded the wiring near the ABS, and taken the wiring from the abs all the way to the interior block where it connects completely out of the car (not sure we ever found that, I'm sure the track officials eventually did during cleanup).
3) Fender was completely destroyed.
4) Front quarter of the sideskirt was destroyed.
5) Corner of the bumper cover was destroyed. I actually found the canard mostly intact though!
6) Door was scuffed up thanks to tire rubber smacking all over it, but really most of it could be cleaned off. The little door cap on the bottom of the door though was torn off and I thought lost. I was pretty bummed as those are near impossible to find for the 97-99 body style anymore thanks to all the conversions people did. I mentioned it to the track workers and next morning I found it laying at the information shed, someone had found it!

Seriously, for what happened... it really wasn't that bad at a glance, until you start to puzzle out just how you fix it all at which point you realize this is absurdly expensive to fix and time consuming. It was really a rough time getting her back together (and she's not done completely as of writing this!).

Wiring Harness
This wasn't so bad actually. Specifically what happened was the tire yanked out three? four? male harnesses that plug in at the driver's footwell area clean out of their female halves, plus the ABS sensor wire (thankfully leaving a good amount still connected to the sensor), and then shredded the wiring harness in front of the tear near the ABS. The harness that were yanked had their locking clips destroyed so this may... become an issue at some point but overall I was kind of shocked everything generally was intact.

A gracious fellow DSM enthusiast that lived nearby that I'd met at a car show I think gave me a completely unmolested 99 GSX engine bay harness. Garrett Mealing, if you're reading this, THANK YOU!! I was going to just pull out my existing harness, modify his to match my slight wiring modifications, and then install the new one, but... ugh that is so much work I learned! To get to the part that connects on the passenger side I was definitely going to need to pull my fender amongst a bunch of other things. I kept looking at it and dreading the work. So I did the arguably stupid thing... I lopped off my harness around the ABS just before it frayed, and lopped off the same section of the new harness, and went to town with 3M butt connectors and heat shrink tubing. I... didn't take any pictures of this because, well, when I was done it looked like an unmolested OEM harness so I figured who cared what it looked like :)

You might ask why I didn't buy one from Ohm Racing. Well, they hadn't released theirs yet sadly. Would have ordered one on the spot had they released it last year.

It didn't all go smoothly. First, my hand cramped to hell crimping so many connectors, must have been like 60-ish. I couldn't really move my right hand properly for a couple days. Second, when I put it all together and tried to fire up the car, it turned on for a few seconds then POP and everything was dead. Dead ignition switch fuse (which is one of those 30amp giant fusible links in the engine bay). I was pretty puzzled and figured I missed something, mixed up wires in the re-wiring, or something else. I went over everything and probably popped four other ignition switch fuses before giving up temporarily. I ordered up a 30AMP circuit breaker, attached it to the fuse pins, and continued to check stuff.
1) Fuses. I pulled every fuse in the engine bay fuse box and put them back in one at a time, no luck. I then tried for the hell of it the driver's footwell and put them in one at a time, none had an effect. Honestly didn't make sense for these to be related as they're all lower amperage than the engine bay fuse and would pop first if they were, but I was desperate.
2) Non-oem electrical connections. I disonnected everything, like my EVC 5 boost controller, the SAFC, my RaceCapture Pro, my gauges... no effect.
3) I figured it had to be in the harness I worked on. So I took the four connections in the driver's foot well and connected the bare minimum that are needed for ignition switch power (I forget if it was one or two of them), and then with the remaining connected them one at a time. I found it! One of the harnesses had the fault.

So had to disassemble the wiring harness by removing all the protective shrouding and electrical tape. I began tracing down that wire. I saw no issues with its wires where my repairs were so I then started moving up the wires. I found something odd. In this one section above the fender (the whole wiring bundle routes along the underside of the fender) there were some blue wires with black stripe. In this one strange bundle of electrical tape... I found one of them connects to a bunch of black ground wires. W T F. Yes, same exact wire coloring, but one goes to ground, the other I have no idea (I think it's part of the ABS). The fix was simply to swap these two and voila! Car starts!

I really hate electrical work (and I have a BS in Electrical Engineering, go figure!).

Tires
Not much to say, I had one free tire thanks to my 2nd place finish, and I had to order three. The one wheel on the bad tire was just fine, no damage whatsoever which is pretty cool considering I was driving on raw flappy rubber as I slowed down and pulled off track.

Body Work
This is the real suck of all this. When this happened I immediately tried to get a hold of the guys with the molds. See, the whole fabrication of this body kit really was a mess, and I'm not sure how much dirty laundry I can share openly here. Here's my brief summary of my efforts to get replicated parts:
1) Andrew Brilliant doesn't own the molds. FXMD, or more specifically Ken Namimatsu, does. I look high and low and track down usable contact info for Ken.
2) Ken after many emails/phone calls responds, saying he can help get replicate parts made, BUT Ken doesn't have the molds himself. The original contractor that made them for Ken might and he has to get a hold of him
3) Ken never responds for months after this.
4) I think I figured out who the secret mystery contractor was, and while he responds once positively, he never responds again.

So I'm f'd. No molds, no part copies. So I try to come up with a plan. I considered moving to v2 which Carbonetics is working on for Andrew, but his time schedules are ridiculously unreliable and V2 wasn't ready last summer (heck, it's not even ready now as of this writing!). Kevin Kovatch, aka @greengoblin here on dsmtuners, to the rescue! I won't go over every step of body work hell but basically Kevin loans me both a fender and sideskirt from his car., and he gave me his canards and sideskirt airflow vane thingies as he won't be using them in his build (I love you man, you made this all possible!). Mr. Spoiler, the original shop that did my body install, have the job to repair things. Here's what they did:
1) Create a re-usable mold of the fender
2) Replicate the fender
3) Create a partial temporary mold of the front of the sideskirt, replicate that front section, and mold into the existing sideskirt
4) Recreate from scratch the front driver's corner of the bumper cover and the diffuser.
5) Repair some wear damage on the underside of the splitter where I'd worn all the way through.

Here's what the underside of the diffuser looked like after years of racing:
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Here was the body work close to completion:
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Here's what the car looked like when it was done:
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This was pretty complex work for them, especially as they didn't quite know how to replicate parts quickly and had to figure some stuff out as they went. The fender was recreated with three molds: one for the main fender body, one for the mounting flange at the engine bay, and one for the louvres. The bumper cover was made by making templates off the passenger side and flipping them, and then a looooot of eyeballing and custom work by hand. Hardest part I'm told was the vent for just in front of the tire with it being a fairly complex 3D shape. The sideskirt was the easiest. In the end they really did a phenomenal job, although the parts came out heavier than necessary due to I believe a bit of inexperience. Either way incredible work, but it took a lot for it to happen.

This took them about three months to do for me and probably the price of a small car. No, I'm not exaggerating. Thank god for annual bonuses, there went mine. Note for future racers with custom bodies... try to guarantee you have access to future parts! I really wish I'd found a way to buy the molds way back when I got this body kit, the investment would have really paid off here.

So at this point in the story there's still a bunch to repair, some I've mentioned, some I haven't, and there are a lot of modifications I am making too to hopefully make the car better faster stronger. I'll talk about those in my upcoming posts as they are ongoing as I type this.
 
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good luck John! hope all your new upgrades work well and you manage to set it all is such a short amount of time! just be safe and have fun at the end of the day!
 
I always forget to share this stuff, but it's good for the sponsors! If you're interested in my social media accounts and would like to follow/subscribe, here is my info:
https://www.facebook.com/john.freund.209

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBGCKvSoLKGn3FxCCNNPvng


More Recovery
So with the body fixed there's still a massive laundry list of tasks to get the car back to where it needs to where it was before. Since it might be interesting for people getting into racing what sort of things can happen I thought I'd include my list:
  • Fix exhaust manifold heat shield. We've been trying to get my big metal heat shield stable for many years, and we keep breaking the mounting brackets. Last year's attempt at a brack hanging from a bolt on the valve cover snapped within one session, so it's back to the drawing board.
  • Fix gauge cluster lighting. For some reason all my dash lights are out. Sadly it's not the fuse as I checked them when debugging the wiring harness stuff.
  • Change Oil
  • Change Brake Pads. Mine are only at about half but I'm swapping due to a sponsor change.
  • Change Spark plugs. I like to change these every couple events.
  • Replace the turbo/mani gasket that was burned from the loose turbo/mani bolts backing out repeatedly.
  • Replace the main water pipe heat insulation that was destroyed by the aformentioned gasket leak.
  • Replace and Re-locate the oil pressure sensor. This failed in the event (I have it on video the moment it happened, kinda neat). Relocate off the engine to a mount on the chassis to reduce vibration that causes frequent failures (this is a widely known issue by racers, I just never got around to it).
  • Replace the turbo blanket.
  • Replace the alternator (also fried by the exhaust leak).
  • Adjust tps voltage (somehow it's off)
  • Re-seal the engine bay and headlights. The old foam seals were removed during the body repairs.
  • Replace turbo/mani bolts with new OEM pieces drilled for safety wire, use Nord-Lock washers.
  • Install all the stickers that were lost from the body work (much of the work was talking to sponsors and getting them to send new ones!)
  • Fix the broken upper a-arm anchors
  • Re-align the car
  • Fix the damaged rear diffuser (one of the side mounts tore through the aluminum sheet metal a bit)
  • Get and install three new tires
  • Replace the driver front a-arm ball joint boot (it was shredded by the tire)
  • Clean the lexan (it has a nasty weird coating that the manufacturer says I can get off with a particular type of polish/cleaner)
  • Boost Leak Test
  • Fix the leaking Frontline Fabrication diff cover (leaks from the preload bolts as well as the very short vent up top) and prevent the preload bolts from working their way loose (which happens in the course of a single track weekend every single time). The design of the preload bolts sucks, and I've let Andrew know this many years ago and he has never offered a fix nor changed his design. So we're going to fix it.

This is actually not that bad a list after an event (ignoring the body work part).

So the body work finished right in the beginning of April, leaving me just enough time for the above with a comfortable buffer if there were any issues with the work (which believe me, there are ALWAYS hidden issues with things, so always give yourself double the time you really need, including buffer time to order parts, then order replacement parts for when the wrong parts are sent...).

I wasn't quite satisfied though with the car as it sat, so rather than just fix the car before this year's racing I really wanted to further improve the car because, like everyone on this site, I love modifications :) So I actually have quite a bit of modifications in the works and with the above work really very little time to do it in.

MOAR MODS
Some of these are pretty exciting ones for me as they've been on the to-do list forever and I can't wait to see how they help the car.

Spherical Bearings Everywhere!! (well, almost everywhere)
Everyone always assumes I already did this. I can't blame them. You might be asking yourself right now "Why the hell doesn't he have these?" Ok so I have been running on rubber bushings everywhere except on the sway bars up to now. Why?
  • Switching is expensive. Or a hell of a lot of annoying work to switch to a poly or spherical. Poly is easier because bushing sets exist, but still a lot of work to take out the stock bushings. Spherical is very hard because you have to do a lot of engineering on your own to figure out how to make sphericals fit, as maybe two to three 2g owners in the world (might be slightly more but I only know of two for sure, and one's never even actually driven on his to be sure they are safe) have made the switch and they didn't document anything for anyone else :)
  • No quantitative data that I could find showing a direct improvement to lap times. Seriously, I looked and looked and it's all anecdotes with no hard data.
  • I felt like seeing how far rubber could go. The car felt pretty good as it was, but I've never driven on track with a poly or spherical car so I had no basis for comparison.
  • Poly, I was told by many many racers, cracks and fails very quickly in a racing environment, requiring constant inspection and common replacement after a single season or less. Spherical has similar maintenance requirements but the failure mode is just a slightly loose bearing, not a potentially catastrophic failure like with rubber/poly.
  • Sphericals potentially transmit so much more energy to their mount points that reinforcement may be needed. It's already known the front upper a-arm anchor mounts crack quickly when switched, but other areas too might be needed as there is very little freely available data on this (mine is purely word of mouth from Andrew Brilliant, and I have none from anyone else actually).

So why now? The upper a-arm anchor bushings were torn and and I figured might as well drill out the old ones and replace them with sphericals as it's not too hard to puzzle out the dimensions. However when you put a super stiff bushing, especially a metal bushing, in one part of the suspension, while leaving others softer, you will end up transmitting more load to those other bushings, which could then speed up their failures. Really not ideal. So when you jump in with sphericals anywhere you really need to consider just going all in. Ok, so how much will that cost? Thankfully... by really just good luck in 2016 we, 2g owners, suddenly had access to a good number of replacement suspension arms that included sphericals! So here's what I got:
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These are the front upper a-arm anchors from my SPC arms. Not really applicable to 99% of you. However, not to worry, 99gst_racer and ec17pse are both working on upper a-arm replacements that will include sphericals here. On mine these were annoying because after removing the original bushing we found the hole was out of round. Actually, I had known that ahead of time thanks to greengoblin who had done this a long while ago. Well, I had bought bearings that were oversized that I thought would account for the out of roundness (requiring machining the hole slightly larger to round things out), and even had the bushings machined for those bearings. Well, it turns out I needed to machine more out of the anchor hole than I thought I would making my bearings, and the machined aluminum bushings (that cost me like $200 to get machined!). I'll have to see if I can sell those bearings to someone... sigh.

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Rear lower control arms from Paul Volk. Now... he might be upset that I'm sharing these but I want people to know his handiwork, he does produce some beautiful pieces. The reason he may be upset is he normally does not produce or sell these separate from his rear subframes, but he made a very special exception for me. Please do NOT go begging him to make you some. However, there is good news! User ec17pse is working on these with a very similar design and should have them ready for group buy later in the year.

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Front lower control arms from Paul Volk (99gst_racer). These lower the shock fork mounting position about half inch but also lower the ball joint from the upright a bit to improve roll center (making it harder for the car to roll, thus staying flat and keeping traction on the inner tires). You can also adjust camber ever so slightly with them but not much as you can quickly cause binding with the rear compression arm. We have some concern over the lowered fork mount as it means I will get a bit more suspension travel and that might give me enough to smack my a-arms up into the fender but we'll have to see. This is particular to my setup with a body height adjusted by spring perch only, and my really tall SPC A-arms. Also of concern is the screw cap for the ball joint (not visible here) as it can come loose and requires frequent monitoring and it's unknown really how tight you should keep it (which determines ball joint friction). I don't like unknowns on my racecar but I'll just have to play it carefully here. I'm not knocking the design, just making it clear these are not a simple change for anyone. Overall the build quality is fantastic and they do have positive racing review from Andrew Brilliant with a brief sting on them a few years ago, so my hopes are still high. Oh I forgot to mention they're supposed to be slightly lighter than stock I think? I forget...

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Rear Upper A-arms from Bobby Gould (ec17pse). These will replace my Ingall's camber adjustment in the rear and give me metal bearings via the inner rod-ends. These also potentially give some roll center adjustment but we'll have to see in the future about playing with those and for now will stay at the stock position. Oh I should point out the mounting brackets there are upside down from how Bobby intends them to be used... don't worry about that, just a bit of confusion with the installer but not important now as I'm using that position in the middle of the bolts like stock to keep things like they were with the old a-arms and mounts to minimize change to the car.

Ok in that picture you can also see I have a spherical in the rear upright at the top. During the install of these pieces I'm having sphericals installed into the rear uprights. The method chose was to make an aluminum sleeve pressed in from one side with a shoulder, and a c-clip holding that sleeve on the other end. There is a bearing inserted into the sleeve, also held in via a shoulder plus c-clip. Arguably this is... heavier. Why not go simpler with just a larger bearing? The answer is time. We have little time to get this done. So rather than have to pull out the uprights completely and drill them out for larger bearings, we opted for this method. The shop has the ability on-site to machine aluminum on a lathe on the spot so making stuff like this is very easy for them. Anyway, here's the rest of the rear mid-work:
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The blue arms there are rear trailing arms from Megan Racing. I randomly discovered these at the end of March and was shocked to find Megan producing parts for us like this. I ordered them just in case they would save my shop time and they turned out to be decently designed. Not the best though, they needlessly provide length adjustment that is not needed this all results in a part that is actually heavier than stock. However, it has a spherical bearing that looks decent and this is good enough to use until it starts failing, after which we'll just assemble or own that is much lighter. ec17pse actually already mocked up a prototype for this part and his was definitely lighter than stock.

I already have spherical bearings in my shock top-hats. The only place remaining is the front compression arm and at this time due to complexity in its design we're opting to leave it as rubber. I won't go into why that thing is a pain in the ass but we can talk about it if people want to. I do have plans though to tackle that at a later date. Right now I don't feel it's critical because I don't think it's heavily loaded except in dive situations (braking) and so don't guess it will impact my handlings like all the other connections.

Shocks
So you may have seen me laud the KW V3 as a great bang for your buck suspension in the $2-3k range. They really are and seem to have performed well. However for quite some time I've wanted to see what the next step up might do for me, with nudgings from my sponsor shop plus many other racers over the years. I decided this year to try it out. So without further ado...
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My shop is building a set of Ohlins ILX TTX36 shocks for the car. This is a pic of the front one, just upside down so the logo read properly :) We'll re-use the existing top-hats as they're perfectly fine. These shocks are still just low-speed double-adjustable, just like the KW V3, but... better? I guess we'll just have to see. I'm just having them built to match my existing spring rates and we'll play from there. Unfortunately the first go around from Ohlins weren't built properly as when we put them on the shock dyno they were way too soft. It's almost like they didn't re-valve them from base at all. So they were overnighted last Friday to Ohlins USA, where they'll be re-valved and overnighted back. It's not guaranteed these will be done in time but I sure as hell hope so. Even when they're done these are a real wild card to throw into the mix but, what the hell, I wanted to try them out. The good news here is once we puzzle out how to build these then the 2g DSM community will have an upscale racing shock option from my shop, RRT. Expect them to be in the $5-6k range which is very typical for this kind of setup.

You might ask why I picked these, or maybe why I didn't go to the next level which is the $10k range. My shop insisted from all their racing experience and tuning with customer cars that this is hands down the best shock in this level and it is severe diminishing returns when moving to the $10k and up sets. That's really it, I'm trusting their knowledge here and we'll see how things turn out. I'm fairly comfortable money-wise these days so I have more flexibility to really venture out and start trying more exotic stuff (at least relative to the car tech I'm used to for DSMs) and it's kind of exciting :)

Oh, almost forgot, supposedly these will be a few lbs lighter each shock compared to the KW V3. We'll see... but that's what my shop thinks after comparing them.

RaceCapture/Pro Mk3 with a tablet Dash display
If you've followed me you might already know that Autosport Labs, manufacturers of the RaceCapture line of Motorsport dataloggers, are a sponsor of me and the car. They've supported me for years now just because they loved the car and continue to take care of me. I've given back by writing a computer program that converts their data format to one usable in some much more advanced analysis software than what they've had time to develop themselves, plus I do my best to be a vocal supporter of their company and products, so it's not without mutual benefit. Last year they released the Mk3 version of their RaceCapture/Pro datalogger/telemetry system which I've been using since Mk1. They've been gracious to upgrade me at every release and they sent along this as soon as Mk3 was ready for shipment:
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That's what you get in the box for the most part. The molex connector there usually is a full harness with wires but they were falling behind during initial production and had to rush mine out with just pins (which is fine, my wiring is already in place). Also in the bottom left is a SensorX breakout board for making connections to sensors (connect one power/ground for all sensors, and places for pull-up/down resistors) simpler which is a separate add-on.

I plan to be using the Mk3 in my car to pull even more data, but also by displaying more data. One of the coolest features of the RaceCapture/Pro is connectivity wirelessly, both Bluetooth and WiFi, to iPhone and Android devices via the RaceCapture app, allowing remote display of information. I've been using this for years by using my personal phone, mounted above my head to my roll cage, for a live lap timer for realtime driver feedback. It's really awesome to know when I got a sector better, or when I should keep pushing it for that fastest lap. What I'm going to be doing shortly is simultaneously using my phone for the timing display, but then an additional Nvidia Shield 8" tablet mounted above my steering column as a dash display. I'm having my shop build the mount now, and I'll share pictures later of that as it progresses (they haven't yet gotten to it). If this works well I'll be removing my stock dash cluster entirely. I'll also then add a third device, likely to also be an Nvidia Shield tablet, mounted more in the center dash area for other gauges eliminating all the other gauges on top of my dash. This should really simplify my data setup and make things look quite futuristic :)

Another neat thing about this system is it can be used for realtime remote telemetry analysis. This will automatically utilize my cell phone, since I already connect it via bluetooth for my timing display, to stream all the data to the Podium service, which is provided free to users. I've... not really leveraged this in the past because I don't really have any crew that can watch things live for me and then call me over the radio when necessary, but for me at least it's need that anyone that is interested could watch my data live AS I go around a track with track position data and everything, along with any other cars using RaceCapture that happen to be there at the event. Really cool stuff here, and if I have time I will play with this soon You can learn more about this at https://podium.live

In the future I'll add linear potentiometers to the shocks to help with shock tuning, and probably some IR sensors for the tires. Here's one of the android/iphone apps displays just for the latter:
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Really cool stuff, right? Anyway, pictures to come!

If you'd like to learn more about RaceCapture products, follow this link: https://www.autosportlabs.com/racecapture_mk3_apex/

GoPro Hero 5
Ok, this isn't really an upgrade, but it's new. I received one for Christmas. I'll be mounting it to the rear where the license plate usually is to get some trailing footage as I haven't done that before. I may get a suction cup mount for it to for other angles. It's already tied into my Bluetooth remote so when I start my interior camera this one will start (assuming I remember to turn it on before I head to the pits). Sadly I can't permanently power it yet as there isn't a way to get it to auto-power-on when the usb port receives power (that I know of). I'll post pics of the mount later when I get to this (likely next weekend).

Larger Header Tank
I have an issue where I push coolant out no matter what and right now it pours out on top of my diffuser. I usually have to fill up every session otherwise in the middle of the second session I will start to see elevated temps (not overheating, but enough to start pulling timing a little). I believe my current header tank is too low relative to the coolant (it is half-filled when I am full on coolant) and/or not large enough capacity (I think it's like .7l, it's tiny), so I'm trying a larger one. Here's the 1.5 quart tank I'll be trying to use pending it can actually fit:
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TPMS System
Ideally I'd like one that ties in via CAN to my RaceCapture so I can see the readouts on one of my displays and have alerts there. However in the short time I had since I realized I wanted one of these I wasn't able to find a system that I could make work quickly. So what I'm going to test out on one set of tires is a USB-powered TPMS system that installs via caps on the valve stems. I have the caps and lock nuts being installed now before the new tires are on the wheels and re-balanced just in case they're heavy enough to make a difference (they feel borderline to me). I'm going to wire the USB into my car with a 12V to 5V USB converter I bought on eBay so it is always powered with accessory power. Here's what the unit looks like:
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I'll take pictures once it's installed and online. If this works, I'll install another system like this on my other set of wheels/tires and either swap the head units when I swap the wheels, or if I'm lucky the reader will read both sets of caps just fine.

Subframe Bushings
FINALLY. I have had these on my shelves for years and am finally getting them on the car. Mine are from @black_gst. I don't have pics I don't think of them off the car sadly... here's one from one of this threads and they all basically look like this:
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Doing this because if I'm going to make all the other connections in the suspension solid I might as well remove the sloppy subframe rubber too.

The pieces I can tell you from Adam are terrific, very well designed and as I'm told by the shop engineer working on my car they fit just right and go in fairly easily (the rears are already on, front might be as of today too). Also, initially my shop had concerns about how to put these in and Adam took a call out of the blue during his work day to allay any fears. Definitely a big thumbs up for him and his parts.

Differential Bushings
So I'm kind of jumping ahead here, but it kind of makes sense to list in the mods section. These were never in the plans but while working on the rear subframe bushings (those are actually already installed on the car as of last Thursday) it was discovered that my rubber rear diff bushings were completely toast. They looked like this:
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Torn all the way around. I was kicking myself because @black_gst also makes diff bushings and I forgot to buy them. Fortunately my shop has delrin in stock so they just machined some delrin with aluminum center sleeves for the bolts. I don't have pics of these yet.

Getting rid of wheel spacers
I have pretty big wheels and tires if you didn't know, 18x12 +16 with 315/30/18 Hoosier R7/A7 tires. With those specs I would normally hit the uprights and rub for sure. I have modified uprights with reinforcements on the back sides of the arms welded in place, and then material grinded out on the tire sides. A few years back we found this worked perfectly for the front and I have plenty of room for no spacers. However in the rear we rubbed and still needed a spacer. We took a look at this and think we have enough meet to grind to make space, though we aren't sure, so we're going to give it a shot, or at a minimum, reduce the side of the spacer needed. My two drivers for this are to reduce complexity (I hate having to worry about a loose part like a spacer) and to bring the tire out of the airflow (it just BARELY sticks out a bit right now).
 
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I forgot to include this earlier, here's last year's issue with the UTCC:
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Also in case anyone's interested while my car has been away I finally got around to installing a winch on my trailer to help me with loading it by myself and when there are problems with the car.
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I installed a Smittybilt X20 10000lbs. winch. It's likely overkill but I went with this winch because it's waterproof and comes with a wireless controller. Waterproof was important to me because I leave the trailer in the elements and while I would cover it when not in use it's still going to get damp/wet. Wireless I'm told by other racers is just really nice to have. Other brands with lesser capacity are cheaper but they don't have these features usually (though wireless can be added on some for a lot of money, usually putting the price well over this one). Here's the Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JXS39VC/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

This took the better part of a day to install. I used a marine battery in a box mounted inside my trailer tool box. I also installed a trickle charging solar panel on top of the box with as well well as a little panel that tells me the battery capacity (this could be crap and not actually work though). I wired the trickle charger into the existing wiring for the battery that was powering the breakaway box so that when I'm connected to the car I'm charging off the alternator, and otherwise the solar panel is charging both batteries. The charge panel turns off after 30 seconds but I figure even if it still has a small current draw the solar panel will handle it.

I can go over the install experience and more parts if anyone cares. Haven't tested it on the car since I didn't have the car when I did this but hopefully it works :)
 
When I opened this I was looking forward to one of your write-ups...but then I saw the photos. DAMMIT!!! Most importantly it's good you came out of the incident unscathed. Best of luck with the season, looking forward to your progress!
 
Well, it turns out I needed to machine more out of the anchor hole than I thought I would making my bearings, and the machined aluminum bushings (that cost me like $200 to get machined!). I'll have to see if I can sell those bearings to someone... sigh.
^ I'm not sure I follow what you're saying above.

I have the same problem. One of my SPC anchor bolts bushings is torn and I plan to do the same as you & Kevin... Replace with spherical bearings.
 
^ I'm not sure I follow what you're saying above.

I have the same problem. One of my SPC anchor bolts bushings is torn and I plan to do the same as you & Kevin... Replace with spherical bearings.

Hmm I wrote some confusing gibberish.

I had my anchors with the rubber bushings in hand. I took measurements for the hole, then found a bearing ever so slightly larger requiring opening up the anchror's hole for a press fit. I think this was in the thousandths. I forget, I have it written on a post-it note under a pile of papers here on my desk, I'll look later haha. Well when the shop working on my car bored out the hole to my specs they still found it out of round. So they had to bore it out more to get it completely round, and thus needed to use a larger bearing. They selected the bearing and I don't recall which one, it was one from NHBB (their preferred bearing supplier, supposedly longer life than Aurora). I think I have too in an email but I'll have to look. Either way they bored the hole out and left a shoulder on one side to hold the bearing in. On the other they cut a groove for the c-clip in the picture.
 
Also interested in this. I recently learned at least one of my SPC anchors has some play, although I haven't taken it apart to see how bad.
 
I'm going try to get pics when the reinforcement is done (it's not yet) which is why I hadn't mentioned it. Basic plan though is to take some steel, cut a hole in it for the anchor hole, weld it in place around the hold and probably have it go over the 90-degree edge a bit. When I brought it up the lead engineer said they'd had to do that on plenty of BMW racecars so he knew what I meant.

They don't foresee any need for reinforcement anywhere else so we won't be doing any and will inspect after the race weekend.
 
Here are some things that have happened over the past few days.

Rear Brake Pad Woes
Girodisc, my brake rotor sponsor, sent me a pair of rear Evo IX 2-piece rotors for the car and since my rear suspension was coming apart including removal of the rotor I asked RRT to install them when they put things back together. Well by dumb luck after they did while they were spinning the rear diff to get the bolt holes to line up with the driveshaft they found things got stuck. Turns out for some reason the brake pads are hitting the rotor hats:
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Very weird. This is supposedly a standard pad backing template used by many pad manufacturers so you'd think this would have been discovered by now. I need to have a chat with Girodisc. However it's too late to get them to look into fixing it before the race so we're going to just grind the brake pads instead.

New Rear Diff Bushings
People like pictures so I figured I'd put up a pic. Really doesn't show much haha but hey, there are my new delrin rear diff bushings. If you need some, buy them from @black_gst!!!
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Also I guess pictured are the preload bolts for the cover that I mentioned kind of suck. RRT tried to resolve my loosening and leaking issues by switching from the plain nuts provided originally to some nylocks. To fix the leaking they put some permatex sealant on the threads, but also on the inside between the cover and feet (that press against the braces) they put two o-rings on each bolt (one alone wasn't thick enough, but two was). This might be hard to visualize for anyone who hasn't seen the feet inside, but they're really close to the cover even when torqued down. Also, to prevent diff fluid from spewing out the very short brass filter on the top we added a line of silicone hose. They explained that the line let's air still escape, but any fluid that pukes up goes up the line, and then can drain right back down. It's something they've commonly done with other track cars (this isn't an issue usually seen with street cars).
Subframe bushings
They're in! Excited to try these out. The first one pictured here by the front compression arm I'm told was a few thousandths too large and when they tried to press it in it started peeling metal. They backed off, and shaved I believe about 5 thousandths off and they fit, though still peeling every so slightly but not enough to be concerned. I'm told all the others went in smoothly.
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Relocated Oil Pressure Sensor
Don't mind the clutter, I cleaned up a bit after taking the picture, this was when I was test fitting. Originally I was going to use an M6 Rivnut but right there on the outside of the frame rail was a nice M6 threaded hole (formerly used by the recently removed horn and horn bracket, hence the loose harness there on the right), so I just used that.
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New lower chassis brace
I had RRT fabricate a lower chassis brace reinforcing the front LCA mount points so they couldn't collaps. This picture isn't the finished product but it was about done, just needed to be tacked up then welded. Designed to be removable and low profile to minimize impact to under car airflow.
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Rear Sway Bar Collars
The engineer said that my sway bar was able to slide around a good amount, and any time the bar was out of position it could load the links differently and introduce delay before it took effect. A small thing, but he didn't like it and added some collars to both sides just outside the mounts. Really not sure he's right or wrong, but considering his racing experience I'm trusting him on this.
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Turbo CHRA bolt clamps
This one was a pain in the ass. So RRT has had the car but knew their delays on things were really impacting my schedule and so they let me come work on my car last Saturday in the shop. Amongst other things I pulled the turbo to deal with the damage done by the turbo/mani leak last year. Well we discovered this:
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A missing bolt? We were pretty puzzled by this, and it looked like there was an exhaust leak in the area that was pretty damned close to melting the coolant and oil lines, but didn't fortunately. I had thought then that it was odd that there wasn't something holding these bolts in place, as I'd seen very things for that on past turbos, but I assumed it must be normal for this turbo not to have any bolt locking as none of the bolts had anything, not just the missing one. So we found a bolt, cut it to length, and put it in place. Replaced the damaged lines, repaired everything else that was wrong, and put the turbo back on the car.

Well so I finally spoke with Mike Hess of Forced Performance about the turbo yesterday afternoon. FP sponsors the car and helped get me this turbo and manifold overnight when I had a turbo failure a couple years ago at VIR (yes, it failed at the track, and thanks to the Loose brothers and FP we got a new turbo on the car the next morning and won that day). Mike looked at this picture and noted the "clamps" weren't turned up to prevent the bolts from backing out. "What clamps?" To those in the know you're probably laughing, but to those that don't like me the clamp is that thin piece of metal angled oddly that might be confused for a gasket or something. Mike explained the corners of those are supposed to be turned upwards against one edge of the hexagonal bolt head to prevent it from backing out. He explained this isn't done during build time so that when a customer receives the turbo they can loosen the bolts and clock the turbine however they need for their car, retighten, and then clamp. Well.... we didn't know that. No one told us sadly. Arguably, this is my fault really... Mike probably assumed with my experience I knew this and didn't bother, or maybe he just forgot to mention it since he scrambled to pack up a turbo, manifold, gaskets, lines, everything, in the course of an hour so Fedex could get it in time to get to me back then :) You know what Mike did though? He doesn't say a word, he just overnights me the gasket and clamp kit. He does his best to try to help me out, no finger pointing, nothing. Now that's some great customer, and sponsor, support!

Here's what the kit looks like:
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I was going to work on the car this evening but RRT said they'd take care of fixing these clamps for me, no charge.
 
Here are some things that have happened over the past few days.

Rear Brake Pad Woes
Girodisc, my brake rotor sponsor, sent me a pair of rear Evo IX 2-piece rotors for the car and since my rear suspension was coming apart including removal of the rotor I asked RRT to install them when they put things back together. Well by dumb luck after they did while they were spinning the rear diff to get the bolt holes to line up with the driveshaft they found things got stuck. Turns out for some reason the brake pads are hitting the rotor hats:
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Very weird. This is supposedly a standard pad backing template used by many pad manufacturers so you'd think this would have been discovered by now. I need to have a chat with Girodisc. However it's too late to get them to look into fixing it before the race so we're going to just grind the brake pads instead.

This is normal, had to to the same for ours too. I swear it's documented somewhere but I can't find it. The grinding is easy - just go up to the pad surface.
 
On my carbotech xp12 rear pads the pad material would also have to be ground down and that I was told was a pain in the ass needing a diamond wheel.

Not sure on the new pads (which I'll talk about in a future post) yet.
 
Well, I only have XP10's in the rear but grinding them down was no big deal. I only had to grind the backing plate, not the pad material itself. I used a bandsaw.
 
New lower chassis brace
I had RRT fabricate a lower chassis brace reinforcing the front LCA mount points so they couldn't collaps. This picture isn't the finished product but it was about done, just needed to be tacked up then welded. Designed to be removable and low profile to minimize impact to under car airflow.
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Would love to see more detailed photos of this once its is finished.
 
The pads are common and do list on girodiscs site about it, sucks but i guess thats how we deal with it being internal shoes of the rear.
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Also that brace you got made, i thought you was looking into the front chromoly tube crossmember? Just seems like if your plans are to change the effeor will be wasted if your swapping?
 
Hah seriously? I talked with Mike@Girodisc and he had never heard of the issue. I didn't see mention of the issue on their site for the Evo rotors, but I see it on other vendor sites that sell girodisc for subarus.

We tried to fit the tubular crossmember from Boosted Fabrication, but it wouldn't fit. If I recall correctly the front engine mount was like an inch too low and too far to the driver's side. BF said he hadn't had anyone have issues, and that he uses the same motor mounts as me, so he was a bit puzzled as to what happened. I have some ideas but don't want to speculate here until we investigate further. He did offer a refund, I'm holding off so we can play around with his more after the racing is done when there is more time.

We'll probably just create one from scratch next time, just no time now to deal with it. Whatever new piece we use we can just add the brackets to it like we did to the stock piece and it will then be compatible with the new braces (since those bolt to the central crossmember but are welded to the subframe gussets).

On to other things.
Ohlins Delays
So Ohlins has been pretty difficult to work with. RRT had my car in the beginning of February briefly to take measurements and notes on the car. Shock dimensions, spring rates, mounting structures, clearances, motion ratios... all that stuff you might need to build a high end set of shocks. These were sent off to Ohlins to build dampers using all this information, something very custom for me. They took about a month and a half to produce a set of shocks. The shocks that arrived were no way near valved properly, way too soft. This was discovered last week. RRT reported the problems, even sending along shock dyno graphs showing what I have now and what they provided and how far off the damping was. We overnighted the shocks to Ohlins last Friday, arriving this past Monday, expecting Ohlins to fix them on Monday and overnight them for Tuesday and Wednesday. We don't get a response until yesterday. Here's the quick summary:
- we're down an engineer
- we're running simulations in Sweden for your requirements
- we might get to the assembly by early next week

I wonder why simulations weren't run before? Ugh. Also I found, by dumb luck when I was looking at the shelf with all my parts at RRT, Ohlins had sent a complete joke of a set of bump stops. Some .5" tall ones, completely unusable. Rather than leave this to Ohlins to fix this, or RRT as they were really busy with everything else I put on their plate, I ordered some Penske bump stops from RE Suspension per recommendations from Andrew Brilliant (actually he only tipped me off to what he uses for the rear, no idea what he used for the front). I'm getting the blue type for the rear, and a set of red and white for the front (letting RRT choose red is the softer of the two). The heights on these are likely just longer or the same height as the KW bump stops which we know work alright and so they should cover us. So these were two-day aired and will arrive today. Keep in mind I'm really taking a guess here, albeit somewhat educated, on the bump stops and not intending to tune with them just yet (i.e. use them as additional springs) but rather really just use them for bump stops.
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I'm pretty pissed, as is RRT. Now the latest response this morning, after I believe some bitching on my behalf from RRT, is:
- rush order for World Challenge is in front of me.
- Simulation (I dunno what simulations they do, I thought damper characteristics were simplified usually to a straightforward formula but shows what I know) will be run "soon".
- Hoping to get them done and shipped today.

I'm not holding my breath. So current plan is for everything else we've been doing on the car at RRT, sans the new shocks and alignment, to be done this afternoon and I'll have to tow the car to my home for work over the weekend in hopes I get my big list (that keeps growning as I remember things) completed, after which I tow it back to RRT for test fitting the dampers.
 
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