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John Freund's Time Attack 99 Eclipse GSX

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I have been working with a manufacturer to develop a low cost TPMS system that will send its data via CAN BUS so that it can be logged by any CAN capable datalogger. The only offering I could find for this when I was first interested was in the $2k and up range. I had discovered a much cheaper device years ago and shared it with people (mainly the Race Capture community), but the problem with it was that you couldn't change sensors so if a sensor is lost or bad you're screwed and have to buy a whole new system and set of sensors, which was going to be $250+. I opted to not use it, but another company decided to take what I shared, buy a bunch, and resell it. Sigh. I tabled the project for a while but decided to look into it again recently and now have a prototype that WILL let you change sensors, and it also includes a nice little display. I'll be running it at VIR this upcoming weekend to make sure everything works, but so far so good in the garage. I now have data for my tire pressure, tire temperature, and sensor voltage (to know when their batteries are low and need changing), as well as on-screen alerts flashing when tire pressures are low. There are some revisions necessary and another prototype will be sent to me soon but this test will still verify most of the system is good to go. Expecting to sell these in the low $200 range.

Here's the display, not much to see, but this is the whole brains of the deal.
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I took the time to wash the car last weekend in prep for the race. The Red Line tent came in handy as it was very hot.
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I also received approval from Tom Dorris of ECMLink to go ahead with selling my "PiLink" datalogging solution for ECMLink ECUs. So while I'm still ironing out details expect that to get released later this year. Main features are that it automatically logs data whenever your car is on and saves to a removable USB drive (that can be remote mounted with an add-on mount) without need to start or stop the logging manually (no corrupted data when just turning off your car either, it handles that). Also will automatically connect to wifi and upload data to Google Drive if you have that. Will possibly add the option of a display for viewing the logs live, and a rearview camera, but I'm still mulling that stuff over. Will likely be made to order so there will be a lead time as I order components for each build, but I may do a initial group buy and let people save some money that way.
 
So VIR. Everything seemed good going into it, so I was hoping for a good weekend. We changed the rear sway bar end links so the bar shouldn't be quite as stiff, and gave the rear about .2 degree more camber (up to -2.1!), and I left the rear wing maxed out. Ready to leave:
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Brought my father along for his first ever track day, putting him in HPDE1 in a rented Porsche Cayman S. Really cool service, though crazy expensive. They had a nice air conditioned facility right on the paddock with refreshments (including beer), and four really nice simulators. Was good as it gave my father time to familiarize himself with the track as well as driving stick again. Admittedly though I don't know how sim racers do it, I cannot drive them worth a damn. i had a hard time just getting a Miata around the course in the sim, let alone a Porsche Cup car.
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A new friend I met at the Mach V car show, @t.choi.photos on instagram, decided to join us for his first ever visit to the track. He took some nice garage shots that night.
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The next day I went out for warm-up. Warm-up was interesting. Right away on the turn 1 of the first hot lap I could tell the rear was feeling WAY better than it had at Summit. I was excited! Turn 2, good. Turn 3, good! Turn 4, good! So good that I got excited and in Turn 5... SPINNING. Thanks to cold tires I spun out, did a 180, then reverse 180 and pulled off to the inside of the track. I had to watch the whole group go by as I sat there wait for a spot to pull back onto the track. Tom happened to be right there to catch the spin, yay.
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A little after that due to being rusty I came in wide left into Turn 10 and then carried too much speed into it and put two off on the outside as I tracked out of the turn. The dirt there though was really carved up and felt like three big divots as the car bounced heavily up and down really hard. This goofed the alignment at least a little as I had to turn left a bit on the long straights to stay straight, but nothing too bad. Also knocked some screws loose with the body work and scraped up the front splitter a tiny bit, along with front corner of the passenger side skirt. Nothing major. While on track though everything felt fine so I kept going.

Did a 2:04 and the car felt good. So I drove a little harder, and did a 2:00.9. Wow. I wasn't fully pushing it and on my slower R7 tires, so that made me really excited. However a lap later the car started sputtering on all right hand turns. I came in.

I thought it was electrical, but couldn't find a smoking gun. Only other thought was something fuel related, so I filled to 100% fuel, optimistically put on the A7 tires, and went out for the first timed session. No luck, still sputtering. No idea what it was and knowing I had no spare fuel parts (socks, pumps), I opted to be done. Really bummed as the fastest time out there (by of course a Corvette) was a 1:59.3 that weekend, and based on how the car felt, and my data afterwards, plus having the brand new set of A7 tires waiting, I think I would have beaten that. Talk's cheap though.

While waiting out the afternoon my good friend Don that runs the track store stopped by. As he did, he got a phone call, said "yeah, I know a car", looked at me and asked "Hey do you want to shoot some video on the track tonight?" I said heck yeah! Well turns out some VidMuze Cinema (apparently they have worked with NBC and Red Bull) was shooting video promo material for a very cool rig that mounts a camera on a boom that spins around on a truck. One guy stopped by to check out the car, liked it, and took me over to the VidMuze guys who were shooting track footage with a drone the size of a car hood. I'm not exaggerating.
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This is the truck rig they had, this thing was nuts. Oh, both the drone there and the truck had RED cameras, which are insanely expensive and high quaility cameras used in the movie industry. They told me we'd be getting 6k video footage out of this.
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So I told them I would be going out on track in the last sesssion with my father and they said that's fine, just meet with them afterwards and we'll talk about the shoot. Cool!

So I took my father out in my car in HPDE4 (that's the instructors group for just fun, no racing) despite the sputtering to show him what it's like, and he really enjoyed it. Got a couple laps in then half way down the front straight I lost my throttle pedal. Cable must have snapped! I was able to coast the rest of the straight and around turn 1 and pulled into the inside grass so I didn't impede everyone's session. My father got to see what it's like to watch the whole session go by and then get towed off track. So I'm thinking I'm screwed and will miss the video opportunity because I don't have a spare cable, but my father said just pull into the garage and see if there's anything that can be done. We pull in and look to find it's not the cable that snapped, but the mounting bracket at the intake manifold broke in half and was dangling. Still not great at first glance, but I had the idea of turning it sideways, drilling a hole, and putting a longer bolt in there to temporarily hold it in place. It worked! This was NOT easy to do on a hot engine.
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Got over to the VidMuze guys just in time and talked about the shoot. At first I was supposed to be background for some other cars so the track didn't look empty, so I sat about 10 car lengths back. They took some footage of just me though at the end which was unexpected. After we did another bunch of laps with more cars and did some cool passes with the truck. This shot was taken from the truck while we were on track.
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They had drones running at various places on the track too! Was so cool to see them moving around as we drove by. Here's some of their teaser footage of the drone work they were doing that weekend, it's so good.


and here's the teaser of some of the footage with me:


VidMuze said I'll get access to the footage and pictures when they're done, which is pretty exciting. Should help with promo material for my existing, but also new sponsors. Can't wait to see it!

Some cool shots by @t.choi.photos waiting between shoots:
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Here's some other track shots Tom took:
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Ok so in summary:
- rear end looseness is fixed
- new right hand turn sputtering problem
- Car's a little down on power. Boost is lower on track than dyno by at least two psi. Will just jump it up next time out. Power curve though is fantastic, I'm riding out to 8k rpm which helps me eliminate 5th gear changes and wasted shift time.
- Probably can lose some angle on the rear wing, will try it next time.
- New sideview camera system is AWESOME. I can SEE. I really liked it. Also I was told by the VidMuze guys I looked like I was in a simulator with all the bright screens while driving at dusk haha.
- The new lap timing HUD works! While you can barely see the white numbers for the lap times you CAN see them even in the brightest of light, and at a glance. It was awesome just shifting my eyes slightly to see my 2:00.9 and then keep driving.
- Stuck piston or brake pad on inside of driver's front. Noticed it during a wheel change the inside pad has like a 15 degree slant to its pad surface. Probably just need to clean the caliper or possibly file the pad backing just a bit. G-LOC is already sending me out new pads plus a new front/rear set for spares, such a great sponsor!
- Transponder was not really working. Worked fine at Summit and we made no changes. Verified it is getting power and they got a signal from it at least once. Suspect it's a signal strength issue and VIR's pickup is not as sensitive as Summit's, will probably relocate it (we had moved it inside the cabin having it transmit through plastic on the cabin floor).
- Replace the throttle body cable. I got two new ones already, one as a spare.
- Front bumper isn't sliding on/off easily anymore. I think something got tweaked with the offroading I did.
- New TPMS system not working quite right. Data wasn't really updating frequently from the two rear sensors. Need to investigate, but the product just might be crap, who knows.

Car's going back to RRT to help investigate everything and I'm shooting for the October 25-27 VIR Event. Really can't wait as the car was feeling great!
 
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Here's my fastest lap from the weekend:


From the footage I can see:
- The car is MUCH faster now in lower speed turns than my previous fastest 2:00.1 lap time in 2015. If you run the videos side by side I think the new car is 1.5 seconds faster per lap in low speed turns than before. The car loses the time on the straights due to the boost not being quite right and being down on power (trap speeds show 5-7mph differences).
- My new brake pressure sensor shows that I let off the brakes a lot when blipping for downshifts. I need to hold steady brake pressure, and so this is lost time as I could brake later.
- I was braking too early on the back straight as I end up coasting (though I knew this while driving, i was still feeling things out with it being warm-up).
- I can carry more speed in turn 3 as I still have more room to track out.
- I can brake later into Oak Tree and carry more speed. Actually this footage doesn't show this, but on a different lap I did this really cool brake/slide that kept so much speed right up until I had to do the sharp right turn onto the back straight. Basically no wasted time braking/coasting, just one solid curved braking zone. High risk, but I think it's free time if I can learn to do it more. Really cool discovering this, it's similar to the technique used at the end of the back straight where we brake uphill and to the left instead of braking in two separate zones.

Seriously, the car feels great. Really can't wait to get it back on track again once this silly sputtering problem is fixed. My current theory is something got knocked loose related to fuel, maybe a fuel pickup, or a pump is starting to fail. I have this worst case theory that maybe the crank is sliding on right turns so that the crank sensor trigger plate is contacting the trigger, but honestly not sure that makes complete sense. Going to open the tanks and look around. If nothing is out of the norm, going to at least service the pickups and replace the fuel pumps anyway based on advice from other racers.
 
So sick!!! Such motivation to keep getting better with my car. I was having a similar fuel issue at lightning, where on right hand corners the car would sputter and sometimes wouldn't go. I'd put the pedal wide open, and nothing, but as soon as the car was straight, it'd go like normal. Haven't really been able to look into it yet since we just moved. Hopefully it's just a pump on it's way out. Had to bump up the fuel pressure at the beginning of the day, which is something that has never needed to be done. Thought the same as you and put just about 3/4 of a tank of fuel in, but still did it. In fact, at Thunderbolt the next day, it had no rhyme or reason. Sometimes on rights, sometimes on lefts. It would do it in one corner one lap, and then not do it in the same corner the next lap. I hope you get your issue sorted. Interested to see what it was.
 
So sick!!! Such motivation to keep getting better with my car. I was having a similar fuel issue at lightning, where on right hand corners the car would sputter and sometimes wouldn't go. I'd put the pedal wide open, and nothing, but as soon as the car was straight, it'd go like normal. Haven't really been able to look into it yet since we just moved. Hopefully it's just a pump on it's way out. Had to bump up the fuel pressure at the beginning of the day, which is something that has never needed to be done. Thought the same as you and put just about 3/4 of a tank of fuel in, but still did it. In fact, at Thunderbolt the next day, it had no rhyme or reason. Sometimes on rights, sometimes on lefts. It would do it in one corner one lap, and then not do it in the same corner the next lap. I hope you get your issue sorted. Interested to see what it was.

Wow what a weird coincidence. If I figure it out I'll let you know, and would appreciate it if you did the same.
 
What kind of fuel do you use?

I use Sunoco 260 GT 100 octane unleaded fuel. E85 isn't readily available and I don't need to ride the ragged edge of performance either being limited in my class on weight and hp. 100 unleaded at race tracks so it's easy to get, and in a pinch I can pick up a 5 gallon can at a nearby Sunoco as well, so it works very well.
 
VidMuze Cinema's promo reel was just released. I'm in it in a few places.


Pretty cool to see the finished product! Looking forward to getting the raw footage so I can see about piecing together my own promo reel for sponsors and such, need to work on an ECU sponsor for next year! I know they have more footage of my car as we took quite a bit, and I did at least half a lap with them focusing only on my car.
 
I finally received the rest of the crane footage from VidMuze Cinema back in October. I spent a couple hours goofing around with it to see if I might make a usable promo video I could show to potential sponsors. I threw in lap footage, goofy music (from Gran Turismo), some placeholder pics, and a quick mockup of a logo. I don't really know anything about video editing or graphics design, but would appreciate any input:



Things I would like to do:
- see if I can stabilize some of the crane footage
- remove some of the extraneous gauges from the lap footage. Those were really there more to advertise for Autosport Labs and the RaceCapture Pro's capabilities, and they clutter everything I think
- need better pictures. I'd like a much cooler interior shot that perhaps is video, showing the displays functioning and making sure to include the Heads-Up Display
- Work on that logo. It's kind of what I think I want with the "JF Racing", but it's a sloppy couple minute creation of mine that could be improved
 
Wow, just read through this entire thread. Thank you so much for taking the time to write about your experiences. There are so many tips and tricks I'm going to apply to my gsx build now. Can't wait to see more.

What oil do you run in the car now? Redline's racing 50WT?
 
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It's been a bit since my last update. I went to VIR in late October. Going into the event the issues from the last event were:
- Sputtering on right hand turns
- Car a little down on power, boost was seen at almost 2psi below target we set on dyno
- Stuck piston or pad (severe uneven pad wear) on driver's front brakes
- Transponder wasn't really working
- Front bumper was tweaked and not sliding on/off easily
- TPMS data wasn't really updating for rear sensors.
- Couldn't connect to ECMLink reliably


RRT worked on the sputtering issue but they could not find the problem. I bought new pumps and they replaced them, along with a new fuel filter and for the in-tank a new sock. They looked for anything that might be the cause. I had them inspect carefuly wiring around the ECU and they said they didn't see anything loose. They verified they could hear both pumps operating at least in the garage. They couldn't figure it out. So before the event I took the car back and dug around and I found the problem. It was shitty wiring.

I had remembered that I heard the fuel pumps turn on and off briefly one time while I had the key in the ignition but not started and I was playing with the wires around the ECU. I thought I had tugged on a ground wire or something, and brushed it off, but remembering that I went back to that area. So this car was owned by at least one other owner before I bought it back in... 2001, or 2002. The owner prior to me had modded it fairly heavy for back then, and man did that moron not know how to do electrical wiring. He used vampire taps everywhere (those ones that slice a blade through/around wires to tap a wire in), and had shitty crimps and poor electrical tape. Much of this was at the ECU, very close to the harness plugs (I know he had an HKS VPC for those that remember what that is), and since the car ran and these were difficult to replace (I hate working on electrical in the driver's footwell, have to be a contortionist) I decided to never touch them. Over the years as I had to work on some of the ECU wiring I gradually removed his bad wiring as I needed to, but left anything I didn't have to touch. Well, after looking at the wiring and seeing nothing obviously loose I decided to finally get rid of all his bullshit and cut it all out, painfully having to reconnect very stubby wires. I removed like 5 vampire taps within 1" of the ECU plugs,, ugh. I had then noticed some electrical tape wrapped around a the crank position sensor wire. I opened it up to see how this splice looked and holy shit it was just bare wire wrapped around each other, and it was loose. So what had happened was I must have at some point tugged on the ECU wires and pulled this hand tightened twist apart and after the off-road excursion at VIR in August it must have pulled apart so much that under right turns it was losing enough connectivity to cause sputtering. Also, I confirmed that if you disconnect the crank position sensor and reconnect it while the electrical power is on the fuel pumps do cycle for a few seconds. I wasn't 100% sure this was the problem but after having gone to VIR I confirmed the problem was fixed.

On the boost issue, I couldn't find a reason for boost being down on track relative to dyno, so I simply massged the boost tables up to try to regain the missing 2psi. This appears to have dealt with the issue, but I suspect there's something more at play that I need to find.

The uneven brake pad wear (the driver's front inside pad was sloped at like a 10-15 degree angle in the caliper) we didn't find any obvious cause for, and I suspected the pad backing was so tight fitting that under slight heat expansion it was rubbing on the caliper on the sides of the pad. Got new pads, and filed down the sides a bit to make sure this won't happen.

The transponder I believed was due to how RRT placed it inside the car last time we shifted things around (we moved it from the underside to get it out of the underside airflow). They had put it inside, but above a rubber floor plug, which they said had worked for other cars. I had the transponder tested by AMB and they said it tested completely fine. So I had RRT move it back under the car, but away from the airflow. This did seem to resolve it as back at VIR the lap sensors were picking me up again for timing.

RRT did fix the bumper, some stuff was just tweaked.

TPMS didn't get fixed. So I contacted the Chinese manufacturer and they suggested I get their repeater box they use on trucks. It just connects to the display unit. So I received it and placed it in the rear, but after October I saw the data for the rear still wasn't really updating. My next theory is that the carbon fiber dash panel is causing enough EM interference for the lower power transmissions from the tire sensors. Carbon Fiber does indeed cause EM interference and it's the last idea I have. I'm going to test the theory by using a coax extender (the antennae on the back on the display is a mini coax) and move the antennae to the middle of the car. If that works i'll pull the carbon fiber panel out and replace with something non-interfering.

The ECMLink problem ended up mainly being bad capacitors in the ECU. I borrowed an ECMLink from my friend Brian (snowborder714 here on dsmtuners) and his connected just fine. I ran his ECU in the October event, but afterwards sent my ECU to ECMlink and they said the capacitors were failing. Oddly my spare ecu too couldn't connect so I need to send that to them for investigation.
 
So October 26-27 at VIR was not great.

Got there on Friday and set up with the Redline Oil tent. Really love this tent.
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I can't recall exactly everything that happened or the order. Next day I went out and two things happened. First, within a few laps something went off in the alignment as the car was pulling to the right. It wasn't horrendous but it was having an effect on handling, and of course I had to pull the wheel to the side to keep it straight on the track, maybe like 5 degrees. I also had the power steering cut out I think once in a turn very briefly. Also, after coming in after the first session there was lots of smoke. That had me freaked out.

After opening the hood and not seeing a fire, I realized it smelled like ATF. Power steering. It was spewing out a fitting on on the rack. We tried to tighten it while on the car. I say we because I forgot to mention I had no help lined up for VIR, but on my way down posted on instagram asking if anyone was interested in coming by to help for the weekend (not seriously expecting any interest). Daniel Simon from NC msg'd me saying he could come down and help out. I can't thank Daniel enough! He drove down in his 2g GST and met with me on Saturday morning to give me a hand. Ok so we tried to tighten the fitting and it wasn't helping. I asked around and heard Quantum Motorsports at VIR was open on weekends to help drivers out, so I ran over there and they said to bring the car on by!

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I brought the car over to them and they couldn't figure out why the fitting was leaking. It was a fitting to a hard line that links the sides of the rack, and this isn't a fitting you ever touch on these. Looking at the fitting it didn't appear to have any damage or anything, but the tech did comment that it didn't have an o-ring and usually he sees o-rings on these fittings. He tried to fit o-rings on there that he had and nothing got the fitting to seal, it just kept spewing fluid.

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Shitty picture of the fitting (the left one) and the hard line it's a part of.

I realized Daniel had mentioned he runs a disconnected rack on his GST. The racks are the same, so I asked him if I could harvest that hard line from his so we could inspect it and possibly use it and he graciously let me do that. So we got his car over to Quantum and pulled that line. Well his has an o-ring, and after comparing you could tell the end of my fitting had some possible damage. Very weird, because this was a brand new OEM rack and I'm pretty sure RRT never touched this hard line/

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Looking at this comparison pic it's really hard for me to see which is the "bad" one. I think the bottom one but not sure. That's how subtle the "damage" was. Either way we said f it and threw Daniel's on my car, and bam, no more leak.

Quantum also looked at the alignment and said that yes it was off, but they didn't see why it went off. They fixed the alignment. I think it was too late for me to go out any more that day, I forget. Or I went out and the alignment went bad again. I really can't remember. Here's a nice pic of me in the garage with something far cooler:
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Here are some nice sunset pics from Saturday evening.
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Next morning I went out and settled behind a friend in his Camaro ZL1-1LE. His car basically looks exactly like this:
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SUPER nice car, and ridiculous performance for $70k. Seriously super fast, faster than my car. Well I drove behind him a couple laps feeling the car out and things were mostly feeling ok, though the alignment went out again exactly like before only after a few laps. Well, since it was feeling good I passed my friend and started to turn it up... big mistake. Up to this point I was musing about places to push it on the track and one place I've always thought about working on was the turns around Oak Tree. It's a two turn section, where you slow down to maybe 65mph. I had thought I could do this really trick trail brake into the first turn and slide every so slightly and get free rotation to then use AWD to hole shot out of there. Not sure why, it just felt like this was possible. I'd be walking a thin wire, but sometimes you get this gut feeling you can do something, like how I had to do when taking the uphill esses at full throttle at 138mph and not lifting. Well, I think the idea still can work, but my execution was off this time. I broke later than I ever have before (this is on the same lap as passing the Camaro), locked up, and slid off into the tire wall probably only going like 20mph when I hit. You can hear me yell "NO!" on video. Well, the car stalled, but I started it right back up, got a wave from the corner worker, and backed up from the wall and pulled onto the track. No issues in data, no smoking, so I puttered back to the pits.

Damage was primarily cosmetic, with the front metal bumper saving me. Radiator ducting was slightly bent up. Unfortunately cosmetic damage on this car is also aero damage, and very expensive since this is basically a completely custom one-off body kit now that the molds are lost. Ugh.
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And that was that. Shitty way to end the year hah.
 
I left VIR the next morning and immediately began thinking of how to repair things. I called the body guy from Mr. Spoiler to see if he could take a look at it, and he said he had moved to a new shop in Warrenton, VA, Boggs Body. I was driving right by Warrenton on the way back and asked if I could swing by to show him the damage and he asked his boss and they said to come by. When there he said he could repair it, but it would take a ton of hours, probably totaling over $10k in repairs. Definitely a lot of careful plastic surgery involved. Their shop is very expensive but it really would take a lot of hours here and $10k was what I expected to hear.

I shortly after also talked to Phil Acierto, now current owner of the original AMB Aero Eclipse, and he said he had a spare V1 bumper cover that came with buying that car. I also knew he had a larger 10" splitter for the V1 that he wasn't going to use (since he was going to a newly planned V3 design), and an APR GT-1000 rear wing to match the downforce of the front splitter. He had offered these to me before but I declined not seeing a need for more downforce in my configuration, and knowing how expensive it would be to change over. The bumper and splitter are separate, unlike my bumper/splitter that are one unit, making mounting WAY more complicated. Also the higher downforce meant a stronger mounting architecture was needed. Same goes for the rear wing, it would have to be chassis mounted instead of on top of the hatch, so a whole lot of work there too.

Thinking about costs, I estimated that the cost to change over to the larger splitter wing was going to be about the same as restoring the old setup, and I might possibly get an upgrade out of it as the higher downforce MIGHT help (I'm actually worried it will hurt to be honest). I opted to go the "upgrade" route and took Phil up on his offer. Phil gave me an outstanding price, packaged everything up super quickly and very well, and shipped things out. I can't thank Phil enough for going out of his way for helping me out in my time of need, and I hope I can return the favor some day.

Knowing I was going to have to now mount the wing through the hatch I decided to get a lightweight hatch. I spoke with Sergio of Carbonetics and he said he could make me a "carbon fiber" hatch with no skeleton to keep it really light weight. Also, Andrew Brilliant told me to make sure I get Sergio's "CSL" hatch, the one with the duck bill like BMWs, as it actually helps with the aero of the car. Also, Sergio said he actually had a mold of the V1 bumper and could make me one of those in "carbon fiber". I am quoting it for a reason, more on that in a second. Sergio also makes some headlight blanks, which will save me time as I wouldn't have to buy some headlights, then gut and paint them like I did before, so I got those too. Sergio was incredibly kind to get my stuff prioritized and made within 5 weeks (that was his estimate and he kept it!). I can't thank Sergio enough for stepping in here.

Now about the "carbon fiber". I'm a bit disappointed there. I paid over double for "carbon fiber" vs fiberglass, but what I got was really a couple layers of carbon fiber in a wet layup over what is really fiberglass. So no weight savings, and just the look of carbon fiber in parts I'm going to paint black anyway. I really wish Sergio had been up front about this with me as he knows my use case and priorities. This isn't some bs show car. With that said though, Sergio came through and gave me parts I desperately needed in a very short time, and so I'm still very thankful and honestly the upcharge I paid for "carbon fiber" was worth it to cover getting parts so fast, so I didn't complain to him. I did bring it up to him after seeing how these were faux carbon fiber (in as nice a way as I could) and he said the molds he has for DSM parts can't be used for prepreg carbon fiber so he has to do it this way, but his parts for other cars where the molds are newer can be. I can't speak for those parts, but I do wish he had told me that. It's too late to get these parts molded elsewhere and made of actual pre-preg sadly.

Ok so the parts all came in. Phil's V1 fiberglass bumper would be a spare and I would use Sergio's "carbon fiber". Phil's splitter and diffuser were really nice, high quality super strong prepreg carbon. The wing was in almost new condition, just minor scratches.

Phil's delivery:
20191114_175601 (1).jpg

Yes, that splitter is insanely huge. 10" vs the 5" I had before.

Here's Sergio's delivery mixed in with Phil's parts:
20200110_115152 (1).jpg


On the Carbonetics pieces, while not really carbon fiber, they look god damned good. The hatch is PERFECT, it fits perfectly and fit and finish is top notch. The headlight blanks are gorgeous, though FYI if you buy them they are missing the mounting tabs towards the outside of the car so you need to add those yourself (I told him this a year or two ago when he first made these, but he only offered to let me pay $250 additional to add the missing mounts........). The bumper cover looks great (more on that later).

So the new plan is to get all these new parts on the car and then have Boggs Body do the small fiberglass repairs and paint. Still going to be at least $10k but hopefully a better car for it.
 
Pic of the hatch just sitting on the car. Perfect fitment. I think I might just paint the sides black like I did the roof, because it really is pretty.
20200206_102527.jpg


Ok so finally a couple weeks ago RRT was able to get me in to start working on the car. We started with the rear wing because I needed to get wing mount templates made and shipped out to DHP Composites (who made my single element wing I've run for years) so Dave Herald can make me some pre-preg carbon fiber uprights and that his fabrication time can overlap other work.

After a bunch of template designs Chris Comer at RRT (#comer_fab on instagrame) got the wing sitting where I wanted. We had to cut the hatch metal edge, the tail light metal mounting cages, and just a bit of the exterior plastic of the tail lights (though we did not have to enter the housing which was great). Here's how it ended up.
85036742_196815728041430_4035452074756931584_n.jpg

20200210_160307.jpg

20200226_142714.jpg


I would have preferred the wing's mounts be between the uprights but to do that we would have had to cut into the exterior metal around the hatch and I didn't want that.

So those uprights are now in DHP Composites' hands and being fabricated as we speak.

Next was mounting the bumper cover. Holy shit this sucked. When Chris@RRT first tried to fit the bumper he was convinced it was not going to work. It was sitting wider than the fenders, and the center portion's slope was much more shallow than the original and looked very weird because it created a big angle with the hood. Now Chris isn't a body guy, he's a race car fabrication guy, and so he's not yet experienced in how far you have to tweak body panels. I'm not a body guy either, but having been through what I have with this car I knew a thing or to, so I told him I'd be there in an hour to help.

Sure enough, the bumper was sitting like 1" out on each side. It did not look like it would fit, or it was horribly misshapen. However, I looked at it and thought if we just kind of forced in one way, and pulled it another, and cut out some stuff... we might get it to work. After about 3.5 hours here's what we ended up doing:
- Cut away material under headlights because this bumper seemed to be hitting the metal bumper mounts (obviously the old bumper doesn't)
- Cut out the metal bumper because it seemed to be hitting the inside of the bumper cover (again, old bumper cover sits nicely on top of this)
- Cut out the lower inside lip of the bumper cover because it seemed to be preventing us from twisting the bumper cover like we wanted to do
- Forced the sides inward and lined them up with the fenders. Idea is we'd add something to hold these outside corners in position.
- while forcing the sides, pull forward and up on the top center portion to get that surface to be parallel with the hood slope. The center dzus mount would hold this piece upwards/forwards once locked in
- pushing in ever slightly on the bottom lip with my legs while holding the top center as described in previous point. Would add a couple dzus on the bottom to attach to a vertical panel we add to the splitter to lock the lower lip into place.

Doing all this and the bumper cover looked good! I don't know what the issue is though, either Sergio's mold is poor, or something in the process allowed the part to warp. People always tell me though with consumer level (i.e. not aerospace/motorports) composite parts this is normal. I'm not convinced, but obviously I expected it based on my prior experience so there's some truth to this for sure.

Pic of us trying to force the bumper to shape before we give up on it:
20200226_151048.jpg


Pic of the bumper cover sitting on its own, with the side clasps and top center mounts in place. Chris says it looks better than the last bumper (which actually always had a slight angle between the hood and bumper, it was never fitted perfectly but you couldn't see it in photos well).
20200227_160717.jpg


Next up is mounting the splitter and diffuser. This is going to be tricky.
 

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