After a hard but fairly successful season of events Bob has dropped the car off with me for a major makeover and revision.

As before I just have the rolling shell.

Jimmer at Power Zed has already removed the engine and box.

He will be doing a strip down /inspect/replace routine on the Kyle Puckett engine.

Bob has dropped the gearbox of at Advanced Motorsport engineering at silverstone for a similar strip/inspect/replace routine.

The rest arrived at my place last weekend .... looking a little worse than when it left in the spring!!!!

 

The brief from Bob is long and detailed.................. but it starts with a reinstate of the 99 spec front with splitter and the TwinZ rear bumper.

I already obtained a good used 99 spec from Mikey Bean and I have a new Twinz rear from Mark Derbys group buy.

I will get a new sheet of ally and make another front splitter. good job I kept the template!!

There are numerous detail improvements on the schedule too. More details to follow!

Probably the most important/significant is a new custom loom for the car. Over the development period of the car numerous items have been added by several people. The result now is a total mess of wiring everywhere with no one personknowing exavtly what is joined to what!!!

This winter I am lucky that our new race day team member Paul is helping at my place with all the work.

Im simply getting too old for some of the harder physical jobs needed.

In addition the newly formed Bodymech team of "Boldy" and "Manta V8" are doing the panel fitting and giving the whole shell a fresh coat of paint inside and out.

so Im sure everyone will be adding to the thread as they get their quota of jobs done.

 

So a few pics meantime and can you spot the brake problem???

I have also highlighted some fittings that need "improving"

Check out the rats nest of wiring too!!

......................

Looking good. Cant wait to see it at TOTB

Looks great. Do you ever do any events at brands? Would love to see it in action.

Thanks guys. I have a lot of work to do for TOTB but we have the potential and I am pretty sure we will give the GTOs a run for their money. Might do time attack at brands later in the year funds dependent and of course only if I think we have a winning car.

Looking good Bob, we're there any RWD drive cars to compare against? Will be great once you get the remaining issues ironed out

Was an M3 driven by BradGT but i was a good 3 seconds off the pace. Having said that I started to get some heat in the tyres on Sunday and gained one and half seconds so not bad considering very low boost. I also managed to beat a couple of GTRs too :)

 

So the rebuild continues and having learned a lot we have plenty of data to work with. Next session at Mallory hopefully in 10 days and all being well am going to try at least one drag session but will update as I understand more.

 

Some pix from Sunday :) quite a lot of positive comments about how the car looks. Hopefully it won't be long before we get some comments about the performance too. The extra width seemed to work well but that's not confirmed yet as more testing is needed.

Really looking very good Bob. Good luck at Mallory!

Bad news. Despite using low boost and being relatively gentle with the car the engine bottom end appears to let go. All I know right now is lots of metal in the oil but the prognosis is pretty poor. Probably done about 10 miles on that £2K rebuild. Looks like I will be breaking the 2+2 after all.

Bad news. Despite using low boost and being relatively gentle with the car the engine bottom end appears to let go. All I know right now is lots of metal in the oil but the prognosis is pretty poor. Probably done about 10 miles on that £2K rebuild. Looks like I will be breaking the 2+2 after all.

 

What a shame, all that hard work and the bottom went.

Bad news. Despite using low boost and being relatively gentle with the car the engine bottom end appears to let go. All I know right now is lots of metal in the oil but the prognosis is pretty poor. Probably done about 10 miles on that £2K rebuild. Looks like I will be breaking the 2+2 after all.

 

sh!t, that's not good. Any nasty noises at any point?

Did you have any data logging from the 2 days to see what happened? I'm guessing Dan is looking at all that, be good to know what happened with the temps and oil pressure. Think you mentioned overheating issues which sounds weird given low boost and short sprints.

Soul destroying! :(

No thats bad news Bob :no:

It is extremely hard and for a moment I wonder whether it's all worth it but just gotta get your head down, get even more overtime in and get on with it. I'm disappointed to say the least! We do have lots of data both ECU and Racepak but there are no issues. The overheating never got out of control it was simply a factor to manage during the weekend and is probably the fan. Noise wise there was little to hear but it is a noisy car though Dan and Josh knew there was a difference when he started it. I doubt we've destroyed the engine as we had such low boost and didn't push it too hard.

 

I'm taking the engine out of 2+2 which was built by Dan and we're going to use that going forward. I have asked Dan to focus on getting the car back on track and we will investigate the issues with this one later.

 

Fingers crossed I'll still be at Mallory next Wednesday.

I dont know how you guys do it Bob it must be so heart breaking at times. I was talking to MikeB from Zclub who lives near me on Saturday and while taking me for a drive in his 240Z Datsun race car he said when racing cars you have to have the mind set that if you crash it or damage it an any way you quickly move on and get on with it. Now Mike's Datsun is a very nice example like yours is Bob but if I had such a car I would be terrified of damaging it but that is the difference between a race car owner and a show car owner.

Hope you get it sorted soon and you start enjoying high speed racing :clover:

So sorry to hear that, I dont know what to say but I would be rocking in the corner if I was in your position so my hat is off to you mate. :clover:

Thanks for the kind words guys. It is upsetting but with racing you have to have the mindset that damage will occur and you must grit the teeth and carry on. Of course this is a bigger disappointment in many ways because it 'appears' to be a build issue. However we don't truly know as yet and will have to scrutinise the data over the next few days to fully understand and deal with it. Onwards and upwards.

Gutted for you, know how you feel having been through similar experiences. Fingers crossed you caught it early to minimise expense later and that you can get the other engine in asap and keep on track for TOTB

 

Let me know if I can help at all

Gutted for you, know how you feel having been through similar experiences. Fingers crossed you caught it early to minimise expense later and that you can get the other engine in asap and keep on track for TOTB

 

Let me know if I can help at all

 

Thanks James appreciated we should be OK :)

Well still a lot of work to do but Dans engine is working well. Need to change the actuators that Ashspecz fitted as it's preventing full boost but testing at around 550 bhp and we are getting somewhere

 

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10152516442213899&id=561413898

Testing today there was some pretty exotic cars. A fair few must have been priceless as Dan was busy taking photos. Once I got up to speed I started to hold my own despite being down on power

 

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=692638107517326&id=100003134288593

 

I will be going to the Lotus test track at Hethel for another sprint in a couple of weeks but hoping for another couple of hundred horses :-)

Sorry, don't do FB but it would be great to follow your progress and pics here.

links don't work, glad to hear you're up and running again. What boost are you limited to at the moment?

Sorry, don't do FB but it would be great to follow your progress and pics here.

 

+1

Facebook and Instagram is where AME put their progress :) not sure what boost we have removed the actuators already so hopefully we can fix that and then move on.

With Dan Turner and his connections across the world I am pleased to tell you guys I now have sponsorship from AEM and if all goes well the car will be featured in the AEM catalogue going forward. I always resisted any sponsorship but with the recent issues and resulting expense I decided it was time to get some help. Due in no small part to the work put into this car from Slickpete and Paul, and Bodymech the car has had a lot of interest in the wider community. So now all I have to do is keep it reliable and start winning things :-) stickers soon to be appearing on this page!