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!!

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

PS. And yes that is AEM and we will be installing one of their Infiniti ECUs shortly :-)

Congratulations on your new sponsorship deal and best wishes in your forthcoming competition season.

Thats great news Bob :thumbup1:

Nice one Bob. And of course to Pete, Paul and the Bodymech guys. Car is a real credit to all of you :tt1:

Well done buddy see you at ten of the best

So have rebuilt the turbos and been on the dyno still haven't installed the Infiniti but perhaps next.

 

And here at Santa Pod an 11.1 with passenger :-)

 

We are getting there :-)

nice have you a engine spec list be intrested to it

That is mad Bob! Aren't you just about Veyron bothering at that spec?

We are getting there :-)

 

Probably true to say you have got there now.

Britain's fastest and most powerful 300ZX.:thumbup1:

Excellent :D

Wow big power Bob well done.:thumbup1:

Hope you do Japshow today, sure it will surprise a lot of people. I make it 624ftlb and 738 hp, can you confirm these are hub figures and I'll update the dyno thread :)

Is that little blue shark's fin at low rpm wheelspin or a glitch or something?

Hope you do Japshow today, sure it will surprise a lot of people. I make it 624ftlb and 738 hp, can you confirm these are hub figures and I'll update the dyno thread :)

 

These are at the hubs James. We should get a bit more out of it yet as we were getting tired and at 2 am we were waking up the neighbours lol. Plus when we install the Infiniti and turn on the NOS I'm hoping for a lot less lag but we shall see.

 

Is that little blue shark's fin at low rpm wheelspin or a glitch or something?

 

From previous runs :)

Here's the print out from my two runs today at Japshow. I did three actually but they didn't register the third run which I believe was an 11.5. Just 6 hundredths off the 10 second but I am really happy with my 60 foot time and if I can maintain that 60 foot will easily hit the 10 second mark So at TOTB I will most likely remove the front splitter and the rear spoiler. I also left a pair of 265 tyres on the front so will change them for a pair of 235 and I hope that will be enough to get the time down.

Excellent 60ft time, what tires are you using for that?

Excellent 60ft time, what tires are you using for that?

 

Hoosier road legal. Worked really well today and I'm hoping they stay sticky for TOTB. I managed to break traction on my last run so will have a good look at them next week to see if they're still good.

Bloody hell that's epic bob :D

Hi Bob, can you confirm the tubs so I can update the dyno thread. Earlier in this thread you mention GTX 3071 but I thought they were 3076?

Hi Bob, can you confirm the tubs so I can update the dyno thread. Earlier in this thread you mention GTX 3071 but I thought they were 3076?

 

They are GTX3071R however we had to modify them a lot as the ashspecz ones didn't do what it said on the tin. We are at the dyno this coming Friday so will probably have a different story by the weekend :)

Are we allowed to know the rest of your spec list?

Are we allowed to know the rest of your spec list?

 

Yes of course no secrets but the list is on here somewhere. I have a list on my PC which probably needs updating and I will do it after TOTB :)

An update on the build as quite a lot has happened over the past few weeks. Now that TOTB is out of the way I will be taking stock and deciding on where we go from here. TOTB didn't go fantastically well and I had a lot of issues to deal with. We installed the Infiniti ECU but it's so new they haven't written much software for it so in reality it was less flexible than the series 2 :( However we installed and ran with NOS but this was used to reduce lag rather than increase power and it did the job well. In fact over a dozen runs we were hitting just over 700 at the hubs in extremely hot weather so sorted.

 

Then I decided to install softer springs at the rear which made sense because of the weight loss. And while the car was excellent at high speed corners it was dire at slow speed and tight bends/hairpins etc so pretty rubbish for TOTB or sprints. I replaced the exiting 6kg springs with 5kg which should help to improve the grip for TOTB. Next job was some sensible geo setup and I got this done in Northampton on a state of the art laser facility (state of the art prices too).

 

Finally AME installed full throttle shift and some electronic gismos which they believed would improve times on the quarter. This was against my personal wishes however I was happy to 'give it a go' and help to develop the concept.

 

So when we turned up at TOTB on Saturday morning it was with a totally different setup from any previous and I wanted to test a bit more than normal to get it right.

 

After a couple of pretty slow laps on Saturday morning it was clear the traction was much better. Unfortunately it was so good that I was suffering oil surge! I initially thought that I had blown the engine as there was loads of smoke from the right exhaust. After a few checks it was clear that it was simply surge and I decided to stop doing handling as I didn't want to do any damage.

 

So onto the quarter mile and more problems. I don't use launch or traction control and like to do the work myself. Dan had installed a switch on the clutch which enables me to hold the throttle pinned and the revs drop to around 5000 revs. This enables me to change gear but stops the turbos from losing boost. Unfortunately this prevented me from doing a burnout as every time I tried it was dropping to the lower revs and bogging. Not only that this same limit prevented me from launching correctly and most of the early runs saw me trying various different ways to overcome the issues. I did manage to cope with the full throttle shift but it wasn't really my cup of tea. So I told Craig to remove everything and went out again and tried to suss out the different suspension as again I was getting a different response with the softer springs. I ended the day not knowing my head from my ass :)

 

On Sunday I let them re-install the switch to give it one last go but after aborting my first two runs it was clear I had to go back to the drawing board and removed all the electronics again. I managed to knock out a half decent quarter(enough to get me into the finals anyway) and did a single top speed run just to get one on the board. A pretty respectable 164 mph which was my theoretical maximum anyway :)

 

On to the handling and I had decided to drive it a bit different from my normal style to try and prevent oil surge. Rather than make maximum traction I tried to get the wheels spinning to get the corners and this seemed to work. In fact it wasn't until the shootout that I experienced some oil surge issues but they were minor. Handling wise the car is amazing but unfortunately I wasn't able to fully exploit this due to the oil surge. Only a second behind Justin who is a pretty decent drifter and has a very well sorted car so it's not all bad.

 

So for now I am going to try and get some seat time in the car without changing it too much as this will help to improve times greatly. I'm not sure what the next stage will be I won't be trying to make it any faster until I can sort out the oil surge. So perhaps I can simply start to enjoy driving it rather than building it :)

 

Some photos later :)

 

On the up side I managed to get on the bottom step of the podium for all three disciplines which is a pretty tall order and apart from me only Andy Forrest, Simon Norris, and Steve Darley achieved that (though they did it a lot quicker)!!! Doing well in all three disciplines is tough on car and driver so survival was important. Perhaps next year I can drive it to its full potential.

Hi Bob, glad both car & driver survived the day, despite the issues you were working through and to get on the podium for each event is a high achievement indeed.

 

For the smoking, has the catch-can plumbing changed for the new setup?

Hi Bob, glad both car & driver survived the day, despite the issues you were working through and to get on the podium for each event is a high achievement indeed.

 

For the smoking, has the catch-can plumbing changed for the new setup?

 

Yes James I was going to pick your brains a little later in the week if that's OK :)