It's been a long time so I thought I'd give an update. I made a few alterations last winter and most of them I'm pleased with. I added a large vent for the fuel filler so now I don't have to trickle the gas in while refueling. I changed the alignment slightly for a bit more camber and that seems to be working well, although it could still use more for maximum cornering power. I also pulled the engine to clean it up and do a bunch of upgrades:
-balance shaft delete
-manual timing belt tensioner
-aluminum flywheel and new clutch
-Wavetrack LSD
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The balance shaft delete removed 13lbs of mass that was rotating 2X engine speed, and I'm no longer feeding 6 bearings with oil, so that's great, but with my stiff engine mounts the added vibration has taken some of the cruising pleasure out of the car. While I don't mind the vibration itself, at certain rpm's some of the sheet metal panels start to resonate and it becomes loud and unpleasant. Some of the components were permanently modified so there's no going back without a new engine. I may try stiffening the problem panels to change their resonant frequency.
Everything else I'm very happy with and the car seems to be working pretty good. I had a chance this summer to do my first trackday. The facility is brand new and built as a driver training/ test track so it's fairly small with lots of technical corners (blind, off camber, and cresting). Aside from the front and back straight, the speeds were on par with a lot of the autocrosses I do. I was the fastest car out there that day and managed to get some pretty respectable lap times. It was really hot (>30*C) so my cooling system couldn't keep up while going all out for a 20 minute session. After about 10 minutes the coolant temp was getting up to 108*C and I would back off for a few minutes and then get back on it for the last couple of laps. In hind sight I probably could have pushed it to 115*C and it might have maintained that temp for the whole session but I thought I would take it easy. I would like to add an auxiliary cooler using the heater core circuit and possibly add a proper oil cooler as well for next year.
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https://youtu.be/i3SYtRLPuGAI've also done some more autocrossing this summer. The car has been pretty solidly getting FTD, although I haven't come up against either of the two cars that beat me last year. The last event I got FTD by 4.4s. While I still find the car understeers at times, I'm not really sure if it's much of a problem since I can drive around it. A little trail braking or a sharp steering input can get the car rotating and makes for a very quick lap.
https://youtu.be/Fpv18Brh0F8Two weeks ago I had the chance to do my very first motorcycle trackday, and it was at the same facility as before. Having previously driven the course was a huge advantage and I was able to start going hard pretty quickly. The speeds were much higher on the bike (190 vs 160) and it sure felt a whole lot faster, even though I doubted it would be. Riding the bike was so much more involved and my legs were sore for days. When I put the videos side by side the car looks really boring, even though it's 8 seconds faster! Both videos were about 2 seconds slower than my fastest lap times so I thought it was a pretty fair comparison. The fastest bike at the event (race prepped new cbr1000rr on slicks) being ridden all out, laying rubber out of the corners and all, just managed to match my car times. I'm really interested in how much time I could drop with a set of slicks on the car.
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https://youtu.be/asgXpG6xryk