Hey everybody, its that time of year again to slip away into the garage and fix everything I broke this year!

First things to go for 2012 is my budget wide body over fenders I made a couple years back. They did the job great for a 1/10 of the cost, but 3 of 4 were hit my other cars this season and its time to change it up. I went with the Version select voltex knock off kit. I love voltex as much as the next guy,but fir the small fortune and the 100% it will likely get hit..... bring on the knock offs!




Next thing to come off and more importantly was the suspension. Towards the end of the year I was having a real problem with alignments. I was on 3 different racks in a week and had vastly different results from what the alignment was when I left. I spoke with Robi and he has me jack the car up and hit the top bolt to the strut with an air gun, and watch for movement in the wheel. Well the wheel was all over hell and that was also the side that I destroyed my wheel at nationals at Mid-Ohio. The passenger side suffered a hard hit from a corvette that really didnt need to happen, but hey.... some as$holes just dont know what they are doing.

Well as I dropped the KW's I noticed another problem. Earlier in the year I could have my camber plates maxed out and mess with the ecentric bolt to get my -3 degrees of camber. Towards the end of the year, doing the same set up I was at -3.6 to -3.8 in the exact same settings. Well the reason is the shoulder built around the ecentric bolt had stretched and fanned out!



Well all and all this was the first weekend of prep, Work is going to be nuts this winter so I had to start early as we were already told we may not have a day off in January!

As always, check out the website at TeamWINracing.com

 

Boy, its a good thing you caught those issues before it got real ugly!

You must not be busy enough if you have the time to post a prep thread. Good luck in 2012, and take it to those Vettes!

 

Thanks buddy...

 

How are your front hubs? This was my original hub we replaced last season! I will be magna flux testing them from now on.

 

^ Holy crap!

In for all the updates!

I've been thinking about doing the widebody thing too, but I've been kicking around the idea of fabbing rear panels to replace the back doors and quarter panel all in one piece since rally rules now allow for doing that (just like what Joe did on his GRC Evo). I need to find a set of fenders I can use to make my mold since I won't be using the actual fenders, I don't want to spend a fortune on them.

Dave

 

I ordered hubs at all 4 corners. I was going to order drive shafts too, till I figured out how much they are! LOL

And that local rally team by us.... I think its ART something or another. I talked to one of their guys at the APM open house. They mold their own rear on piece fender starting from the tail light and trunk like a normal rear quarter but its one huge piece including the rear pillar and rear door!

 

Yeah, those guys went in together on the development of the parts (molds?), but they were asking $3k per set. Probably not a bad price when you figure all the development time that goes into it...but for me, then I'd have to do more work to it so I'd be able to run some wider tires (rally car regulations restrict max width to 245), so that makes it even more expensive. Plus I'd have to factor in shipping, and I'm sure that wouldn't be cheap for such large parts.

I'd love to use something similar to the APR kit since my rear quarter on one side is a bit mangled from the guardrail and I think the APR bits go higher on the body.

Dave

 

The Rear kit I just bought should just barely cover up my little run in with a Lotus! LOL

Some other company ATI i think makes one too, but its rather ugly and it cover up like 75% of your tear door too.

 

Have the same rears sitting in the basement! Maybe your install will inspire me to put these on later this winter...

Also replacing all 4 hubs (had one die early last year) they aren't that expensive and can save a weekend...or your butt!

 

LoL. He found out about that after a full day of diagnosing my alignment problem, and told me he now tells Everybody to do that the minute the mention it haha. Though in this case I was the a**hole and hit a curb before it became a full time track car. Bent the shaft by about 5 deg, but didn't mange to stretch the hole .

Ditto on the hubs, both my fronts are shot so i'm doing all 4. I was trying to do the math for the Curt Brown hubs. If I replace these 2.5 times I would have paid for 1 set of Curt's. So for now since i'm uber strapped for cash i'll do OEM. A guy down the street from my shop rebuilds the driveshafts for about 60 a piece I think. He does it for a lot of race cars in the area so we'll see if they need it or not when we take it down.

The rest so far include:

1. New HP number, tune, different tire, and different fuel (Pending 2012 rules)
2. Clean up electrics
3. New hubs/rebuild driveshafts
4. New 5th gear and syncros (and whatever else is torn apart)
5. New clutch (while they're in there, tried to go cheap, ACT sucks ***** for RR)
6. Build out alum covers for surge tank and seal trunk area
7. Possibility new fire system due to surge.
8. Gonna give the Weir Performance LSD a try
9. Rear bumper beam, different/lighter then OEM, aka Thunder Roadster deflector .
10. A ring for the better half to lock her into the "program" .

 

Hmmm....you should try gravel tires and a route book.

Dave

 

THat's spooky, how much track time created that nastyness?

 

I've heard about this but never believed it till now. Wow!!! This picture looks bad and we should track how often the is happening and start a separate thread on this. From what have researched, I think this may only effect earlier year cars. Mitsubishi has revised the part number. I was told to used 300GT VR4 hubs but the part number are now the same.

Ryan, The build starting to look good. Keep us updated.

 

Depending on what you are looking for in clutches, I have a spare Exedy Hyper Compe-R ultralight twin disc I would give you a good deal on. It's what I've been running in my car for about 4 years. Something like 7-8 pounds lighter than the normal Twin or HD twin, and seems to last just as long. Definitely not a street car clutch, though.

Good luck with the winter build. I'll be following everyone's winter work as I plan ahead for next year's season.

 

Thanks homie, But Exedy sponsors the evo. I roll their HD twin disk, just rebuilt it actually! Im currently deciding what I want to do about the rear diff??????