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Yes, more car changes. I missed Top Drift Battle round 1 and I wanted to make sure that I could make it to round 2 and on top of that, make sure that my car would be able to get me into tandem rounds!

So I’m taking care of the cage requirements – yes I finally have a cage. The door beam will be welded in next week. Marco Vargas from SR20Store has been working on my car all week and should have a completely rebuilt SR20DET in my car along with some Tomei Poncams. I know, it’s not much, but trust me – my car has been super low on compression for a couple years now – a refreshed engine with cams will be a lot better than what I had before.

So here are my challenges:

Hopefully the car will be ready for me to pick up on Saturday!

Wish me luck!

So I went to the Carboy gymkhana event last Saturday and placed 2nd! Nadine got 3rd! It was a pretty chill day and it was perfect for shakedown #2 for Red Thing. The wiring relocation is pretty much finished, except for making it look pretty:

I got a Safety 21 cage from Big Bad BH and it is now in my car… still needs a little modification to the the a-pillar base plates and door beams, but other than that, it looks great. Hopefully I can paint it soon!

At the event, I noticed that my tires would rub up against my front bumper and it would also rub a little bit on the fender… so a little hammering and cutting is still needed. The engine is getting really tired too, more now than ever – so I need to really get on the ball with these things!

Here’s some pics of other new things on my car that I haven’t posted yet:

New Taka Motorsports Oil Cooler and Filter Relocation Kit

New ARC blow off valve

New Tanabe Medalion Concept G Blue muffler

OK, so I missed the event after all. But at least I have a little bit more time to prepare for the next event… I’ll be going to Carboy’s Gymkhana event on March 10. And hopefully I’ll have my Safety21 roll cage in (that is, if it fits cars with a sunroof).

The wiring is now finished, I’ve made more modifications to the wheel well and now nothing rubs, and as far as I know from idling on my drive way, my car doesn’t overheat. Things are looking good!

So like I said from my last journal entry, I realized I still have a lot to work on for my car. When I turn the steering wheel to the left, it starts to rub against my wiring harness pretty badly. So what I’ve spent this entire past week doing is going to work, then coming home to a wiring harness nightmare. The harness consists of at least 60 wires that I’ve had to cut, re-route, and then solder back together. I think it’s taken me a total of 8 hours to do them all. I’m going to lower the car back down tonight and see how much clearance I’ve made. I’m hoping there’s no more rubbing issues AT ALL.

Another issue I’ve found is that on the way home from the track at the last event, a few holes were made into my radiator from a moving fan shroud… somebody was looking over me that day though, because the car made it all the way but a few blocks away from home before the leak started, causing my car to overheat pretty badly. Anyway, I got the radiator fixed and put the car together last night. The car started OK which is good… so tonight will be my judgement day. I have to see if my engine is OK from the overheating and if my wheels clear my wiring modifications. Cross your fingers! I’m trying to make it to the track this weekend!

After all the troubles of making sure my car was track worthy, I got my butt back onto the track last Saturday! The car was running pretty decently. My new alignment helped out a lot, as it got rid of some understeer and ambiguity in the steering at certain limits. I still have a lot of work to do though, like more alignment adjustments, chassis modification for wheel clearance, electrical troubleshooting, and I’m really needing a new engine. It also started to rain and now I have a much better understanding of how to drive in the rain in a car like mine.

Thanks to everybody who came out and a big thanks to the people who helped! I can’t wait for the next one!

Wow, if you are from Southern California, we experienced some pretty crazy weather this past weekend! It was pretty danged cold outside and to top it off, it was raining pretty hard. There was an international D1 Grand Prix event at Irwindale. Pretty good way to welcome our foreign guests, huh? I bet you they were expecting sunny blue skies and palm trees. So Cal is not like the movies guys!

I got my car back from Tanabe! I’m testing out their Sustec Pro Seven coilovers right now. Pretty much, it’s the next generation of the Tanabe DDs (my previous coilovers that I thought were good). The good thing about these coilovers is that they improved the dampening so that it feels much tighter. On the Tanabe DD, the coilovers felt great when the dampers were set stiffer but at soft, it felt like the dampers didn’t match well with the springs. With the new Sustec Pro Sevens, the coilovers feel great through the entire damper setting range. They are even pretty comfortable when set full soft! Another improvement is that there are 16 different damper settings instead of the previous 4. I’m also currently testing their TEAS electronic active suspension controller, which is much like Tein’s product where you can adjust dampening from inside the car, but it has some even more impressive features. The controller unit gets a signal from the ECU telling the controller wheel speed. On full auto mode, the controller will adjust according to the speed of the vehicle. You also have 4 memory settings so that you can quickly change settings depending on the type of driving/racing you are doing, or different tracks that require different setups. So far, everything is really cool driving it on the street. I can’t wait to see how it does on the track when I leave it on full auto mode. I’m also interested in how it will feel during autocross and gymkhana. I know it allows you to fine tune the way it auto adjusts, so I’m really excited to see how much I can do with this thing!

Tanabe also custom fitted me a Concept G Blue exhaust so that it would fit with my extreme aero a little bit better. Basically they took the S13 exhaust kit and extended the exhaust further out. MAN, the exhaust sounds MEAN!! There’s no pre-muffler, so it’s just piping from the catalytic converter all the way to the muffler cannister. And the best thing is that it’s pretty quiet with the silencer in. But once you take the silencer out, it’s ear bleeding time baby!

Now I can focus on getting a few other things taken care of before the January 27th event.