After our successful Halloween race, we spent most of our holiday time away from the race car. Although we did pick up this car for $200, which might come in handy some day. It's a 2005 350Z with a manual transmission that runs, but was involved in a police chase and is a little beat up.
Our next to attack some of the feedback we got from Randy Pobst was to try to improve the mid-corner understeer. On a 240SX lowering the car can really hurt the roll center, and the lower control arms end up pointing up at the knuckle. This makes the tire gain a lot more camber through travel than ideal. A knuckle that lowers the lower control arm pivot point can help this, so I decided to give the GKTech lowering knuckle a try.
First up I wanted to measure what things looked like. With the car sitting on the lift I measured 3.7 degrees angle up towards the ball joint.
Oh wow, first time we had seen this happen! Surface cracks are normal, but we had never had one actually crack through. These are 350Z track rotors:
New "Grip" GKTech knuckle on.
The knuckle is not designed to be ran with a dust shield, but I'm using mine as a brake duct. I ended up just tack welding it to the knuckle.
After the knuckle, our control arms are almost perfectly flat! Right around 3 degrees improvement there.
All back together:
Inside view of the knuckle.
Our muffler was toast..
New muffler swapped in:
Some day.. we will swap out some panels and clean up the car. This is not that day, but some day..
These are actually the overfenders that came with the chassis years ago.. but at the time we were running factory wheels/tires and we had put some new uncut factory quarter panels on it.
Our fire bottle was expired, so it was time to swap that out for a Lifeline system.
We also started gathering parts for our next brake upgrade. I've been lusting after the Core4 Motorsports brake upgrade kit for a while, but just couldn't justify the cost. We have been running the smallest piston Wilwood fronts available, which was an OK brake balance, but not good. Hydraulically it was pretty close to factory, but once you factor in the leverage with the larger rotors it was front-biased. We had swapped over to ST45 in the rear with the ST43 in the front to help bias, and that did help. The rear calipers are still stock and are getting harder to find, so I have been nervous about having one of those fail. Yet at the same time I didn't want to be buying up spares when I wanted to put in something better.
Used rear kit:
New front calipers:
The front rotor box looks like a pizza box!
The last time I raced at night I said I'd never rely on those headlights alone again.. so on goes a light bar:
As we were preparing to load up for our next race.. we found some fuel on the ground:
We found some gas on the side of our tank which was disconcerting..
But then we tracked down that our vent line filter got broken and was leaking down to the tank (picture is after I fixed it):
So with that last little fix, the car was loaded up and ready for a practice day at Ridge Motorsports Park on Friday before the race Saturday!