Looks like Nasa MA VIR is the weekend following my Summit event, not enough time to turn the car around.

 

My spring schedule got wrecked. The march summit event that's usually my season starter got cancelled. The following April vir event is a no go also, I'll be away during that week for a solar eclipse vacation. So now I've got to figure out alternate track dates. I guess that's why I've been taking my time getting the car prepped.
Finally pulled it out of storage this weekend. Was impressed to see that after sitting for months the antigravity battery started right up. Nice.
​​​​​​Got the kinetix intake, tb and new cone installed. Also fabbed up a heat shield. Thought I'd need to do the pedal dance to get the new tb idle correct, but it runs and idles just fine. Still need some rubber trim so I'm not cutting myself on the sharp edges.

also pulled the front calipers for rebuild but one of the bolts was stuck and ended up destroying the thread. So instead of replacing seals I had to order another set of calipers and bolts. Fortunately summit stills has them at $180.. it's always something 😐

 

Nice, I hope the intake works. It’s definitely always something on race cars but that’s the fun part! Ha

 

Now with more rubber seal

 

nice! I'm really eager to hear your opinion of the kinetix intake after you get it out. it looks so damn good.

 

Did the oil change today and finally removed the stock heat exchanger plate while there. Used a shorter threaded pipe available from z1 off-road. Top is the stock pipe designed for the exchanger, bottom is the short one for use without exchanger, part number 15213-31U00. Middle is my external oil cooler plate extension.

 

So you are using the M20x5 stud for a bare oil filter setup, I assume that there is a different oil cooling setup somewhere.

 

Correct, there is an external oil cooler plate that's held in place by the extension piece in the middle of the picture

 

Signed up for NASA VIR event in mid-March, so I guess I have a deadline now. So far got solid bushings installed on one side of the subframe, gonna do the other side tomorrow. Hope it goes smoothly....

 

I had trouble with the nuts during reinstall. For some reason, they just wouldn't cooperate, like they'd been torqued too hard at the factory. They went in okay but not smoothly. But the last one was so bad I (sad to admit) forced it up the final inch into place. If the subframe ever needs to come off again it'll have to be re-threaded.

 

No such issues here. Got the subframe retightened and the diff refilled. Also took out the last degree or two of toe-in from the rear alignment. Now that all the bushings are solid it should no longer be necessary. Then I redid the corner balance. Ended up all I needed to do was drop the right rear strut one revolution to get the cross weights within 0.25% of perfect with me in the car. Close enough. The car with about 7 gallons or 40 lbs of fuel weighed in at 2923 lbs, so weight without fuel would be in the 288x range.

 

thats awesome, my goal is to get the car under 3,000 as well.

 

Well plans have changed, won't be able to make NASA vir after all. Instead I signed up for pca summit the following weekend.

 

bummer man, was looking forward to getting some tack time with you!

 

Yeah, me too. The good news is that I now have a NASA membership so I have a reason to attend.😁

 

nice, let me know the next time your gonna do VIR

 

Hi Hoon, I know this has been discussed before; but can you remind me again what the benefits are of bypassing the oil cooler? Is the coolant actually getting heated by the hotter oil when on track?

 

Without an external oil cooler the heat exchanger is basically cooling the oil by transferring the heat to the coolant and using the radiator to cool it down. That's sufficient for street use, but not track use. The other benefit of the heat exchanger is that oil heats up quicker during cold starts. So if you're driving short distances it's worth keeping. I don't think keeping it in addition to an external cooler is detrimental, for me it was mainly about simplifying the coolant system and reducing the number of potential failure leak points. You'd need to go back to my posts about that but basically I was able to get rid of the drivers side hard pipe and most of the pass side hard pipe along with multitude of ports.

 

definitely, I ditched it and alot of lines years ago when I pulled the engine too. Alot of that crap is for emissions and stuff, its not needed.

 

My plan is to disconnect from the radiator and to use a thermostat adapter which keeps all the oil in the engine to warm up until the thermostat opens. It also ensures that there are no oil starvation on start up.