2007 Lotus 2-Eleven
Discussion
Into the frantic stages now, Dyno is booked for Mon 6th to get my old Exige map tweaked in for the subtle differences I've made on the 2-Eleven.
Cage came out of storage and went back on.
To conclude the chargecooler install I needed a new bracket to support the rear of the CC core. As a reminder, the Pro Alloy dev car for the 2-Eleven kit was a later car which came with a different heatshield arrangement that could be used to mount the core. The first 50 cars had the same heatshield as me, and I'm #50...
I feel like I need to apologise for this, as somebody with a bit of engineering ability would have been able to come up with something so much better, but all I wanted to focus on was getting the dimensions right, and getting something stiff enough to provide the support. I'm certain that a much lighter and more elegant solution can be found, which is something I'll sort out later when time pressure is off a bit.
My goal was to fill the gap between the subframe legs, so did some measuring up and cardboard mocking and came up with this.
I left it to Pro Alloy to decide materials, and add any folds needed for strength. This is what they (very quickly) turned around for me.
Luckily, it turns out I can use a ruler... and it fit.
It bolts in using some existing threaded holes in the subframe, and is more than stiff enough. I think a short term solution for making it look just a little bit "thought out" would be some punched holes and dimple die bending to make it look a bit more race car. Really though I think the best fix would have been to chop a massive section out of the trailing end, leaving 30mm or so at the sides and front, then rewelding on a 'fold' to put some strength back in it. Maybe a project for another day.
All that was left was to pop some bobbins in and we had a mounted chargecooler. Excellent.
Plumbing was next, I had all the old hoses from the Exige but they just weren't going to work as the pipe run was a bit different and the lengths just weren't right. Also, the supplied hose with the CC kit is very stiff and heavy, this helps for blindly jabbing the pipes through the sill but it adds up to a lot of weight.
This little bundle is a fair bit lighter per metre, more flexible but probably a little weaker on the abrasion resistance. I can live with that.
Bought 2x 90 degrees elbows to do the initial run from the pre-rad, then mocked up my routing:
For pump mounting, there were two M6 holes already in the chassis that I had been eyeing up. They were very conveniently positioned for a couple of M6 isolation bobbins I just happened to have lying around
They would let me do something like this...
Pump would be hidden from the wheel well by a piece of thin aluminium that's bonded into the side panel, but just about accessible for service/replacement by some blind fondling either from below or above... not that it's particularly hard to remove a side panel if needed.
After a few tweaks, rerouting to allow me to use existing fixtures for P-Clips I was ready for coolant. Filling this was significantly easier than on the Exige, because the header tank is a clear high point on this system. For the Exige, you can't really get it any higher than the CC core so it makes airlocks and 'burping' quite tedious. Quick test of the pump, all good - and very quiet too. Isolation bobbins ftw.
Speaking of coolant, I'm out of sequence now - but I also had a few jobs to do before getting the car fired up on the new(old) ECU and idling nicely.
Engine was dry of coolant since having the radiator shroud removed, so took the opportunity to refit yet another Exige refugee (and add yet more weight, woo!) in the guise of my gearbox cooler setup. Pics from the original Exige install:
Worlds cutest laminova with a small fluid pump, and some home made AN hosing. Would fit to the gearbox drain plug and fill plug via a couple of these:
..and would trigger via some logic on my dashboard which acts like a thermostat to fire the relay when the box temp is hot enough.
Pump sits on the chassis crossmember between engine mount and wishbone mount:
Cooler sits just above the crossmember and is covered in coolant splatters from the chargecooler refill.
Suppose I should 'service' it too.
(had a peak inside gearbox after oil drained, defo has an open differential in there)
What berk put this on?!
I did, never ever struggled to undo one before so not sure what happened here.
I was getting ready for first fire time. Nothing really scary, engine has only been opened up for a quick peak inside the cam cover and I had a map on the ECU which ran fine on the Exige... so as expected it fired up on the button. Fuelling needed a bit of a tweak, as I'm no longer factoring in fuel pressure to my fuelling model as I did on the Exige but within about 30 seconds it was idling smoothly, returning to idle after a little throttle blip and fuelling bang on target.
Brought car up to temp, burped coolant, discovered fans were wired in wrong so had to reverse the polarity of those but other than that - all good, no leaks, no funny noises or smells. Excellent.
Cage came out of storage and went back on.
To conclude the chargecooler install I needed a new bracket to support the rear of the CC core. As a reminder, the Pro Alloy dev car for the 2-Eleven kit was a later car which came with a different heatshield arrangement that could be used to mount the core. The first 50 cars had the same heatshield as me, and I'm #50...
I feel like I need to apologise for this, as somebody with a bit of engineering ability would have been able to come up with something so much better, but all I wanted to focus on was getting the dimensions right, and getting something stiff enough to provide the support. I'm certain that a much lighter and more elegant solution can be found, which is something I'll sort out later when time pressure is off a bit.
My goal was to fill the gap between the subframe legs, so did some measuring up and cardboard mocking and came up with this.
I left it to Pro Alloy to decide materials, and add any folds needed for strength. This is what they (very quickly) turned around for me.
Luckily, it turns out I can use a ruler... and it fit.
It bolts in using some existing threaded holes in the subframe, and is more than stiff enough. I think a short term solution for making it look just a little bit "thought out" would be some punched holes and dimple die bending to make it look a bit more race car. Really though I think the best fix would have been to chop a massive section out of the trailing end, leaving 30mm or so at the sides and front, then rewelding on a 'fold' to put some strength back in it. Maybe a project for another day.
All that was left was to pop some bobbins in and we had a mounted chargecooler. Excellent.
Plumbing was next, I had all the old hoses from the Exige but they just weren't going to work as the pipe run was a bit different and the lengths just weren't right. Also, the supplied hose with the CC kit is very stiff and heavy, this helps for blindly jabbing the pipes through the sill but it adds up to a lot of weight.
This little bundle is a fair bit lighter per metre, more flexible but probably a little weaker on the abrasion resistance. I can live with that.
Bought 2x 90 degrees elbows to do the initial run from the pre-rad, then mocked up my routing:
For pump mounting, there were two M6 holes already in the chassis that I had been eyeing up. They were very conveniently positioned for a couple of M6 isolation bobbins I just happened to have lying around
They would let me do something like this...
Pump would be hidden from the wheel well by a piece of thin aluminium that's bonded into the side panel, but just about accessible for service/replacement by some blind fondling either from below or above... not that it's particularly hard to remove a side panel if needed.
After a few tweaks, rerouting to allow me to use existing fixtures for P-Clips I was ready for coolant. Filling this was significantly easier than on the Exige, because the header tank is a clear high point on this system. For the Exige, you can't really get it any higher than the CC core so it makes airlocks and 'burping' quite tedious. Quick test of the pump, all good - and very quiet too. Isolation bobbins ftw.
Speaking of coolant, I'm out of sequence now - but I also had a few jobs to do before getting the car fired up on the new(old) ECU and idling nicely.
Engine was dry of coolant since having the radiator shroud removed, so took the opportunity to refit yet another Exige refugee (and add yet more weight, woo!) in the guise of my gearbox cooler setup. Pics from the original Exige install:
Worlds cutest laminova with a small fluid pump, and some home made AN hosing. Would fit to the gearbox drain plug and fill plug via a couple of these:
..and would trigger via some logic on my dashboard which acts like a thermostat to fire the relay when the box temp is hot enough.
Pump sits on the chassis crossmember between engine mount and wishbone mount:
Cooler sits just above the crossmember and is covered in coolant splatters from the chargecooler refill.
Suppose I should 'service' it too.
(had a peak inside gearbox after oil drained, defo has an open differential in there)
What berk put this on?!
I did, never ever struggled to undo one before so not sure what happened here.
I was getting ready for first fire time. Nothing really scary, engine has only been opened up for a quick peak inside the cam cover and I had a map on the ECU which ran fine on the Exige... so as expected it fired up on the button. Fuelling needed a bit of a tweak, as I'm no longer factoring in fuel pressure to my fuelling model as I did on the Exige but within about 30 seconds it was idling smoothly, returning to idle after a little throttle blip and fuelling bang on target.
Brought car up to temp, burped coolant, discovered fans were wired in wrong so had to reverse the polarity of those but other than that - all good, no leaks, no funny noises or smells. Excellent.
With the car running and idling I could get on to some finishing touches.
I'd already decided that I wasn't going to put bodywork on for the dyno, it would mean I don't have to rush (not that it's a big job, I just want more time to tidy things up, give the chassis a good wipe down, etc) but also I'd have no anxiety about whether the front clam could even fit up the ramp for the dyno!
I would have to put the side doorcard things back on to allow me to get the scuttle panel back on which contains the fuel filler cap. Safety first n' all that. So before doing that and making the interior of the car a little less accessible, I'd crack on and get a few interior jobs done.
First up, some carbon tat!
Went to the Autosport show in January, was pretty crap compared to previous years but I achieved my two goals. One was getting a technical answer from Haltech about the TPMS stuff, and the other was trying on and buying a helmet a little more suited to an open car.
I was all set to look for a Bell GP3, but Bell closed faced helmets were nowhere to be seen. I spotted a Zamp stand, had never heard of them before but their range was uncannily identical to the Bells in terms of features and certifications.
The key things I wanted were a chin spoiler to try and stop my helmet lifting, capacity for an intercom and readily available options for smoked visors etc.
The Zamp came with a clear visor, and I opted for this metallic yellow one too. Also got HANS posts.
The next job was to sort an intercom out. I think this will only very rarely get used so I went for the entry level ZeroNoise offering.
It either runs off a 9v battery (the ones you lick) or can wire it into the 12v supply from the car, which I've done.
Zamp included empty earcups within the helmet lining, so threaded the earpieces into the back and stuck the mouthpiece behind the chin bar where the drinks tube would come through.
The downside of the entry level one is that I think it has a 6.5mm jack which isn't really common across the other intercom vendors... but nothing is standardised anyway so getting a one size fits all for instructor helmets etc is just not viable. Instead I've ordered a spare "guest" headset, which is velcrod into my old helmet for passengers etc, but can easily be removed and stuck into another one if they'd rather use their own.
Mounted it on the roll bar behind the passenger seat
Next one is maybe a bit controversial for the anodized lovers, but I bought some vinyl sill covers for an S1 (2-Eleven sills are more S1 style than S2) and they fit beautifully.
It's a function over form thing, you don't slide over the sills like an Elise/Exige but they do come up to your elbows and seem to be always getting clonked by harness buckles, luggage, passengers, etc. Once you mess up the anodized finish on the chassis.... there's no real way back.
At one point this Winter I'd had a bodyshop lined up to paint the doorcards, but on later inspection they were in really good condition. The scuffs and scrapes that I'd previously spotted ended up in the most part being just scum that cleaned off! The few scratches I had left came out pretty well with a quick blast from the DA polisher.
Gave them a good coat of sonax npt and they're looking lovely.
Finished the job off with harnesses and put the doorcards back on. Only just noticed that my driver harness is not an ASM one.
The doorcards were bonded on originally and I was really reluctant to bond them back in, in case I ever want them off again. I felt very fortunate not to damage them beyond repair when hacking through the betaseal, and it was very time consuming.
As a result, I ran a self adhesive gasket of neoprene stuff all the way around to take up the tolerance and provide some weather sealing (lol). The sealant I think is there from the factory purely because the tolerances are so to cock. You get two reference points to meet (8-10mm gap between doorcard top and rollbar upright) and when lining it up, there are huge voids in some areas between the doorcard and the chassis. Previously this was taken up by a 15mm (in some cases) bead of betaseal, but for me it would be filled with neoprene.
I added a couple of nuts/bolts and washers to secure it at the top end (bottom end already bolts to chassis) and I'm happy with it. Should be a 5min job to remove in future, but if I find a reason in hindsight for why they should have been bonded in - I can always come back in an afternoon and redo it.
It felt really good to get all the crap out of the footwells and give it all a good vac out. One of those jobs that makes it feel 'nearly done', and not tripping over those doorcards on the garage floor is most welcome.
I even popped a side panel on just to check for clearances and alignment. All good.
I ran a litre of brake fluid through, got loads of air out of the calipers but the pedal still goes to the floor so I fear my attempts to cap the brake lines during all my work has failed, and the ABS system has got some air in it. Been here before and it's a total mare to sort, you can either tow it to someone with a Lotus scantool to cycle the ABS and purge it of air, or just run gallons of fluid through with quick road tests between to try and lock up the brakes and trigger the ABS. I'll give it one run up and down the cul-de-sac at the weekend and give it one more pre-Dyno bleed, but might need to wait until it has bodywork on and is road going before sorting it properly.
I'd already decided that I wasn't going to put bodywork on for the dyno, it would mean I don't have to rush (not that it's a big job, I just want more time to tidy things up, give the chassis a good wipe down, etc) but also I'd have no anxiety about whether the front clam could even fit up the ramp for the dyno!
I would have to put the side doorcard things back on to allow me to get the scuttle panel back on which contains the fuel filler cap. Safety first n' all that. So before doing that and making the interior of the car a little less accessible, I'd crack on and get a few interior jobs done.
First up, some carbon tat!
Went to the Autosport show in January, was pretty crap compared to previous years but I achieved my two goals. One was getting a technical answer from Haltech about the TPMS stuff, and the other was trying on and buying a helmet a little more suited to an open car.
I was all set to look for a Bell GP3, but Bell closed faced helmets were nowhere to be seen. I spotted a Zamp stand, had never heard of them before but their range was uncannily identical to the Bells in terms of features and certifications.
The key things I wanted were a chin spoiler to try and stop my helmet lifting, capacity for an intercom and readily available options for smoked visors etc.
The Zamp came with a clear visor, and I opted for this metallic yellow one too. Also got HANS posts.
The next job was to sort an intercom out. I think this will only very rarely get used so I went for the entry level ZeroNoise offering.
It either runs off a 9v battery (the ones you lick) or can wire it into the 12v supply from the car, which I've done.
Zamp included empty earcups within the helmet lining, so threaded the earpieces into the back and stuck the mouthpiece behind the chin bar where the drinks tube would come through.
The downside of the entry level one is that I think it has a 6.5mm jack which isn't really common across the other intercom vendors... but nothing is standardised anyway so getting a one size fits all for instructor helmets etc is just not viable. Instead I've ordered a spare "guest" headset, which is velcrod into my old helmet for passengers etc, but can easily be removed and stuck into another one if they'd rather use their own.
Mounted it on the roll bar behind the passenger seat
Next one is maybe a bit controversial for the anodized lovers, but I bought some vinyl sill covers for an S1 (2-Eleven sills are more S1 style than S2) and they fit beautifully.
It's a function over form thing, you don't slide over the sills like an Elise/Exige but they do come up to your elbows and seem to be always getting clonked by harness buckles, luggage, passengers, etc. Once you mess up the anodized finish on the chassis.... there's no real way back.
At one point this Winter I'd had a bodyshop lined up to paint the doorcards, but on later inspection they were in really good condition. The scuffs and scrapes that I'd previously spotted ended up in the most part being just scum that cleaned off! The few scratches I had left came out pretty well with a quick blast from the DA polisher.
Gave them a good coat of sonax npt and they're looking lovely.
Finished the job off with harnesses and put the doorcards back on. Only just noticed that my driver harness is not an ASM one.
The doorcards were bonded on originally and I was really reluctant to bond them back in, in case I ever want them off again. I felt very fortunate not to damage them beyond repair when hacking through the betaseal, and it was very time consuming.
As a result, I ran a self adhesive gasket of neoprene stuff all the way around to take up the tolerance and provide some weather sealing (lol). The sealant I think is there from the factory purely because the tolerances are so to cock. You get two reference points to meet (8-10mm gap between doorcard top and rollbar upright) and when lining it up, there are huge voids in some areas between the doorcard and the chassis. Previously this was taken up by a 15mm (in some cases) bead of betaseal, but for me it would be filled with neoprene.
I added a couple of nuts/bolts and washers to secure it at the top end (bottom end already bolts to chassis) and I'm happy with it. Should be a 5min job to remove in future, but if I find a reason in hindsight for why they should have been bonded in - I can always come back in an afternoon and redo it.
It felt really good to get all the crap out of the footwells and give it all a good vac out. One of those jobs that makes it feel 'nearly done', and not tripping over those doorcards on the garage floor is most welcome.
I even popped a side panel on just to check for clearances and alignment. All good.
I ran a litre of brake fluid through, got loads of air out of the calipers but the pedal still goes to the floor so I fear my attempts to cap the brake lines during all my work has failed, and the ABS system has got some air in it. Been here before and it's a total mare to sort, you can either tow it to someone with a Lotus scantool to cycle the ABS and purge it of air, or just run gallons of fluid through with quick road tests between to try and lock up the brakes and trigger the ABS. I'll give it one run up and down the cul-de-sac at the weekend and give it one more pre-Dyno bleed, but might need to wait until it has bodywork on and is road going before sorting it properly.
MTW said:
Great updates. I have also been suffering with similar helmet problems when I run with no screen. I will be interested in how you get on with that one.
Are you doing silverstone in march with Lotus on Track?
Thank you! No I've booked the November one again, have a Blyton in early March for a shakedown run... hopefully.Are you doing silverstone in march with Lotus on Track?
With dyno day fast approaching. I got the car outside and made sure that it did basic things... like forwards, backwards and stopping.
The forwards and backwards were OK, the stopping less so. I slammed on the best I could at <5mph and triggered a couple of tiny lockups. This allowed me to re-bleed the brakes and get a bit more air out, nowhere near 'done' yet but probably safe enough to drive onto a trailer, and maybe up and down the road a few times when bodywork is back on.
Out of curiosity I put the wishbones back on without any camber shims. On the Elise/Exige cars it's a struggle to get more than 'book' camber of about 0.5 degrees at the front. Aftermarket arms/machined uprights/etc can be had, but even then my Exige maxed out at 1.5deg.
With no shims, the 2-Eleven goes full stance mode!
I lobbed some shims in just to give me a closer starting point for when it comes to geo. 2-Eleven will be aiming for similar to what I ran on the Exige, as per the book.
With that sorted, one final check over of the car (found a cam position sensor unplugged!) it was time to load onto the trailer.
Trailer did not like being woken up, with one brake jammed on for its first 4-500 metres. Luckily it sprung loose...
Strapping the car down without bodywork on was an absolute delight. I'm going to resent the bodypanels when they're back.
I was booked onto the dyno at 4pm, over in Liverpool so meant for a lunchtime departure. Lovely day for it, pleasant drive over the M62 and no trailer gremlins after the brake freed up.
Parking on the industrial park was a concern, but luckily it was chucking out time for more places so the little carpark was deserted and I didn't feel guilty doing this...
Back to EFI Tuning.
I stumbled across Chris a little bit by accident when I wanted the Exige mapping. I'd wanted a second opinion for a while over how the car/ECU was originally delivered to me and despite Chris not working day to day with the EMU Black nor 2ZZ cars, he fixed some idle/drivability issues that other specialists had really struggled to get the head around. Further to that, he was happy to talk me through everything he did - and even after bringing the Exige home we continued to chat about things for months, I learned a shed load from Chris - so it only seemed right that he get the pleasure of putting up with me again.
Dyno days are supposed to be exciting, but I was apprehensive about this one. I was repeating my Exige path step by step, and that ended in tears. The car had been in bits very recently, with zero road miles to shake it down.... was I going to fill his workshop with pressurised coolant, fuel, oil? Was a wishbone going to fall off at 8000rpm? Who knew...
Spoiler alert, none of those things happened.
We did have a drama I hadn't even considered though... how the hell would we get airflow through the car without blowing Chris' head off. The big dyno fan would have demolished him over a few hours of tuning so we settled for some little 'sidepod' fans. It may compromise the overall airflow through the chargecooler and water radiator, but we could monitor that and adapt if needed.
All rigged up and ready to start.
The map on the car was essentially how my Exige finished off. There was a slight change to fuelling strategy this time, on the Exige I used the aftermarket fuel pressure sensor to add a modifier to the fuel table. This meant for a 'flatter' fuel table than you'd see on the OE application, or most other tuned 2ZZ as there's no fuel pressure data on the stock engine.
This time, as the variable TC switch took up an extra input on the ECU I had to wire fuel pressure to my dash, and send back to the ECU via can network. For this reason I didn't want to use it as a mission critical sensor, and instead just have it for monitoring/diagnostics. The fuel tables now will rise with manifold pressure instead.
Chris was very aware of my gearbox woes and concerns, so we had a plan to see what we could do and give some options to preserve it. Ultimately you're playing with fire at any power level above OE, there's no magic cut off point and it's not unheard of for cars to smash 3rd gear even at OE power... it's just a sliding scale of likelihood.
After some initial installation runs, tweaking the idle and refamiliarising himself with the engine and map it was time to start hunting for power. Despite having a base map from an identical spec car, Chris went through his program regardless and spent time revving up to 6k RPM without any cam switch to experiment with timing and optimising the "off-cam" power delivery, then he would reverse and tweak the cam switch before finally overlaying all of his results and finding the best crossover points.
Then it was onto the power runs, with the car in my "race mode" designated map the car quickly made the exact same power as my Exige, within 1bhp and 2ftlbs. The headline figures were:
301bhp and 202ft/lbs torque, calculated flywheel figures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imiFyQ5_YNU&ab...
On my request Chris was doing the pulls in 5th. I think technically it's the best gear to use in this application because it's the closest ratio to 1:1, but the dyno figures all that stuff out anyway. For me I just didn't want him smashing 4th gear all over the place! (3rd and 4th are the inherently weak ones, 5th and 6th are not really heard of breaking).
With that done, we turned to options with the 'road mode' map. Following the example set by Lotus with the 2ZZ SC cars we figured the path of least resistance would be to peg the DBW back and figure out what impact it would have on boost, and power.
We a did a load of runs at different throttle configurations and came up with the following results
Though probably not surprising to somebody who knows what they're talking about, I was amazed at how much throttle opening we had to trim to start having an impact. I was introduced to this chart a bit later which describes flow rate vs opening angle of a butterfly valve which correlates and makes sense once you consider that.
To get a 20% reduction in flow, you need to reduce the opening by almost 50%!
Plotted on dyno graphs:
The boost is a bit interesting (to me, anyway) in that the 272bhp and 251bhp maps can't actually maintain their levels of boost to the redline, and the boost starts tapering off as the engine flows more and more gas.
With all things considered, we decided to go with the 272bhp map as my 'road map'. It runs very close to OE boost levels, the SC is of course still running at the same very high RPM thanks to the 2.9" pulley but it's reassuring to think that the other components are only under the stress of stock boost.
We spent a bit of time after this optimising the maps, to try and keep the same levels of BHP and Torque up to around 4.5k RPM, so low speed drivability and responsiveness will be the same but torque will be capped at the slightly lower level once heading into the higher RPM ranges.
Long term I'm also going to have a play with throttle limits by gear. The EMU gives me the opportunity for example to run 60% throttle in gears 1-4, then 100% throttle in 5 and 6. This could be a best of all worlds map, gives me a bit more punch to try and overcome the 2-Eleven straight line speed handicap without threatening 3rd and 4th.
The last thing we had a play with was transient enrichments. The EMU gives the option to add fuel (fairly common wall wetting technique) during quick jabs of the throttle. It also gives the option to retard timing at the same time, usually used for knock control. We played with using this to pull a few degrees whenever there was a sharp jab of throttle, this retard event would only last a fraction of a second but acts to smooth out the generation of torque. Chris tuned this by feel, it's not a "tune by numbers" thing which my inexperience struggles to apprehend but it's something for me to play with. Chris has defined the 'safe' limits for this, and the rest will be up to me tweaking it to come up with a power delivery I'm happy with. Whether it will substantially reduce shock loading on the gearbox or not? Probably not, but it can't hurt to try it.
IATs and CLT didn't really suffer with the smaller fans, I have logs from my Exige dyno session and they were much the same. IATs for info peaking up to 36 degrees during a pull, then falling down to 20 (seems to be the resting temp for it in these ambients) within 20seconds after a pull. The big test for chargecooling obviously comes on track where there aren't 20 second breaks between pulls, so we'll see what the performance is like, but I don't expect it to be any worse than the Exige was - and that coped with everything I threw at it, pulling 1degrees of timing at the most on a very hot day.
Got the car back onto the trailer, it clearly makes too much power now as my rear right spat one of my ramps back about 20 feet! Luckily I didn't have bodywork on... that might have been messy if I did.
Drive home was tiring, but very satisfying. Didn't have a single 'installation gremlin' to deal with, no leaks, no hoses popping off, no sensors unplugged. Everything just worked.
Still haven't touched the brakes, but since getting the car back from the dyno it lived in the trailer for a few days which gave me time to turn my garage into a woodshop for a bit.
Original splitter (I think it's original, anyway) is looking a bit worse for wear. It still has it's original shape and structure, so I wanted to get it replicated before it lost either of those attributes. It was 9mm ply, I'm guessing marine grade... so I got some ordered.
Bit of drawing, bit of drilling, and bit of playing around with my brand-new-second-cheapest jigsaw that Screwfix sold and we had something starting to take shape.
The holes on the underside are countersunk to allow the dimpled holes of the undertray to sit flush, so replicated those.
And some other holes are countersunk with a 'flat bottom' to allow for a 15mm washer to slide in flush, so I bought a forstner(???) bit for that. Will play with that later.
As I've left them, they're roughly the right shape, need a final forming with a sander and need the leading edge tapering a bit... then of course paint. I've bought some proper weather proofing stuff so hopefully that'll do the job. For now they're piled up in the corner waiting for later.
With the sawdust tidied up (that which I didn't breath in, anyway) it was time to go repatriate the car and get some finishing touches done.
First up, I had the ECU nicely mounted originally but when I came to mount the scuttle panel thing, the wiring for the cut-off switch fouled it... so the car was mapped with a wonky ECU.
I knocked up some little brackets that allowed me to use the factory fixing points, but just sat a little lower. Tidy.
Next up, wing mirrors. They'd taken a few stonechips over the years so wanted to tidy them up. I'm told they're from a Yamaha Fazer 1000 (some sort of jetski for the road I think) so I did find and order a very cheap set of replacements, but they weren't quite the same size and shape so didn't work for me - so back they went. If anyone knows of a good, reliable source of Yamaha originals I'd probably pick up a pair for spares.
Still, I'm not short of satin black paint so I scrubbed them up myself for now.
Did some idle tuning next. As we inherited the config from my Exige, and Chris tweaked it enough to get it idling and fuelling nicely on the dyno... it really didn't take much to just finish the job.
I did a lot of work for this on my Exige, even the OE Lotus mapping wasn't great for returning to idle characteristics, often stalling out when cruising up to stop lights etc. Lotus improved it throughout the S2 range, and even my 2-Eleven worked much better than the Exige in this area.
When switching to standalone, the issue is carried over but at least you have the tools to sort it. The root of the issue, I believe is the length of the intake tract from the throttlebody to the cylinders. Any attempt to modulate idle control using the DBW throttle is just too slow and laggy because of the sheer quantity of air between it and the combustion chamber. What worked for me, after lots of trial and error and advice from people like Chris, was to limit how influential the DBW throttle could be under idle conditions and use ignition control for it instead.
In effect, the DBW becomes more of a 'long term trim' tool for idle control, rather than something responsible for quick adjustments. Combined with some EMU features to temporarily raise idle targets when returning to idle, and slowly ramp the target down to the resting level allow you to catch the revs smoothly and feels as good as any OEM application.
I did a little demonstration of what you want, vs what the car tries to do.
Red line is RPM, blue is target. You can see when I blip the throttle that the idle target gets a short term boost, then tapers down. The aim is to get the rpm to drop and trend along with target smoothly which it does on the first throttle blip.
On the second, the revs dip a bit too low, and the car has to raise it back up again. This isn't so bad, but it feels "clunky" when it happens on the road. If this scenario gets too dramatic, the revs fall too far and the car stumbles or stalls.
Bored yet? Sorry... will move on.
Next up, bit of a gimmick I'm sure but over Christmas I spent a load of money on heat management stuff. The boost pipe route on the 2-Eleven puts it in a position to pick up a lot of radiant heat, so I wanted to attempt to do something about it.
Very tedious hour or two later and I had something that looked acceptable.
It's the cold side of the intercooler (right side of picture) that I was most concerned about, it runs within mm of the engine and during some of my intercooled trackdays this side became too hot to touch. Obviously a lot of that was due to the heat saturated intercooler which the chargecooler has hopefully fixed, but still even on the dyno between runs you could see the cold side slowly getting warmer and warmer where it ran close to the engine. This gold tape, in theory should reflect that radiant heat but still allow the pipe to shed a bit of temperature once it has airflow running over it. I'm sure it'll be worth 0.5degrees C and be a total waste of time and money, but bling.
With that I had pretty much run out of jobs, so time to start thinking about bodywork.
I'd bought a remanufactured number plate plinth some months ago, it's pretty close to the original but straighter and doesn't have a dozen numberplate holes drilled in it.
It did come completely undrilled though so needed to get that fettled and lined up.
Side panels went on, sort of temporarily but I think they can just stay on now.
Up next will be rear clam, it feels like the most awkward bit to refit because it doesn't really 'sit' on anything, it kinda floats whilst being anchored to various other body panels. It only finally gets anchored to the car when the spoiler uprights go back in.
Front should be easy enough, but it's the only part that's a two-man lift. My arms just aren't long enough to support it properly. I do wonder how all these body panels will line up, as this car uses no shims at all... unlike the Elise/Exige clams which are shimmed to buggery. The clam mountings are hardly precision engineered either, they're just gobbed on with glue and glass.... fingers crossed I get it looking something like.
Original splitter (I think it's original, anyway) is looking a bit worse for wear. It still has it's original shape and structure, so I wanted to get it replicated before it lost either of those attributes. It was 9mm ply, I'm guessing marine grade... so I got some ordered.
Bit of drawing, bit of drilling, and bit of playing around with my brand-new-second-cheapest jigsaw that Screwfix sold and we had something starting to take shape.
The holes on the underside are countersunk to allow the dimpled holes of the undertray to sit flush, so replicated those.
And some other holes are countersunk with a 'flat bottom' to allow for a 15mm washer to slide in flush, so I bought a forstner(???) bit for that. Will play with that later.
As I've left them, they're roughly the right shape, need a final forming with a sander and need the leading edge tapering a bit... then of course paint. I've bought some proper weather proofing stuff so hopefully that'll do the job. For now they're piled up in the corner waiting for later.
With the sawdust tidied up (that which I didn't breath in, anyway) it was time to go repatriate the car and get some finishing touches done.
First up, I had the ECU nicely mounted originally but when I came to mount the scuttle panel thing, the wiring for the cut-off switch fouled it... so the car was mapped with a wonky ECU.
I knocked up some little brackets that allowed me to use the factory fixing points, but just sat a little lower. Tidy.
Next up, wing mirrors. They'd taken a few stonechips over the years so wanted to tidy them up. I'm told they're from a Yamaha Fazer 1000 (some sort of jetski for the road I think) so I did find and order a very cheap set of replacements, but they weren't quite the same size and shape so didn't work for me - so back they went. If anyone knows of a good, reliable source of Yamaha originals I'd probably pick up a pair for spares.
Still, I'm not short of satin black paint so I scrubbed them up myself for now.
Did some idle tuning next. As we inherited the config from my Exige, and Chris tweaked it enough to get it idling and fuelling nicely on the dyno... it really didn't take much to just finish the job.
I did a lot of work for this on my Exige, even the OE Lotus mapping wasn't great for returning to idle characteristics, often stalling out when cruising up to stop lights etc. Lotus improved it throughout the S2 range, and even my 2-Eleven worked much better than the Exige in this area.
When switching to standalone, the issue is carried over but at least you have the tools to sort it. The root of the issue, I believe is the length of the intake tract from the throttlebody to the cylinders. Any attempt to modulate idle control using the DBW throttle is just too slow and laggy because of the sheer quantity of air between it and the combustion chamber. What worked for me, after lots of trial and error and advice from people like Chris, was to limit how influential the DBW throttle could be under idle conditions and use ignition control for it instead.
In effect, the DBW becomes more of a 'long term trim' tool for idle control, rather than something responsible for quick adjustments. Combined with some EMU features to temporarily raise idle targets when returning to idle, and slowly ramp the target down to the resting level allow you to catch the revs smoothly and feels as good as any OEM application.
I did a little demonstration of what you want, vs what the car tries to do.
Red line is RPM, blue is target. You can see when I blip the throttle that the idle target gets a short term boost, then tapers down. The aim is to get the rpm to drop and trend along with target smoothly which it does on the first throttle blip.
On the second, the revs dip a bit too low, and the car has to raise it back up again. This isn't so bad, but it feels "clunky" when it happens on the road. If this scenario gets too dramatic, the revs fall too far and the car stumbles or stalls.
Bored yet? Sorry... will move on.
Next up, bit of a gimmick I'm sure but over Christmas I spent a load of money on heat management stuff. The boost pipe route on the 2-Eleven puts it in a position to pick up a lot of radiant heat, so I wanted to attempt to do something about it.
Very tedious hour or two later and I had something that looked acceptable.
It's the cold side of the intercooler (right side of picture) that I was most concerned about, it runs within mm of the engine and during some of my intercooled trackdays this side became too hot to touch. Obviously a lot of that was due to the heat saturated intercooler which the chargecooler has hopefully fixed, but still even on the dyno between runs you could see the cold side slowly getting warmer and warmer where it ran close to the engine. This gold tape, in theory should reflect that radiant heat but still allow the pipe to shed a bit of temperature once it has airflow running over it. I'm sure it'll be worth 0.5degrees C and be a total waste of time and money, but bling.
With that I had pretty much run out of jobs, so time to start thinking about bodywork.
I'd bought a remanufactured number plate plinth some months ago, it's pretty close to the original but straighter and doesn't have a dozen numberplate holes drilled in it.
It did come completely undrilled though so needed to get that fettled and lined up.
Side panels went on, sort of temporarily but I think they can just stay on now.
Up next will be rear clam, it feels like the most awkward bit to refit because it doesn't really 'sit' on anything, it kinda floats whilst being anchored to various other body panels. It only finally gets anchored to the car when the spoiler uprights go back in.
Front should be easy enough, but it's the only part that's a two-man lift. My arms just aren't long enough to support it properly. I do wonder how all these body panels will line up, as this car uses no shims at all... unlike the Elise/Exige clams which are shimmed to buggery. The clam mountings are hardly precision engineered either, they're just gobbed on with glue and glass.... fingers crossed I get it looking something like.
Steve H said:
I assume the small person in the last pic was one you borrowed? You surely can’t have kids and the time to do all this 
.
Great work as ever, you need to work out a price for those splitters in case anyone might ever need one
Didn't even know she was there, which goes a long way to explain how I can do all this whilst parenting....Great work as ever, you need to work out a price for those splitters in case anyone might ever need one
The Splitter wood was about £50, so two splitters per sheet isn't too bad. I think it would be a properly scaleable thing to sell on if I could find a friendly wood CNC'er person. The manual effort to jigsaw it out, sand, paint, etc would make it not too cost effective but if I could get someone with some gadgetry to churn them out... that would help.
f1ten said:
Great write up.
The 211 on track is such a pure connection to the road and flows effortlessly. I was lucky enough to do Silverstone and brands in one for full days. I simply did not want to get out the car. Yes out paced by 991.2gt3s and RS's but just so satisfying braking and turning in.
The sheer lack of mass and weight was what blew me away. A brilliant aggressive whine from the supercharger was addictive too. Like you say, early errors were simply not knowing you could brake late and getting to grips with the fantastic turn In.
Thanks!The 211 on track is such a pure connection to the road and flows effortlessly. I was lucky enough to do Silverstone and brands in one for full days. I simply did not want to get out the car. Yes out paced by 991.2gt3s and RS's but just so satisfying braking and turning in.
The sheer lack of mass and weight was what blew me away. A brilliant aggressive whine from the supercharger was addictive too. Like you say, early errors were simply not knowing you could brake late and getting to grips with the fantastic turn In.
Yes I agree with that assessment. Although the 2-Eleven is a bit chubby for a true lightweight special (200kg up on most Caterham/Atoms etc) it does seem to have a real stability advantage over its contemporaries. Being the only one cowardly enough to come with ABS and TC probably helps the average driver too.
The lack of inertia is hard to describe, and gives you so much confidence when the car gets out of shape too - as you just have this sense of being able to stop it dead in its tracks, whenever you have decided you've had enough. You don't get that pendulum sensation that the Elise/Exige gives you.
I was warned when I rolled out of the pits at Donington Park, about 40 hours after buying the car... to not turn in too early. It's crazy, I think I described it at the time as feeling like it had a really quick rack. It just darts in immediately, and makes you realise how much subtle understeer you were calibrated for in a 'normal' car.
Bodywork weekend.
Rear clam was fairly straight forward, I loosely mounted the spoiler uprights to the clam and used those to support it in place on the subframe while I 'folded' the corners in under the side panels and loosely bolted those up.
I think I mentioned before, but there's not really any shimming to do with the 2-Eleven for panel gaps, it all seems to be just loosely bolting up, then manhandling bits into position whilst nipping up the fasteners. There's enough flex in the bodywork to allow you to line it up with reasonable success, and there are startlingly few fixing points to the chassis itself.
Engine cover on to check for panel gaps, pretty good - at least as good as it was before, maybe a bit better.
Onto the front, I needed a second pair of hands here because you can't carry and support it alone. It's light enough, just a bit too floppy and ungainly... I could imagine it just snapping down the middle if you tried to lift it solo.
Slots on a fair bit easier than the Elise/Exige versions as it just kinda sits on top, rather than needing to be fed from the front in a hooking motion.
Again alignment was just a case of jiggling it around before bolting it down. It only rigidly mounts to the chassis via the dashboard/bulkhead thing - all other fixings are just into other pieces of bodywork. The final bit of support will come from the front undertray and wooden splitter.
Mounted the oil coolers which have been cleaned up
And fitted the aero spat things to the front corners and the 'a' pillar area.
It's a relief to have the garage floor cleared, not only for the space but also it marks (another) 3 month period without tripping and walking backwards into a load of fibreglass. Also a relief that all of my chargecooler plumbing fits comfortably into the wheel well.
I still have the carbon skinned covers to go here to cover up all of the electronics/plumbing - they just need a final wet sanding and maybe some lacquer before going in.
Arch liners are about ready to go in at the back, but I did spot a couple of things that I think I failed to document in the thread ages ago.
My Sector111 catch cans have been repurposed from the Exige. They can't mount to the head as they did on the Exige because the CC piping is in the way here, so they've been relocated to the roll bar support. Nicely accessible to drain them off from the wheel arch without removing from the car.
Also lurking in the background is the ITG Stab99 airbox. The EMU black runs MAF-less so really frees up your options for induction. This has a nice bit of a induction noise, not that I'll hear it on the move...
There's a temptation to run some fresh air to it, you can see at top of shot that there's the big round opening from the previous clam mounted ducts for the A/A intercooler. They're now redundant, so could maybe pipe something around in a convoluted U-Bend. I don't think I'd direct attach it to the airbox because it might throttle the air supply, but having a bit more fresh air blown into the direction of the airbox can't hurt.
I thought I'd give the brakes another bleed. I'd had a broom handle jamming the brake pedal down for a few days to see if it helped.
Initial impressions were underwhelming, pushed pistons back and clamped them. Ran 20PSI through from the Sealey and didn't really get any satisfying globs of air... but the pedal was no question a lot firmer. I relieved the pressure, popped the pads back in and remounted the calipers and gave it one more round of bleeding. Pedal I think is almost there, I think any real road/track mileage will still produce a bit of sponge but hopefully I can get some shakedown mileage on it, lock up the brakes a few times and then give it one last go.
@junks Had been advertising some little gismos, presumable from another OEM that used the same 2-pin connectors for the ABS. These wires are prone to breaking if mishandling them, I know because I've done it before. I now treat the ABS wires like I'm diffusing a bomb but these replacement plug-clips should help offer a bit of support for future hamfisting.
I got to spend some time sat in the cockpit to finish off the clam fixings (wee M6 bolts you can just see under the clam line) so I replaced the weather stripping too which the aeroscreen would mount against.
Speaking of which, I decided to break out the spare aeroscreen that the previous owner had supplied with the car. It doesn't have the hazy/crazed effect of the old one. It does make me very nervous thinking that I've now "used up" my spare aeroscreen, so I might be on the lookout for another spare. I imagine once they run out, these will be incredibly expensive to get made up.
A few fixings delicately done up later, and we had giazing back.
You can just see a bit of clumsy rubber trim going around the rear view mirror. It might be some sort of IVA compliance trim but it's constantly trying to fall off, so I gave it a helping hand. Mirror looks much sleeker now, but still as useless as ever.
With that done I'm now just arch liners, wheels and a splitter away from being able to drive the car. I have Geo booked with @seriouslylotus Wednesday this week so if push comes to shove I can bolt the old splitter on to get it onto the trailer (clam flaps around far too much without a splitter fitted, wouldn't want to drive it even a few feet like that).
If the weather allows though, I'll get this finished off. So far it's primed.
Will give it a fine sanding and then a couple of coats of black then we should be good to go. This is the worst of my attempts, but still pretty damn good. I'll spend more time (maybe borrow a router) on the better one to give it some nicely finished edges.
Rear clam was fairly straight forward, I loosely mounted the spoiler uprights to the clam and used those to support it in place on the subframe while I 'folded' the corners in under the side panels and loosely bolted those up.
I think I mentioned before, but there's not really any shimming to do with the 2-Eleven for panel gaps, it all seems to be just loosely bolting up, then manhandling bits into position whilst nipping up the fasteners. There's enough flex in the bodywork to allow you to line it up with reasonable success, and there are startlingly few fixing points to the chassis itself.
Engine cover on to check for panel gaps, pretty good - at least as good as it was before, maybe a bit better.
Onto the front, I needed a second pair of hands here because you can't carry and support it alone. It's light enough, just a bit too floppy and ungainly... I could imagine it just snapping down the middle if you tried to lift it solo.
Slots on a fair bit easier than the Elise/Exige versions as it just kinda sits on top, rather than needing to be fed from the front in a hooking motion.
Again alignment was just a case of jiggling it around before bolting it down. It only rigidly mounts to the chassis via the dashboard/bulkhead thing - all other fixings are just into other pieces of bodywork. The final bit of support will come from the front undertray and wooden splitter.
Mounted the oil coolers which have been cleaned up
And fitted the aero spat things to the front corners and the 'a' pillar area.
It's a relief to have the garage floor cleared, not only for the space but also it marks (another) 3 month period without tripping and walking backwards into a load of fibreglass. Also a relief that all of my chargecooler plumbing fits comfortably into the wheel well.
I still have the carbon skinned covers to go here to cover up all of the electronics/plumbing - they just need a final wet sanding and maybe some lacquer before going in.
Arch liners are about ready to go in at the back, but I did spot a couple of things that I think I failed to document in the thread ages ago.
My Sector111 catch cans have been repurposed from the Exige. They can't mount to the head as they did on the Exige because the CC piping is in the way here, so they've been relocated to the roll bar support. Nicely accessible to drain them off from the wheel arch without removing from the car.
Also lurking in the background is the ITG Stab99 airbox. The EMU black runs MAF-less so really frees up your options for induction. This has a nice bit of a induction noise, not that I'll hear it on the move...
There's a temptation to run some fresh air to it, you can see at top of shot that there's the big round opening from the previous clam mounted ducts for the A/A intercooler. They're now redundant, so could maybe pipe something around in a convoluted U-Bend. I don't think I'd direct attach it to the airbox because it might throttle the air supply, but having a bit more fresh air blown into the direction of the airbox can't hurt.
I thought I'd give the brakes another bleed. I'd had a broom handle jamming the brake pedal down for a few days to see if it helped.
Initial impressions were underwhelming, pushed pistons back and clamped them. Ran 20PSI through from the Sealey and didn't really get any satisfying globs of air... but the pedal was no question a lot firmer. I relieved the pressure, popped the pads back in and remounted the calipers and gave it one more round of bleeding. Pedal I think is almost there, I think any real road/track mileage will still produce a bit of sponge but hopefully I can get some shakedown mileage on it, lock up the brakes a few times and then give it one last go.
@junks Had been advertising some little gismos, presumable from another OEM that used the same 2-pin connectors for the ABS. These wires are prone to breaking if mishandling them, I know because I've done it before. I now treat the ABS wires like I'm diffusing a bomb but these replacement plug-clips should help offer a bit of support for future hamfisting.
I got to spend some time sat in the cockpit to finish off the clam fixings (wee M6 bolts you can just see under the clam line) so I replaced the weather stripping too which the aeroscreen would mount against.
Speaking of which, I decided to break out the spare aeroscreen that the previous owner had supplied with the car. It doesn't have the hazy/crazed effect of the old one. It does make me very nervous thinking that I've now "used up" my spare aeroscreen, so I might be on the lookout for another spare. I imagine once they run out, these will be incredibly expensive to get made up.
A few fixings delicately done up later, and we had giazing back.
You can just see a bit of clumsy rubber trim going around the rear view mirror. It might be some sort of IVA compliance trim but it's constantly trying to fall off, so I gave it a helping hand. Mirror looks much sleeker now, but still as useless as ever.
With that done I'm now just arch liners, wheels and a splitter away from being able to drive the car. I have Geo booked with @seriouslylotus Wednesday this week so if push comes to shove I can bolt the old splitter on to get it onto the trailer (clam flaps around far too much without a splitter fitted, wouldn't want to drive it even a few feet like that).
If the weather allows though, I'll get this finished off. So far it's primed.
Will give it a fine sanding and then a couple of coats of black then we should be good to go. This is the worst of my attempts, but still pretty damn good. I'll spend more time (maybe borrow a router) on the better one to give it some nicely finished edges.
Thank you, kind comments. Glad people are enjoying, as I keep saying - I write the thread mainly for me, so anyone else enjoying it is a bonus.
Got a few more finishing touches done.
The worst of my splitter remake attempts got some paint. I'd spent ages sanding it to flatten the grain. but as soon as I painted it, the grain rose up again. Bit annoying, but need a better plan for next time.
The underside was barely sanded at all, as it'll get scuffed up within about a mile from my house. All my countersunk holes lined up nicely though.
I'm a bit harsh on this splitter, it's the worst of my efforts but still really happy with it. It'll probably stay on the car for the foreseeable but I can spend a bit of time on my next version to see if I can perfect some techniques.
Next up, and last job really was to sort out arch protection at the front. Lotus didn't fit arch liners cos' race car but most owners have figured something out to stop the front clam from being smashed to pieces from the inside.
Mine had previously been fitted with some dynamat foam, but despite still being in one piece it hadn't done the job. Couple of star cracks on the OS wing. I have made an effort to improve it by fitting some Bostik roof flashing tape. I had a roll left over from arch liner repairs on my Exige.
It's dead easy to work with, cut to shape and it's barely sticky at all in the cold garage temps so you can keep peeling it off and repositioning etc. Once happy with it, quick blast with a heatgun and it sticks like tar (which I think it might be!) and once cooled off goes rock hard.
I then sprayed with contact adhesive and replaced the dynamat stuff over the top, so I'm doubled up.
You can just see my carbon skinned/repaired arch "bucket" too in that shot peeking out. They never did get the final wet sand/polish that they deserved but they're fine for their purpose.
Had a quick test of my intercom system, works a treat.
Bolted the diffuser on, mounted front undertray (still needs replacing, it's a mess) and rolled it out of the garage fully clothed for the first time since November.
...then straight in the trailer and off to @seriouslylotus for spanner check and geo.
Got a few more finishing touches done.
The worst of my splitter remake attempts got some paint. I'd spent ages sanding it to flatten the grain. but as soon as I painted it, the grain rose up again. Bit annoying, but need a better plan for next time.
The underside was barely sanded at all, as it'll get scuffed up within about a mile from my house. All my countersunk holes lined up nicely though.
I'm a bit harsh on this splitter, it's the worst of my efforts but still really happy with it. It'll probably stay on the car for the foreseeable but I can spend a bit of time on my next version to see if I can perfect some techniques.
Next up, and last job really was to sort out arch protection at the front. Lotus didn't fit arch liners cos' race car but most owners have figured something out to stop the front clam from being smashed to pieces from the inside.
Mine had previously been fitted with some dynamat foam, but despite still being in one piece it hadn't done the job. Couple of star cracks on the OS wing. I have made an effort to improve it by fitting some Bostik roof flashing tape. I had a roll left over from arch liner repairs on my Exige.
It's dead easy to work with, cut to shape and it's barely sticky at all in the cold garage temps so you can keep peeling it off and repositioning etc. Once happy with it, quick blast with a heatgun and it sticks like tar (which I think it might be!) and once cooled off goes rock hard.
I then sprayed with contact adhesive and replaced the dynamat stuff over the top, so I'm doubled up.
You can just see my carbon skinned/repaired arch "bucket" too in that shot peeking out. They never did get the final wet sand/polish that they deserved but they're fine for their purpose.
Had a quick test of my intercom system, works a treat.
Bolted the diffuser on, mounted front undertray (still needs replacing, it's a mess) and rolled it out of the garage fully clothed for the first time since November.
...then straight in the trailer and off to @seriouslylotus for spanner check and geo.
EmBe said:
Sanding sealer is what you need - https://www.toolstation.com/natural-pale-shellac-s... - apply, sand and then paint over and you won't get the raised grain.
Thank you! That sounds like just the ticket. Will give it a try on Splitter #2.Dave and John spent a fair few hours over a couple of days checking out the car and making sure I hadn't made many stupid mistakes.
Was great to see the newly refurbished workshop in use, lots of hard work gone into it - few finishing touches still to come, but it's a proper job. Actually took my shoes off to come inside, will fetch my indoor Crocs next time.
John has a good eye for detail and noted a couple of snags, mainly incorrect fixing types in a couple of places. Easily sorted, and John also bled my brakes for me for hopefully the last time.
Generally though the car was all the right shape, so it was time to move onto rideheight and geo.
A big regret is not measuring the setup of the car before taking it apart. It drove really well, but it would have been nice to have had a reference point. The only thing we did still have a comparable datapoint for was rideheight, so that was adjusted first.
The spec for this car is 100mm front ground clearance (measured from front jacking points to floor) with a 10mm rake. This car was a fair bit lower than that, in the mid-high 80mm range. This was music to my ears, as it meant I'd been needlessly bouncing off the local roads. The single biggest killer for this car being a 'fun' road car was ground clearance.
Aesthetically though, the car suits the much lower ground clearance. The front arch gaps are massive to allow for clearance so it does look a bit goofy now that it's running the proper rideheight. Still, function over form n' that.
The car was setup with my body weight in the driver seat and we landed on:
100/110mm ride height
-1.7 front camber
-2.8 rear camber
Touch of toe-out at the front
Touch of toe-in at the rear
Shed loads of castor
Unlike the Exige, there's still loads of adjustability either way around these figures. Could add a fair whack more camber if I think it needs it.
Whilst John was setting up the car, Dave was swearing in the corner turning a sheet of aluminium into a couple of front undertrays for me.
He was critical of his work initially, but I think we all agreed he did a fab job. I now have unblemished splitter and undertray and it looks loads better for it.
John gave me a short list of hints and tips for fettling a few bits (strategic cable ties for arch liner support, etc) and I was on my way.
Weather even put on a show
Back home the went immediately onto the lift so I could finish a couple of bits off:
Oil coolers got some stonechip protection:
Mesh stonechips were touched in on the various grilles and vents:
...and the front undertray fixings were all swapped for the correct ones, as we had to cobble it on with whatever we could find lying around before. Uses countersunk cap head type bolts which seem to like chewing themselves apart.
Finally after months, I could wash the car! Woohoo.
We've been practising the two-bucket method on Mummy's car, so happy to let her loose on the proper stuff now.
The car looked sort of clean from a few feet away, but as soon as it got wet - there was jet black water running off it from all of the dust that had settled on the bodywork. The Yellow really is a good colour for hiding dirt.
I now had shakedown to think about. Blyton is booked for next Saturday, and I really wanted to get some miles on it (and get it out of first gear!) before loading it onto the trailer for that. With just two days left in February, it killed me to stick some tax on the car and take it out on Sunday.
However, it was lots of fun!
Conveniently it was the NYLOC monthly meet so that was my destination sorted, weather was forecast to be grey... but 0% of rain. That was a lie.
Good Yellow turnout though
And four Emira in attendance. Was good to get my first proper look of them, lovely things - Lotus are growing up!
I did about 50 miles in total, was damp and cold in the morning and couldn't get any power down on the AR1s so I just logged as many areas of the map I could under cruise and low speed conditions.
Coast down and return to idle stuff (historically a problem area on the Exige) was bang on. No stalls, threats to stall, nada.
If I had one minor complaint is that the car seems to generate enough torque at idle to keep it moving (fairly quickly!) in first gear, so driving slowly in a carpark is a little bit clumsy. I can fix that through mapping, but I think that's mainly a product of it being such a light car.
Had a bit of a near miss on the A1 for the short stint I needed to do. NS mirror flopped down a bit and I was completely blind and stuck in the middle lane. That was fun...
Got it dirty...
For the ride home, it had dried up and I was able to get the hammer down a bit to log some WOT pulls and make sure the map all checked out. In the 'road mode' map the car felt as expected, very similar to OE power levels. I was a bit concerned that capping my throttle at 60 odd percent would translate to a poor resolution of throttle actuation and lead to some drivability issues, but it didn't - it drove just like factory.
A winter away from the car plus cold roads on AR1's made the car feel all the more lairy, but it didn't half feel fast.
One roundabout away from home and it was time to put the bigboy pants on and try the uncapped throttle 'race mode'. Easing onto the throttle gently to avoid too much gearbox pain and the acceleration piled and piled. It felt very fast, and didn't blow up.
Pulled into the garage grinning ear to ear, nothing fell off, everything points in the right direction (after adjusting the mirror), brakes feel good (would probably benefit from a proper hammering just to clean the discs up a bit) and the mapping felt really good. I know it should do, it's been done by a professional on a dyno etc - but you never really know until you get it on the road, and with more time (not to mention bodywork!) any decent mapper would want to correlate dyno findings onto a road test for final tweaks.
It needs fuel, another clean - then into the trailer for Blyton. Exciting, more updates in a week or so.
Edited by Fonzey on Monday 27th February 09:28
Blyton Park
Blyton is my regular season opener now. Close to home, usually pretty inexpensive so no real heartache if I have to call it a day early, and nice familiar place to benchmark upgrades and test reliability.
Was attending with Brother in Law (Clio) and a friend (MG Midget with A-Series Turbo) with a few tag alongers coming along to spectate, so would be a social one too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51II5tYmTho&ab...
The morning was fantastic, different passenger hopped in for each session and the car was very quickly feeling familiar (and fast!).
The first session was very slippy, bone dry but very cold and the tyres took AGES to get up to temp. Validated by my new TPMS sensors. Once they did and pressures stabilised, the car came to life. Even with passengers in the car it was feeling on its toes, and had bags of traction. Still braking far too early, though.
Between sessions I was hiding in the trailer, desperately trying to warm up and checking the logs for any mapping tweaks that I'd need.
The mapping seemed good, as expected. Probably a tiny bit on the rich side if chasing ultimate performance, but happy to have a safety margin.
I was seeing some knock events each time the VVTLI engaged or disengaged, so put that down to valvetrain noise. I had similar noise events on the Exige but I'd configured my thresholds to be a tiny bit above it, and on the 2-Eleven it's JUST breaching those thresholds, so slight difference of engine bay acoustics probably all it was. I can tweak the threshold to avoid this in future.
I went into it in detail on my Exige thread, but the 2ZZ in SC format is a bugger for phantom knock. It's very difficult to tune reliable thresholds for it because the engine is just naturally noisy on the knock frequency it would make noise on. I've not seen a single map from a professional tuner that has attempted to remedy this, and have just left knock control either disabled entirely - or setup with an incorrect frequency. Even Lotus struggled with it, and there's a Lotus document somewhere advising race teams to remove their knock sensor, wrap it in foam and tie it to the bulkhead somewhere...
Anyway, I've had a go - and I can sleep at night knowing I've got *some* knock detection/protection, but the downside is that I occasionally have to chase these phantoms.
Example here of two events, and two 'nearly' events.
Purple line is observed noise, green line is the threshold, brown line is VTEC engagement. You see it's JUST touching my threshold, so triggering the knock alarm, but not actually exceeding it enough to trigger the knock protection such as pulling timing or adding fuel.
Anyway, kept on lapping - kept on enjoying it and getting quicker throughout the morning.
My intercom was disappointing. It worked fine in the first session for passenger #1, but then the passenger #2 could no longer hear the audio from my mic. I could hear the audio from my mic (it plays back to you as you speak so you know it's working) and I could hear the audio from their mic, so it could just be a dodgy wire in their headset... or the intercom itself has broken already. Either way, annoying. Binned it off for the rest of the day.
Regular engine bay checks during the morning passed scrutiny, no leaks, weeps or any problems I could find.
Tyres started retaining a bit of temp between sessions, but had to keep the breaks short to avoid losing all my hard earned grip.
(thanks Simon for the photos)
I had an odd sudden power cut on a sharp left hander late morning. I suspected fuel surge, but I still had a decent amount of fuel left. Later found it was my DIY TC kicking in a bit too aggressively. I wound my knob back to the half way setting for the rest of the day and had no such issues.
Before we knew it, it was lunch time. Passengers all had lives to be getting on with so I looked forward to some solo laps after lunch, and really pushing on. Car felt like it had a PB lap in it, easily.
Losing the best part of 100kg is significant for any car, but in this it's mind bending. Immediately after going out the car felt totally different. Brakes felt better, turn in felt better, mid corner grip and traction felt better...everything, except... it was slower?
It was hard to pinpoint at first... the car didn't feel broken, wasn't lumpy or misfiring... but it just lacked some zing in the high RPM ranges. The little shift lights progressed through at their usual romp until the final three which seemed to take an age. Hmmm.
I finished the session and eagerly checked my logs. I had made a map tweak over lunch time, just tidying up a little bit of fuelling and a DBW voltage tweak.... but nothing that should have caused this.
Sure enough, I wasn't making the expected levels of boost.
Normally I have a fairly steady level of manifold pressure going up to the redline.
In my 'road mode' which I used exclusively at Blyton, this should be around 140kpa (40 + atmosphere) so around 6psi of boost.
This is what started happening over lunch:
Made 140kpa initially, then it just tapers right down to below 120kpa at the red line, so making half the boost it should be making.
I work in IT, rule number #1 is just to reverse the last thing you did... which was the map change I made over lunch, but I immediately found a problem in the engine bay and got fixated on that all day instead.
Under vacuum whilst idling I had an intercooler hose collapsing on itself. It should have had a metal sleeve inside it to prevent this, so I whipped it off and found the problem.
A-Ha, smoking gun. Sorted. This had rotated to cause the collapse at idle, and would have been restricting boost at WOT. Love an easy fix.
...except it didn't really fix anything. I could improve the collapsing hose but not perfect it. A bit more sleeving, or a solid 90 with straight joiners will both fix this in the long term, but the best I could do was just reduce the size of the dimple under idle.
It was a long way from blocking itself off (car would have stalled if it was) and under positive pressure it expanded back out absolutely fine... so this couldn't be the cause of my bleeding boost, could it?
I spent all afternoon faffing around with boost pipes, checking for leaks and restrictions... couldn't find anything amiss other than this joiner.
The car still drove pretty well, obviously it was slower- but it didn't feel broken. I weighed up the idea of just driving it anyway, but I'd never forgive myself if I went on to cause terminal damage by ignoring a clear issue, so I called it a day. I never did do a solo session at proper speed, but it was a shakedown run - so no need to sulk.
At time of typing I'm a little confused, but I have a couple of theories:
1. Perhaps my lunchtime map tweak did something unexpected. I've retrospectively looked at logs, and my throttle traces are all what I'd expect to see. I am however seeing some inconsistencies in throttle pedal sensor voltage. Sometimes 100% throttle is 3.5v, sometimes it's 3.7v. My tweak at lunch time was to change this so that I was always seeing 100% pedal, and the logs suggest I achieved that... but I shouldn't have needed to do it, and perhaps something else is going on.
2. There's a mechanical/physical restriction somewhere. I've had all the intake off and can't find anything amiss other than this collapsing elbow. I will of course fix/replace that, but as I said - I can't see how this is causing a restriction when the system is positively charged. Only other thing I can think of is an exhaust issue, maybe the cat has collapsed. I've known this once before on a friends Exige and it happened during a dyno session. Manifold pressure went down and power stopped climbing at around 6k RPM. I struggled to understand how a restriction in the exhaust side could reduce manifold pressure rather than increase it, and I still struggle with that now... but I've seen it happen, so I know it's possible.
3. SC belt slipping. Having an aftermarket pulley on a non-AC car means there aren't many documented sources for correct belt size. I made a best guess based on info I could find, and I went for the larger side of tolerance. Perhaps I should try the next size down.
My IT brain can't rule out #1. I've checked the logs, my very last WOT pull before lunch made full boost. I tweaked map over lunch. First WOT pull of the afternoon and it was losing boost. That's too black and white to ignore.
Really wish I reverted it in the afternoon, but discovering that boost pipe just distracted me. Oh, and I ran over my own USB cable so I couldn't upload a map tweak anyway
Anyway, I didn't sulk too much. I'll fix the boost pipe elbow, probably take the cat off and give it a shake, and will revert my map tweak. Probably all one step at a time so I know what the fix was, if I fix it.
I do appreciate any suggestions though.
This ended up being my last few decent laps of the day, just before lunch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FaWPMGO9XM&ab...
Still need to work on external mic positioning, not happy with how much wind noise I'm picking up. Working on it!
Enjoyable day despite the afternoon. Brother in Law took me out in his Clio (one of the new ones with flappy paddles) and it was ace, really didn't expect it to do what it did. Very capable car, I've never tracked a FWD car myself but this made me want to.
Blyton is my regular season opener now. Close to home, usually pretty inexpensive so no real heartache if I have to call it a day early, and nice familiar place to benchmark upgrades and test reliability.
Was attending with Brother in Law (Clio) and a friend (MG Midget with A-Series Turbo) with a few tag alongers coming along to spectate, so would be a social one too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51II5tYmTho&ab...
The morning was fantastic, different passenger hopped in for each session and the car was very quickly feeling familiar (and fast!).
The first session was very slippy, bone dry but very cold and the tyres took AGES to get up to temp. Validated by my new TPMS sensors. Once they did and pressures stabilised, the car came to life. Even with passengers in the car it was feeling on its toes, and had bags of traction. Still braking far too early, though.
Between sessions I was hiding in the trailer, desperately trying to warm up and checking the logs for any mapping tweaks that I'd need.
The mapping seemed good, as expected. Probably a tiny bit on the rich side if chasing ultimate performance, but happy to have a safety margin.
I was seeing some knock events each time the VVTLI engaged or disengaged, so put that down to valvetrain noise. I had similar noise events on the Exige but I'd configured my thresholds to be a tiny bit above it, and on the 2-Eleven it's JUST breaching those thresholds, so slight difference of engine bay acoustics probably all it was. I can tweak the threshold to avoid this in future.
I went into it in detail on my Exige thread, but the 2ZZ in SC format is a bugger for phantom knock. It's very difficult to tune reliable thresholds for it because the engine is just naturally noisy on the knock frequency it would make noise on. I've not seen a single map from a professional tuner that has attempted to remedy this, and have just left knock control either disabled entirely - or setup with an incorrect frequency. Even Lotus struggled with it, and there's a Lotus document somewhere advising race teams to remove their knock sensor, wrap it in foam and tie it to the bulkhead somewhere...
Anyway, I've had a go - and I can sleep at night knowing I've got *some* knock detection/protection, but the downside is that I occasionally have to chase these phantoms.
Example here of two events, and two 'nearly' events.
Purple line is observed noise, green line is the threshold, brown line is VTEC engagement. You see it's JUST touching my threshold, so triggering the knock alarm, but not actually exceeding it enough to trigger the knock protection such as pulling timing or adding fuel.
Anyway, kept on lapping - kept on enjoying it and getting quicker throughout the morning.
My intercom was disappointing. It worked fine in the first session for passenger #1, but then the passenger #2 could no longer hear the audio from my mic. I could hear the audio from my mic (it plays back to you as you speak so you know it's working) and I could hear the audio from their mic, so it could just be a dodgy wire in their headset... or the intercom itself has broken already. Either way, annoying. Binned it off for the rest of the day.
Regular engine bay checks during the morning passed scrutiny, no leaks, weeps or any problems I could find.
Tyres started retaining a bit of temp between sessions, but had to keep the breaks short to avoid losing all my hard earned grip.
(thanks Simon for the photos)
I had an odd sudden power cut on a sharp left hander late morning. I suspected fuel surge, but I still had a decent amount of fuel left. Later found it was my DIY TC kicking in a bit too aggressively. I wound my knob back to the half way setting for the rest of the day and had no such issues.
Before we knew it, it was lunch time. Passengers all had lives to be getting on with so I looked forward to some solo laps after lunch, and really pushing on. Car felt like it had a PB lap in it, easily.
Losing the best part of 100kg is significant for any car, but in this it's mind bending. Immediately after going out the car felt totally different. Brakes felt better, turn in felt better, mid corner grip and traction felt better...everything, except... it was slower?
It was hard to pinpoint at first... the car didn't feel broken, wasn't lumpy or misfiring... but it just lacked some zing in the high RPM ranges. The little shift lights progressed through at their usual romp until the final three which seemed to take an age. Hmmm.
I finished the session and eagerly checked my logs. I had made a map tweak over lunch time, just tidying up a little bit of fuelling and a DBW voltage tweak.... but nothing that should have caused this.
Sure enough, I wasn't making the expected levels of boost.
Normally I have a fairly steady level of manifold pressure going up to the redline.
In my 'road mode' which I used exclusively at Blyton, this should be around 140kpa (40 + atmosphere) so around 6psi of boost.
This is what started happening over lunch:
Made 140kpa initially, then it just tapers right down to below 120kpa at the red line, so making half the boost it should be making.
I work in IT, rule number #1 is just to reverse the last thing you did... which was the map change I made over lunch, but I immediately found a problem in the engine bay and got fixated on that all day instead.
Under vacuum whilst idling I had an intercooler hose collapsing on itself. It should have had a metal sleeve inside it to prevent this, so I whipped it off and found the problem.
A-Ha, smoking gun. Sorted. This had rotated to cause the collapse at idle, and would have been restricting boost at WOT. Love an easy fix.
...except it didn't really fix anything. I could improve the collapsing hose but not perfect it. A bit more sleeving, or a solid 90 with straight joiners will both fix this in the long term, but the best I could do was just reduce the size of the dimple under idle.
It was a long way from blocking itself off (car would have stalled if it was) and under positive pressure it expanded back out absolutely fine... so this couldn't be the cause of my bleeding boost, could it?
I spent all afternoon faffing around with boost pipes, checking for leaks and restrictions... couldn't find anything amiss other than this joiner.
The car still drove pretty well, obviously it was slower- but it didn't feel broken. I weighed up the idea of just driving it anyway, but I'd never forgive myself if I went on to cause terminal damage by ignoring a clear issue, so I called it a day. I never did do a solo session at proper speed, but it was a shakedown run - so no need to sulk.
At time of typing I'm a little confused, but I have a couple of theories:
1. Perhaps my lunchtime map tweak did something unexpected. I've retrospectively looked at logs, and my throttle traces are all what I'd expect to see. I am however seeing some inconsistencies in throttle pedal sensor voltage. Sometimes 100% throttle is 3.5v, sometimes it's 3.7v. My tweak at lunch time was to change this so that I was always seeing 100% pedal, and the logs suggest I achieved that... but I shouldn't have needed to do it, and perhaps something else is going on.
2. There's a mechanical/physical restriction somewhere. I've had all the intake off and can't find anything amiss other than this collapsing elbow. I will of course fix/replace that, but as I said - I can't see how this is causing a restriction when the system is positively charged. Only other thing I can think of is an exhaust issue, maybe the cat has collapsed. I've known this once before on a friends Exige and it happened during a dyno session. Manifold pressure went down and power stopped climbing at around 6k RPM. I struggled to understand how a restriction in the exhaust side could reduce manifold pressure rather than increase it, and I still struggle with that now... but I've seen it happen, so I know it's possible.
3. SC belt slipping. Having an aftermarket pulley on a non-AC car means there aren't many documented sources for correct belt size. I made a best guess based on info I could find, and I went for the larger side of tolerance. Perhaps I should try the next size down.
My IT brain can't rule out #1. I've checked the logs, my very last WOT pull before lunch made full boost. I tweaked map over lunch. First WOT pull of the afternoon and it was losing boost. That's too black and white to ignore.
Really wish I reverted it in the afternoon, but discovering that boost pipe just distracted me. Oh, and I ran over my own USB cable so I couldn't upload a map tweak anyway
Anyway, I didn't sulk too much. I'll fix the boost pipe elbow, probably take the cat off and give it a shake, and will revert my map tweak. Probably all one step at a time so I know what the fix was, if I fix it.
I do appreciate any suggestions though.
This ended up being my last few decent laps of the day, just before lunch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FaWPMGO9XM&ab...
Still need to work on external mic positioning, not happy with how much wind noise I'm picking up. Working on it!
Enjoyable day despite the afternoon. Brother in Law took me out in his Clio (one of the new ones with flappy paddles) and it was ace, really didn't expect it to do what it did. Very capable car, I've never tracked a FWD car myself but this made me want to.
Paul_M3 said:
Where exactly do you have it now mate?
My rear camera is exactly where the number plate would sit, and here seems to be really good in terms of getting exhaust noise but little wind noise. I used to have an external microphone in that location as well, but when I upgraded my GoPro it didn't fit, and I didn't seem to need it anymore. Sound is ok.
This video gives a decent idea of how little wind noise there is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiLbicIOL90
I guess for you that may mean taping an extension wire along the top of the rear bodywork when you get to track, but might be worth it if you're really annoyed by the wind noise?
On my Exige I did very similar to you, stuck a GoPro Session4 on the rear numberplate and used the audio from that and it was fantastic. I did get annoyed having two sets of video to sort out, remembering to set both cameras recording, then syncing up the audio etc - so my hope for the 2-Eleven was to just run one camera, maybe another for some other arty farty angles when I find some.My rear camera is exactly where the number plate would sit, and here seems to be really good in terms of getting exhaust noise but little wind noise. I used to have an external microphone in that location as well, but when I upgraded my GoPro it didn't fit, and I didn't seem to need it anymore. Sound is ok.
This video gives a decent idea of how little wind noise there is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiLbicIOL90
I guess for you that may mean taping an extension wire along the top of the rear bodywork when you get to track, but might be worth it if you're really annoyed by the wind noise?
The rear numberplate plinth seems to melt stuff on the 2-Eleven. Already lost two numberplates to it, so really don't fancy having a camera or microphone too close to that known-good location. Microphone on this occasion was clipped to one of the little grilles in the rear clam, I think with some of those wind muff things on it, it would have been much better - so will do some road testing.
Alternatively I can move it inside the clam a bit, strap it to a spoiler upright within the clam and it should be sheltered enough.
Anywhere in the cockpit just picks up the clonking of my feet on the pedals, plus the turbulent air in there gets pretty bad.
Feirny said:
Steve looks mega happy in that pic!
So good to see you back out on track with this mate.
Happiest I've seen him in years. Cheers, it was good to be back. Can't believe I've got to wait till' mid April now to go again!So good to see you back out on track with this mate.
Mini update
Took the catalyst off to see if anything was amiss in there, looks good to me.
Bit of a relieve, because these HJS cats are not cheap... especially when they've been ceramic coated three times over!
In the meantime Pro Alloy sent me some bits of pipe for me to play with.
Needed a bit of trimming, but I've now got hose joiners that are practically solid.
Done an idle test, and no more collapsing. I'd love to go do a road test to see if I'm now boosting properly, but .. well, snow.
I've got an 1873mm belt sat waiting to go, it's 7mm shorter than the current one but I'm reluctant to stick it up despite the downtime because I want to know what the specific issue is/was.
My test plan is to therefor take the car out as it is, do some pulls and see if I'm boosting properly again. If not, I'll have the laptop with me and can revert my ECU config whilst on the test run and try again. If that still doesn't work, I can come home and swap the belt.
If the belt swap doesn't sort it either... well, I've not thought that far ahead yet. One way or another, I will eventually swap the belts - because the current one seems on the slacker side of tolerance anyway.
Took the catalyst off to see if anything was amiss in there, looks good to me.
Bit of a relieve, because these HJS cats are not cheap... especially when they've been ceramic coated three times over!
In the meantime Pro Alloy sent me some bits of pipe for me to play with.
Needed a bit of trimming, but I've now got hose joiners that are practically solid.
Done an idle test, and no more collapsing. I'd love to go do a road test to see if I'm now boosting properly, but .. well, snow.
I've got an 1873mm belt sat waiting to go, it's 7mm shorter than the current one but I'm reluctant to stick it up despite the downtime because I want to know what the specific issue is/was.
My test plan is to therefor take the car out as it is, do some pulls and see if I'm boosting properly again. If not, I'll have the laptop with me and can revert my ECU config whilst on the test run and try again. If that still doesn't work, I can come home and swap the belt.
If the belt swap doesn't sort it either... well, I've not thought that far ahead yet. One way or another, I will eventually swap the belts - because the current one seems on the slacker side of tolerance anyway.
Boost problem solved, it's both a relief and an annoyance to report that it was my lunch time map/DBW tweak that fecked something up.
I just took the car out, did some pulls and noted the exact same boost ramp down towards the limiter. Pulled over and reran the DBW wizard, this spends about 5 mins modulating the DBW automatically, measuring response times, voltages, etc - and then it sets all of your DBW parameters for you.
I went back out, and was hitting full boost every time.
I'm annoyed at myself for not reverting at Blyton, but I was so distracted by the boost hoses I left my logical troubleshooting at the door. I'm also annoyed that I cannot explain why the changes I made, caused a problem. I'm staring at the two pulls in the logs now and DBW activity is identical, so whatever I did - it's not something I can see in the logs.
Oh well, lesson learned. The DBW config created by the wizard is not perfect (I'm only getting 97-98% TPS when the throttle is pinned). This is what I tried to fix on the day, but I'll just live with that. My Dyno science showed that there's zero power loss by being a few % short of full throttle... it just annoys me when I look at graphs.
Think I'll still put the shorter SC belt on, this one is a bit on the slack side. But happy days, onto the next trackday with not much of a job list.
I just took the car out, did some pulls and noted the exact same boost ramp down towards the limiter. Pulled over and reran the DBW wizard, this spends about 5 mins modulating the DBW automatically, measuring response times, voltages, etc - and then it sets all of your DBW parameters for you.
I went back out, and was hitting full boost every time.
I'm annoyed at myself for not reverting at Blyton, but I was so distracted by the boost hoses I left my logical troubleshooting at the door. I'm also annoyed that I cannot explain why the changes I made, caused a problem. I'm staring at the two pulls in the logs now and DBW activity is identical, so whatever I did - it's not something I can see in the logs.
Oh well, lesson learned. The DBW config created by the wizard is not perfect (I'm only getting 97-98% TPS when the throttle is pinned). This is what I tried to fix on the day, but I'll just live with that. My Dyno science showed that there's zero power loss by being a few % short of full throttle... it just annoys me when I look at graphs.
Think I'll still put the shorter SC belt on, this one is a bit on the slack side. But happy days, onto the next trackday with not much of a job list.
Hoping to get some road mileage in now that it's hopefully stopped snowing, so thought I'd retrieve my road wheels/tyres out of the trailer and get them cleaned up.
The Gtechniq C5 on the trackday wheels (shadow chrome ones) is still holding up brilliantly, they clean up a treat. The Satin black wheels which came on the 2-Eleven less so.
Got them best I could, then slapped some poorboys sealant on to give me half a chance for the rest of the year.
Track wheels can wait patiently for a few weeks...
Popped out for a chilly blast up to the North Yorks owners club meet, nothing too much to report - car did what it was supposed to do.
I did test a new external mic position though, and I think I've finally got something that will stop clipping and collecting wind noise on track.
Back in the lab, I finally figured out what my DBW mistake was at Blyton. As a reminder, I was seeing a max of 97% TPS in the logs from the morning session so I tweaked the voltage down a bit so that 100% throttle = the voltage I was seeing in the logs.
After that, the car was dropping boost at high RPM and was generally more sluggish. My mistake was that I changed the voltage for the TB opening potentiometer, not the pedal one... this explains why the pedal and TB were both still reporting 100% to the ECU, but I'd altered the definition of what 100% is. Idiot.
Oh well, glad I've fixed it - and it's allowed me to change the proper value and I'm now seeing 100% TPS in the logs again, so all has ended well.
The Gtechniq C5 on the trackday wheels (shadow chrome ones) is still holding up brilliantly, they clean up a treat. The Satin black wheels which came on the 2-Eleven less so.
Got them best I could, then slapped some poorboys sealant on to give me half a chance for the rest of the year.
Track wheels can wait patiently for a few weeks...
Popped out for a chilly blast up to the North Yorks owners club meet, nothing too much to report - car did what it was supposed to do.
I did test a new external mic position though, and I think I've finally got something that will stop clipping and collecting wind noise on track.
Back in the lab, I finally figured out what my DBW mistake was at Blyton. As a reminder, I was seeing a max of 97% TPS in the logs from the morning session so I tweaked the voltage down a bit so that 100% throttle = the voltage I was seeing in the logs.
After that, the car was dropping boost at high RPM and was generally more sluggish. My mistake was that I changed the voltage for the TB opening potentiometer, not the pedal one... this explains why the pedal and TB were both still reporting 100% to the ECU, but I'd altered the definition of what 100% is. Idiot.
Oh well, glad I've fixed it - and it's allowed me to change the proper value and I'm now seeing 100% TPS in the logs again, so all has ended well.
Rodd Nock said:
I'd been looking forward to seeing the write up of this year's first track session after all those mods, great to see that you've now got it running spot on.
Your threads are IMO some of the best content on PH: everything done right but without any tiresome humblebrag blank-cheque engineering, lots of detail but no waffle, and a great story of making a fabulous car even better with some really well chosen mods. Please keep it up!!
Far too generous. Pressure is on now to not cock it up.Your threads are IMO some of the best content on PH: everything done right but without any tiresome humblebrag blank-cheque engineering, lots of detail but no waffle, and a great story of making a fabulous car even better with some really well chosen mods. Please keep it up!!
Nyloc20 said:
Kyle, I’m having a sort out of all my Lotus stuff and found a launch leaflet for the 2-Eleven you can have if you haven’t got one. Are you at next Motorist or F&G meets?
Hi Mate, that would be grand thanks. I'd say the next F&G Meet is most likely, weather dependent - but I'll let you know either way.
Cheers!
Rare for me I got a free pass on Sunday morning, had nothing to fix - so went for a drive.
It's my first proper drive on the road for a long time in this car, no squinting at a laptop to check stuff or limping it to the petrol station with half of the body missing, etc etc. Just driving for the sake of driving.
The slight raise I've made to the rideheight has been significant, I can use the car on a fairly average road now without scraping around a lot. Speedbumps still an absolute no-go, but at least it's usable.
Though I never measured the suspension alignment prior to my rebuild, I can now say with some confidence that the car was previously running a very conservative and road biased geometry. The camber settings I'm now running are much closer to what I had on my Exige, and as 2-Eleven book figures are understandably track focussed this has had a negative implication on the road.
Nothing too bad, but it's hunting undulations and cambers a bit much, and it occasionally catches me off guard. The ride isn't so bad aside from that, but definitely on the stiff side of acceptable.
It's not something I plan on changing, it's predominantly a track car and I'm happy to know I've got the right setup for that, but I do have some headroom to play with the damping to see if I can make it a little more forgiving for any future road adventures.
Had a play in both driving modes, the fully unleashed 300bhp 'race mode' is a bit of a beast. It's intoxicating and I'm really enjoying having two modes to flick between, as I think it will delay the inevitable upgrade-itis when I can spend most of the time at 'OE' power levels with the odd spurt of full power whenever I'm feeling like the car should be faster... to scare me back into my box.
I had a little bit of a glitch with my dashboard, I noticed it at Blyton and completely forgot about it - but my "coolant high" alarm randomly flashed for a split second when I had just 84deg showing. I checked the logs afterwards and could see that my coolant temp value on my dash spiked to max value for a fraction of a second and then back down to 84 again.
The Coolant temp is wired into the ECU, and the data sent to the dash via canbus. I can see that the ECU value for coolant temp never spiked, so it's clearly just a dash glitch or maybe a CAN clash that I need to investigate, but easily engineered around in the meantime just by adding a 1sec delay on the coolant alarm.
Oh, my helmet intercom I think is fixed too. Or more should I say, I don't think it was ever broken. The earpiece positions in my 'guest helmet' were naff, and once the helmet was on they were actually pressed into your cheeks. I reorganised the helmet lining a bit, and got a much better setup.
It's my first proper drive on the road for a long time in this car, no squinting at a laptop to check stuff or limping it to the petrol station with half of the body missing, etc etc. Just driving for the sake of driving.
The slight raise I've made to the rideheight has been significant, I can use the car on a fairly average road now without scraping around a lot. Speedbumps still an absolute no-go, but at least it's usable.
Though I never measured the suspension alignment prior to my rebuild, I can now say with some confidence that the car was previously running a very conservative and road biased geometry. The camber settings I'm now running are much closer to what I had on my Exige, and as 2-Eleven book figures are understandably track focussed this has had a negative implication on the road.
Nothing too bad, but it's hunting undulations and cambers a bit much, and it occasionally catches me off guard. The ride isn't so bad aside from that, but definitely on the stiff side of acceptable.
It's not something I plan on changing, it's predominantly a track car and I'm happy to know I've got the right setup for that, but I do have some headroom to play with the damping to see if I can make it a little more forgiving for any future road adventures.
Had a play in both driving modes, the fully unleashed 300bhp 'race mode' is a bit of a beast. It's intoxicating and I'm really enjoying having two modes to flick between, as I think it will delay the inevitable upgrade-itis when I can spend most of the time at 'OE' power levels with the odd spurt of full power whenever I'm feeling like the car should be faster... to scare me back into my box.
I had a little bit of a glitch with my dashboard, I noticed it at Blyton and completely forgot about it - but my "coolant high" alarm randomly flashed for a split second when I had just 84deg showing. I checked the logs afterwards and could see that my coolant temp value on my dash spiked to max value for a fraction of a second and then back down to 84 again.
The Coolant temp is wired into the ECU, and the data sent to the dash via canbus. I can see that the ECU value for coolant temp never spiked, so it's clearly just a dash glitch or maybe a CAN clash that I need to investigate, but easily engineered around in the meantime just by adding a 1sec delay on the coolant alarm.
Oh, my helmet intercom I think is fixed too. Or more should I say, I don't think it was ever broken. The earpiece positions in my 'guest helmet' were naff, and once the helmet was on they were actually pressed into your cheeks. I reorganised the helmet lining a bit, and got a much better setup.
I pootled over to @seriouslylotus for the opening day of the newly refurbed workshop.
As usual with these things I got so distracted nattering away that I didn't actually take any photographs, so have to nick a couple of others to prove I was there.
Really impressive turnout, and the workshop is a really impressive facility now. Would be well worth travelling for if you need your Lotus tinkering on.
I've seen Dave's 3-Eleven at various trackdays, seen it kicking around the workshop, etc - but I've never really spent time looking at it. Properly. They are marvelous things, with some really trick details on them. As a later/runout one, this one has some nice carbon flourishes which I don't think the earlier ones got including inlays in the bodywork. Very nice bit of kit.
One day...
Nothing else to report really, I had a passenger with me to SL and back so we gave the intercom a workout and it worked a treat. My only complaint now is that I pick up a lot of wind noise from the passenger mic because the passenger headset is generally just bunged into a helmet not designed for it. Apparently I transmit very little wind noise because my mic is nicely nestled in a little recess for it.
Took the car back out on Easter Sunday to take the long way around for petrol.
She's now holed up patiently waiting for Donington in a weeks time.
As usual with these things I got so distracted nattering away that I didn't actually take any photographs, so have to nick a couple of others to prove I was there.
Really impressive turnout, and the workshop is a really impressive facility now. Would be well worth travelling for if you need your Lotus tinkering on.
I've seen Dave's 3-Eleven at various trackdays, seen it kicking around the workshop, etc - but I've never really spent time looking at it. Properly. They are marvelous things, with some really trick details on them. As a later/runout one, this one has some nice carbon flourishes which I don't think the earlier ones got including inlays in the bodywork. Very nice bit of kit.
One day...
Nothing else to report really, I had a passenger with me to SL and back so we gave the intercom a workout and it worked a treat. My only complaint now is that I pick up a lot of wind noise from the passenger mic because the passenger headset is generally just bunged into a helmet not designed for it. Apparently I transmit very little wind noise because my mic is nicely nestled in a little recess for it.
Took the car back out on Easter Sunday to take the long way around for petrol.
She's now holed up patiently waiting for Donington in a weeks time.
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