Mazda RX8 Track Car, "The Kraken"
Discussion
Update Time Again.
Well it’s had a bit of use now and I thought I would report back.
The 5.385 diff is good in gear, it’s nice to drive and it feels like a decent increase in performance has been attained. 85mph on the motorway is nearly 5krpm though, so we tend to commute around at the regulation 70mph now. However, being none-OEM gears with probably slightly different tolerances and hardening processes, and the stiff Powerflex diff mounts, it does make a bit of noise back there, mostly noticeable as you come on/off the throttle. Nothing I’m worried about, John’s with the 5.8 diff and the Powerflex black series mounts makes similar noises, maybe it’ll calm down with a bit more bedding in.
The gearbox cooler works well, however the rate in which the oil cools is not as high as I expected, therefore I lowered the activation temperature of the gearbox cooling systems from 105 degrees to 90 degrees.
Time to introduce another two cars to the pack, the RXstate and the RXcuse.
Leon and John (W) came along to almost all track days for passenger rides and the social side of it all. Well they have now decided to go into a cheap car and see how they get on. Locally a winning blue RX8 231 turned up, in a legal colour (one of each colour only allowed in our little series) which had decent structure and engine, just a slight misfire, all for the bargain price of £450. We had spare plugs, and coil packs in the spares pool of the other cars so replaced them, removed the oil from the sump as it had been over filled, replaced the wiper blades, cleaned out the elephant truck and replaced the brake pads and it’s good to go.
Another friend (Rich_D- “Dizzy”) has bought a silver one to join in, but that’s not seen the track yet, he is incapable of committing to anything and is the original author of the excuse book it has been named the RXcuse. Rick has also got a yellow one recently and has transplanted the engine from Boom 2 into the yellow one; it’s not seen a track yet either.
The current series-
Kraken- Velocity Red – Matt (“StreetDragster”) & Allan
Hadouken- PZ Grey – John B (“Cabriolet”)
Sonic KaBoom 3 – Yellow – Rick (“Sonic KaBoomII”)
RXstate- Winning Blue – John W & Leon
RXcuse – Silver- Dizzy (“Rich_D”)
Blyton Park was attacked on the 24th of March 2017 by the Kraken, the Hadouken and the RXstate. Weather was good and forecast to be dry all day so the Kraken had semi slicks on, as did the Hadouken. The RXstate was on its supplied semi budget road tyres which were death traps.
The weather was excellent, warm and sunny all day, bit windy but the erection (lol) of a windbreak sorted that out. The day went well with the drivers quickly learning the circuit, getting some decent lines and cracking on making progress. It was a day organised by the Frank Hall of the Practical Performance Car club/team/forum who organise days like these for charity, always a really good day with a great mix of metal on the track, helps that it’s for a good cause too.
I personally treat these days as a test/shakedown day for the rest of the year, they are pretty cheap and Blyton is an open circuit with minimal furniture so you can really push it. This event highlighted some problems with the Kraken which needed sorting.
Problem 1, oil breathing. I had the small Toyo oil catch can, situated behind the air box on the side of the fuse box, lower than the intake. First hot session at Blyton it was a misfire combined with loads of smoke out the back, yellow flag, confirmed its not leaking and then pottered into the pits round the outside of the track. Found the catch can full (I had emptied it that morning) and the elephant truck, inlet, MAF & sensor, air filter and air box full of oil.
Well there’s your problem. I cleaned it all out in the paddock as best as I could and out we went again. Solved, happy days will look into it the issue further back at base.
Problem 2, gearbox oil leak. Odd one this, at 80mph on the motorway you could open the window and smell gearbox oil strongly, suggesting a catastrophic oil leak. Pull over, look under the car, nothing. Park overnight and there is a very small puddle of gearbox oil under the car, like 2 drops. Odd, another one for further research.
Problem 3, air conditioning. More air conditioning problems, it’s not working again. Most frustrating after 2 condensers, a receiver/drier, numerous recharges and check overs. Unfortunately there is only so much I can do at home without the charging machine and the UV dye so will have to see what I can see. I would consider leaving it as the car is getting more track only use, but with 3 track days in Spain/Portugal on the cards, I suspect it’ll be needed.
Problem 4, the most serious of the lot, the parcel shelf is rattling. There is something under the rear parcel shelf plastics, roughly in the middle that is buzzing whilst driving. It is driving me INSANE. I will find it and stop it.
Problem 5, I think the rear needs attention as its starting to get high speed understeer.
The RX-state did well too. It had some shakedown issues, mainly related to zero attention by the previous owner(s). Things discovered were that the heater fan fuse had failed at some point in the past and had not been replaced, the tyres were carved from granite, the brake/clutch fluid has never been changed and was supporting a small eco system, and the aftermarket cat/catback exhaust puts out nice flames. Happy days all round, the two drivers got to grips with the car very quickly and are really happy with how it turned out.
The Hadouken did splendidly all day, not an issue or hiccup. A couple of times the Kraken and the Hadouken got on track near each other and we had some great fun, both cars are very capable and were some of the faster stuff on the track overall. The cars themselves being very closely matched, John’s shorter diff giving him a touch more acceleration, but he needs an additional gear change which brings us back together. Really fun day.
Away from the RX8 I have decided to get some professional help to further improve my driving, I booked a day at the end of April at Anglesey and hired ARDS instructor Phiroze (“Fi-rose”) Bilimoria (http://www.phirozeracing.co.uk) to come along and give me (and John B/Hadouken) a full day of driver training. Anglesey has given me a bit of mental anguish since the Civic spin, so I thought it would be a good track to attack and crush that demon, and Phiroze will hopefully get me through it. Depending on how the day goes and the time/costs associated, I may enrol on further “track academy” courses.
I have also purchased a used curtain-sider type covered car trailer to start attending track days in rather than driving to/from. This is mainly due to my Mrs getting herself a lovely Range Rover Sport which just so happens to have the high towing capacity I needed, I also completed my B+E towing license a couple of years ago.
..and we have booked a further day, Mallory on the 16th of June 2017, happy days.
In prep for the Anglesey day I got the Kraken back in the garage and gave it a thorough check over which revealed a load of interesting problems.
Problem 1- Engine oil breathing, first thing I did was removed all the inlet trucking, air box, MAF and catch can. Clean and inspected it all and found some nasty congealed mess on the inlet to the catch can and all the way up the 8mm ID pipework, restricting flow down the pipe. I also reasoned that the Hadouken did everything the same as I did at Blyton with no issues whatsoever. John doesn’t have a catch can, and the cars are very similar except for his having the later post 2006 breather system on, where they revised the plumbing to the inlet manifold.
I decided to remove the catch can and lines, retrofit the revised breather system and see how it goes. There is a plan if it doesn’t work, but I’m not doing anything until I have proven that I still have a problem or not.
Problem 2- The gearbox oil leak appears to be coming from the [liquid] gasket between the gear housing and the tail case I removed for the gearbox oil cooler. Irritating, that’s a box off job to repair, given that it’s like 1 drop every two days I cleaned it all up with IPA and smeared some gasket paste on the outside which appears to have arrested the leak, not a great repair, but that’ll do for now until after Rockingham when I’ll pull the box and fix it properly.
The oil smell was from this very small leak being cooked off by the exhaust, surprising how strong a smell there was from such a tiny leak.
Problem 3- Air Conditioning, this one was easy. Under the car there was what looked like electrical wire wrapped around the rear suspension. Unravelling this showed that it was also wrapped around the front suspension, unravelling further and a quick pull extracted a shredded air conditioning belt. Simple fix, replace the belt and air conditioning is restored, awesome.
Problem 4- The rattle was fixed by removing all the plastics off the rear shelf, and applying thin foam when any of the two parts meet near the now reinforced parcel shelf.
Problem 5- The high speed understeer was looked at next, initially I thought that stiffening the rear suspension was the answer but with some help from the RX8OC I was pointed in the direction of the anti-roll bar instead. I have Japspeed adjustable rear arms which the anti-roll bar connects to, at the time of fitment I was a little concerned that there was nothing to prevent these arms rotating round the shaft except the pressure from the lock nut. Can this locknut resist a hard cornering 1300kg car? It seems not, the brackets are in different positions than what I mounted them at, different on each side of the car, showing that they have slipped, hence reducing the force applied by the anti-roll bar.
To counter this, I was going to weld up the entire arm to be rigid now that the suspension has been adjusted somewhere near. I decided not to do this in the end; this particular design of adjustable arm from Japspeed is fundamentally flawed. All the other arms are in compression/tension only and as such, work perfectly fine. However this one on the RX8 is also in torsion when the anti-roll bar is applying load, this simply rotates the arms about the spherical bearings in the rose joints and applies no force to the arms, effectively removing the anti-roll bar from the car.
Therefore I have removed the arms, and replaced with OEM arms, meaning I have lost the rear camber setting I wanted, and also meaning ANOTHER suspension setup FFS. That said, Japspeed were very good about it and refunded me the cost of the arms with just a small amount of discussion and agreement. They did mention that they will pass on the comments to their design department.
I also replaced the MAF screen in the Racing Bear air box as I had put my chub fingers through it when hastily removing the inlet system in the Blyton paddock. I made a bracket to better support the engine wiring loom near the pulleys, and I installed rear arch liners in an effort to keep any wheel spray away from the oil cooler.
Another thing completed was a clean out of the K&N air filter, I haven’t done this since I fitted it, LOADS of dirt came out of it by just banging it on the floor, and even more when I degreased it and washed it clean. A quick re-oil and it’s lovely and clean now ready for action.
Roll on Anglesey.
Anglesey was the first time that I decided to tow my car to/from an event, so this was a learning experience on the loading/unloading process. One of the things I learnt, very scarily is to get the nose weight right on the trailer. A horrible horrible sway developed on a downhill section of the motorway and I was convinced we were rolling over. Thankfully I got out of it in one piece, redistribution of weight within the trailer left everything ok and it towed fine for the rest of the trip, phew! Lesson learnt there and all towing since then has been better with proper weight distribution, also a nose weight gauge has been purchased to permit safe loading in future.
Weather was decent at Anglesey, overcast but dry and clear. Following the safety briefing Philroze cracked on with stage 1 of his tuition, getting us to understand the cornering principles for higher exit speed. Off we went practising what he taught us for a bit, much better, power getting on much earlier. Stage 2 was vision and stage 3 was weight transfer. Highly recommend his help for a day, learned a lot and I would like to repeat the experience/coaching at some point in the future, maybe with a structured coaching approach rather than a sporadic assistance on random track days. To be discussed later in 2017/18.
Kraken did well all day, no issues or failures, most notable was no oil burping issues now that it is on the later 2006 oil breather system. Same story for the Hadouken, no issues. However the £450 RXstate was not so lucky. 5-6 laps in loss of power, stalled and towed off the track. Couldn’t get it to start in the pits, plugs out, fuel pump fuse out and turned over, sounds odd. Let it cool for 2 hours and attempted restart, no success, suspected Apex seal failure.
Into the trailer it went and John W drove the Kraken home instead.
Next up was Rockingham ISSCL circuit, for this the Kraken needed a check over and oil’s topping up, otherwise it was good to go again. The RXstate however needed an engine transplant, and it was to be getting the Krakens old RotaryMotion engine which has been retained as a spare since the WGT engine transplant.
I was out of the country for a week, so the weekend before Rockingham (no pressure) the RXstate was attacked with the spanners, old engine out, new engine in, sump resealed and fitted and then fluids added and start up. All went reasonably well given that this was the first time the engine has been removed from this car. Started up well and appears to be running spot on with only a random miss fire to look into, plugs/coils suspected. However at the last second it was found that the Rockingham slot for the RXState hadn’t been booked, and the track day was full, so after all that Cinderella wouldn’t be going to the ball after all.
Onto Rockingham, Kraken loaded and trailered down without issue, stopped at a local hotel which was nice. 3 RX8’s and 2 Civic Type R’s were in attendance in our little group on this day. Weather was overcast and warm, with a threat of rain all day, thankfully the rain held off.
The track was really good and challenging, high speed and low speed sections, technical and open, scary concrete raised curbs and obviously the outer wall of the speedway. I had first tuition slot of the day, this in reality was a mistake and I should have gotten some laps in beforehand, I’ll aim for a 10:30 slot in future. The instructor was giving me directions and instructions whilst driving round an unfamiliar track, I simply couldn’t take in all the information he was giving me.
Eventually I did start to get some good laps in, and the RX8’s did well not being embarrassed too much by faster machinery. Caterham’s were out in force that day, training for an upcoming academy race, some of these were a little troublesome but overall the day went well. No issues with oil breathing, or in fact anything, Kraken running really well. Gearbox temps managed nicely by the cooler, all good.
The Hadouken had a moment at the end of the main outer banked section, a fuel starvation issue took John’s attention just prior to the hairpin, his line was not great and he over steered into the wall. Quite a light knock, and damage wouldn’t have been too bad had it not have hit one of the tow hooks, which punched its way through the front bumper support of the car. Not too much to repair thankfully.
Mid-afternoon I decided to pack up and leave ahead of the rest of our team, I was due to fly out to the Middle East with work very early the following morning so needed to get home. Loaded the car on the trailer and returned to base without issues.
I checked the car over prior to the next outing which was Mallory park on the 16th of June, 2-3mm on the front tyres, 4-5mm on the rear tyres, and about 4mm on the front brake pads and 6mm on the rear brake pads. This should be enough to get through the track day but if not, it’ll be loaded into the trailer early. I will then replace all the brake pads, discs and tyres in preparation for the Iberia trip in September.
June comes around and before you knows it, it’s time to load the car back into the trailer and head down south again. Got to Mallory Park just before 8am on the 16th and signed up and unloaded. A few other chaps from the RX8OC were also attending this track day so met up with them throughout the day. Weather was very warm and very dry so naturally the car had its semi slick tyres on.
The track was great, being such a small track it was easy to practise cornering techniques on, if you didn’t get it right a minute later you’d be back around for another go. I don’t think I got the hairpin right all day but I was happy with most other corners, including Gerrard’s, although I think I could go faster if I had more bottle. One of the cars with us (John) went a little too full bore on occasion and ended up on the grass, no damage.
The last time we were at Mallory, a chap who races there told us that the technique for Gerrard’s was to approach without braking, sliding into the corner allowing the tyre scrub to take the speed off and get on the line. This is something I couldn’t bring myself to do on the day, best I could manage was a dab of the brakes, into 4th, and then drive it round on the limit of grip, adjusting my mid corner position with the throttle rather than the steering wheel.
We ran out of fuel round 4pm, 90 litres consumed, so it was pack up and home time. Loaded onto the trailer and then a 45 min wait to get off site due to the Mallory paddock being on the in-field and there is no bridge or tunnel to get off site, so you have to wait until they periodically close the track to allow egress. Home without issue.
There is now nothing in the calendar until the Iberia trip with BookATrack in August/September. Being three, expensive track days back to back with no time for maintenance, significant checking and maintenance will be completed beforehand.
I plan to change all the oils and filters, check the torque on all suspension bolts, the diff bolts, girder bolts, and basically anything I can access. I’m going to replace the spark plugs, brake discs, brake pads, and tyres. The gearbox will also be removed and inspected, we occasionally had a 5th gear crunch, not sure if this was driver or mechanical wear but a quick inspection will be performed and the gearbox maybe swapped as a precaution. I will have the suspension setup again, this time with a touch more front and rear camber. The seats will finally be replaced with the Evo 6 Recaro seats and the 3” wide TRS 4-point harnesses.
Hopefully then it will be ready to go.
After Iberia, the car is going to go on a diet. I have bought some corner scales and a levelling gantry. Step one will be find out what the car weights and what its weight distribution is with driver and passenger on board, and then we will start removing and moving stuff to bring the weight down. Will be interesting to see how much I can get out of it without upsetting the 50/50 distribution too much, no point having a really lightweight car that handles like a bag of spanners. This reduction in weight however will probably result in needing coil overs, and I think I’m going to switch to Whiteline Anti roll bars too so I can gain some adjustability, the Racing Beat ones have no adjustment. The Kraken understeers when compared to the Hadouken on the same circuit, therefore I want to make some changes to improve turn in.
Thanks
Matt
Well it’s had a bit of use now and I thought I would report back.
The 5.385 diff is good in gear, it’s nice to drive and it feels like a decent increase in performance has been attained. 85mph on the motorway is nearly 5krpm though, so we tend to commute around at the regulation 70mph now. However, being none-OEM gears with probably slightly different tolerances and hardening processes, and the stiff Powerflex diff mounts, it does make a bit of noise back there, mostly noticeable as you come on/off the throttle. Nothing I’m worried about, John’s with the 5.8 diff and the Powerflex black series mounts makes similar noises, maybe it’ll calm down with a bit more bedding in.
The gearbox cooler works well, however the rate in which the oil cools is not as high as I expected, therefore I lowered the activation temperature of the gearbox cooling systems from 105 degrees to 90 degrees.
Time to introduce another two cars to the pack, the RXstate and the RXcuse.
Leon and John (W) came along to almost all track days for passenger rides and the social side of it all. Well they have now decided to go into a cheap car and see how they get on. Locally a winning blue RX8 231 turned up, in a legal colour (one of each colour only allowed in our little series) which had decent structure and engine, just a slight misfire, all for the bargain price of £450. We had spare plugs, and coil packs in the spares pool of the other cars so replaced them, removed the oil from the sump as it had been over filled, replaced the wiper blades, cleaned out the elephant truck and replaced the brake pads and it’s good to go.
Another friend (Rich_D- “Dizzy”) has bought a silver one to join in, but that’s not seen the track yet, he is incapable of committing to anything and is the original author of the excuse book it has been named the RXcuse. Rick has also got a yellow one recently and has transplanted the engine from Boom 2 into the yellow one; it’s not seen a track yet either.
The current series-
Kraken- Velocity Red – Matt (“StreetDragster”) & Allan
Hadouken- PZ Grey – John B (“Cabriolet”)
Sonic KaBoom 3 – Yellow – Rick (“Sonic KaBoomII”)
RXstate- Winning Blue – John W & Leon
RXcuse – Silver- Dizzy (“Rich_D”)
Blyton Park was attacked on the 24th of March 2017 by the Kraken, the Hadouken and the RXstate. Weather was good and forecast to be dry all day so the Kraken had semi slicks on, as did the Hadouken. The RXstate was on its supplied semi budget road tyres which were death traps.
The weather was excellent, warm and sunny all day, bit windy but the erection (lol) of a windbreak sorted that out. The day went well with the drivers quickly learning the circuit, getting some decent lines and cracking on making progress. It was a day organised by the Frank Hall of the Practical Performance Car club/team/forum who organise days like these for charity, always a really good day with a great mix of metal on the track, helps that it’s for a good cause too.
I personally treat these days as a test/shakedown day for the rest of the year, they are pretty cheap and Blyton is an open circuit with minimal furniture so you can really push it. This event highlighted some problems with the Kraken which needed sorting.
Problem 1, oil breathing. I had the small Toyo oil catch can, situated behind the air box on the side of the fuse box, lower than the intake. First hot session at Blyton it was a misfire combined with loads of smoke out the back, yellow flag, confirmed its not leaking and then pottered into the pits round the outside of the track. Found the catch can full (I had emptied it that morning) and the elephant truck, inlet, MAF & sensor, air filter and air box full of oil.
Well there’s your problem. I cleaned it all out in the paddock as best as I could and out we went again. Solved, happy days will look into it the issue further back at base.
Problem 2, gearbox oil leak. Odd one this, at 80mph on the motorway you could open the window and smell gearbox oil strongly, suggesting a catastrophic oil leak. Pull over, look under the car, nothing. Park overnight and there is a very small puddle of gearbox oil under the car, like 2 drops. Odd, another one for further research.
Problem 3, air conditioning. More air conditioning problems, it’s not working again. Most frustrating after 2 condensers, a receiver/drier, numerous recharges and check overs. Unfortunately there is only so much I can do at home without the charging machine and the UV dye so will have to see what I can see. I would consider leaving it as the car is getting more track only use, but with 3 track days in Spain/Portugal on the cards, I suspect it’ll be needed.
Problem 4, the most serious of the lot, the parcel shelf is rattling. There is something under the rear parcel shelf plastics, roughly in the middle that is buzzing whilst driving. It is driving me INSANE. I will find it and stop it.
Problem 5, I think the rear needs attention as its starting to get high speed understeer.
The RX-state did well too. It had some shakedown issues, mainly related to zero attention by the previous owner(s). Things discovered were that the heater fan fuse had failed at some point in the past and had not been replaced, the tyres were carved from granite, the brake/clutch fluid has never been changed and was supporting a small eco system, and the aftermarket cat/catback exhaust puts out nice flames. Happy days all round, the two drivers got to grips with the car very quickly and are really happy with how it turned out.
The Hadouken did splendidly all day, not an issue or hiccup. A couple of times the Kraken and the Hadouken got on track near each other and we had some great fun, both cars are very capable and were some of the faster stuff on the track overall. The cars themselves being very closely matched, John’s shorter diff giving him a touch more acceleration, but he needs an additional gear change which brings us back together. Really fun day.
Away from the RX8 I have decided to get some professional help to further improve my driving, I booked a day at the end of April at Anglesey and hired ARDS instructor Phiroze (“Fi-rose”) Bilimoria (http://www.phirozeracing.co.uk) to come along and give me (and John B/Hadouken) a full day of driver training. Anglesey has given me a bit of mental anguish since the Civic spin, so I thought it would be a good track to attack and crush that demon, and Phiroze will hopefully get me through it. Depending on how the day goes and the time/costs associated, I may enrol on further “track academy” courses.
I have also purchased a used curtain-sider type covered car trailer to start attending track days in rather than driving to/from. This is mainly due to my Mrs getting herself a lovely Range Rover Sport which just so happens to have the high towing capacity I needed, I also completed my B+E towing license a couple of years ago.
..and we have booked a further day, Mallory on the 16th of June 2017, happy days.
In prep for the Anglesey day I got the Kraken back in the garage and gave it a thorough check over which revealed a load of interesting problems.
Problem 1- Engine oil breathing, first thing I did was removed all the inlet trucking, air box, MAF and catch can. Clean and inspected it all and found some nasty congealed mess on the inlet to the catch can and all the way up the 8mm ID pipework, restricting flow down the pipe. I also reasoned that the Hadouken did everything the same as I did at Blyton with no issues whatsoever. John doesn’t have a catch can, and the cars are very similar except for his having the later post 2006 breather system on, where they revised the plumbing to the inlet manifold.
I decided to remove the catch can and lines, retrofit the revised breather system and see how it goes. There is a plan if it doesn’t work, but I’m not doing anything until I have proven that I still have a problem or not.
Problem 2- The gearbox oil leak appears to be coming from the [liquid] gasket between the gear housing and the tail case I removed for the gearbox oil cooler. Irritating, that’s a box off job to repair, given that it’s like 1 drop every two days I cleaned it all up with IPA and smeared some gasket paste on the outside which appears to have arrested the leak, not a great repair, but that’ll do for now until after Rockingham when I’ll pull the box and fix it properly.
The oil smell was from this very small leak being cooked off by the exhaust, surprising how strong a smell there was from such a tiny leak.
Problem 3- Air Conditioning, this one was easy. Under the car there was what looked like electrical wire wrapped around the rear suspension. Unravelling this showed that it was also wrapped around the front suspension, unravelling further and a quick pull extracted a shredded air conditioning belt. Simple fix, replace the belt and air conditioning is restored, awesome.
Problem 4- The rattle was fixed by removing all the plastics off the rear shelf, and applying thin foam when any of the two parts meet near the now reinforced parcel shelf.
Problem 5- The high speed understeer was looked at next, initially I thought that stiffening the rear suspension was the answer but with some help from the RX8OC I was pointed in the direction of the anti-roll bar instead. I have Japspeed adjustable rear arms which the anti-roll bar connects to, at the time of fitment I was a little concerned that there was nothing to prevent these arms rotating round the shaft except the pressure from the lock nut. Can this locknut resist a hard cornering 1300kg car? It seems not, the brackets are in different positions than what I mounted them at, different on each side of the car, showing that they have slipped, hence reducing the force applied by the anti-roll bar.
To counter this, I was going to weld up the entire arm to be rigid now that the suspension has been adjusted somewhere near. I decided not to do this in the end; this particular design of adjustable arm from Japspeed is fundamentally flawed. All the other arms are in compression/tension only and as such, work perfectly fine. However this one on the RX8 is also in torsion when the anti-roll bar is applying load, this simply rotates the arms about the spherical bearings in the rose joints and applies no force to the arms, effectively removing the anti-roll bar from the car.
Therefore I have removed the arms, and replaced with OEM arms, meaning I have lost the rear camber setting I wanted, and also meaning ANOTHER suspension setup FFS. That said, Japspeed were very good about it and refunded me the cost of the arms with just a small amount of discussion and agreement. They did mention that they will pass on the comments to their design department.
I also replaced the MAF screen in the Racing Bear air box as I had put my chub fingers through it when hastily removing the inlet system in the Blyton paddock. I made a bracket to better support the engine wiring loom near the pulleys, and I installed rear arch liners in an effort to keep any wheel spray away from the oil cooler.
Another thing completed was a clean out of the K&N air filter, I haven’t done this since I fitted it, LOADS of dirt came out of it by just banging it on the floor, and even more when I degreased it and washed it clean. A quick re-oil and it’s lovely and clean now ready for action.
Roll on Anglesey.
Anglesey was the first time that I decided to tow my car to/from an event, so this was a learning experience on the loading/unloading process. One of the things I learnt, very scarily is to get the nose weight right on the trailer. A horrible horrible sway developed on a downhill section of the motorway and I was convinced we were rolling over. Thankfully I got out of it in one piece, redistribution of weight within the trailer left everything ok and it towed fine for the rest of the trip, phew! Lesson learnt there and all towing since then has been better with proper weight distribution, also a nose weight gauge has been purchased to permit safe loading in future.
Weather was decent at Anglesey, overcast but dry and clear. Following the safety briefing Philroze cracked on with stage 1 of his tuition, getting us to understand the cornering principles for higher exit speed. Off we went practising what he taught us for a bit, much better, power getting on much earlier. Stage 2 was vision and stage 3 was weight transfer. Highly recommend his help for a day, learned a lot and I would like to repeat the experience/coaching at some point in the future, maybe with a structured coaching approach rather than a sporadic assistance on random track days. To be discussed later in 2017/18.
Kraken did well all day, no issues or failures, most notable was no oil burping issues now that it is on the later 2006 oil breather system. Same story for the Hadouken, no issues. However the £450 RXstate was not so lucky. 5-6 laps in loss of power, stalled and towed off the track. Couldn’t get it to start in the pits, plugs out, fuel pump fuse out and turned over, sounds odd. Let it cool for 2 hours and attempted restart, no success, suspected Apex seal failure.
Into the trailer it went and John W drove the Kraken home instead.
Next up was Rockingham ISSCL circuit, for this the Kraken needed a check over and oil’s topping up, otherwise it was good to go again. The RXstate however needed an engine transplant, and it was to be getting the Krakens old RotaryMotion engine which has been retained as a spare since the WGT engine transplant.
I was out of the country for a week, so the weekend before Rockingham (no pressure) the RXstate was attacked with the spanners, old engine out, new engine in, sump resealed and fitted and then fluids added and start up. All went reasonably well given that this was the first time the engine has been removed from this car. Started up well and appears to be running spot on with only a random miss fire to look into, plugs/coils suspected. However at the last second it was found that the Rockingham slot for the RXState hadn’t been booked, and the track day was full, so after all that Cinderella wouldn’t be going to the ball after all.
Onto Rockingham, Kraken loaded and trailered down without issue, stopped at a local hotel which was nice. 3 RX8’s and 2 Civic Type R’s were in attendance in our little group on this day. Weather was overcast and warm, with a threat of rain all day, thankfully the rain held off.
The track was really good and challenging, high speed and low speed sections, technical and open, scary concrete raised curbs and obviously the outer wall of the speedway. I had first tuition slot of the day, this in reality was a mistake and I should have gotten some laps in beforehand, I’ll aim for a 10:30 slot in future. The instructor was giving me directions and instructions whilst driving round an unfamiliar track, I simply couldn’t take in all the information he was giving me.
Eventually I did start to get some good laps in, and the RX8’s did well not being embarrassed too much by faster machinery. Caterham’s were out in force that day, training for an upcoming academy race, some of these were a little troublesome but overall the day went well. No issues with oil breathing, or in fact anything, Kraken running really well. Gearbox temps managed nicely by the cooler, all good.
The Hadouken had a moment at the end of the main outer banked section, a fuel starvation issue took John’s attention just prior to the hairpin, his line was not great and he over steered into the wall. Quite a light knock, and damage wouldn’t have been too bad had it not have hit one of the tow hooks, which punched its way through the front bumper support of the car. Not too much to repair thankfully.
Mid-afternoon I decided to pack up and leave ahead of the rest of our team, I was due to fly out to the Middle East with work very early the following morning so needed to get home. Loaded the car on the trailer and returned to base without issues.
I checked the car over prior to the next outing which was Mallory park on the 16th of June, 2-3mm on the front tyres, 4-5mm on the rear tyres, and about 4mm on the front brake pads and 6mm on the rear brake pads. This should be enough to get through the track day but if not, it’ll be loaded into the trailer early. I will then replace all the brake pads, discs and tyres in preparation for the Iberia trip in September.
June comes around and before you knows it, it’s time to load the car back into the trailer and head down south again. Got to Mallory Park just before 8am on the 16th and signed up and unloaded. A few other chaps from the RX8OC were also attending this track day so met up with them throughout the day. Weather was very warm and very dry so naturally the car had its semi slick tyres on.
The track was great, being such a small track it was easy to practise cornering techniques on, if you didn’t get it right a minute later you’d be back around for another go. I don’t think I got the hairpin right all day but I was happy with most other corners, including Gerrard’s, although I think I could go faster if I had more bottle. One of the cars with us (John) went a little too full bore on occasion and ended up on the grass, no damage.
The last time we were at Mallory, a chap who races there told us that the technique for Gerrard’s was to approach without braking, sliding into the corner allowing the tyre scrub to take the speed off and get on the line. This is something I couldn’t bring myself to do on the day, best I could manage was a dab of the brakes, into 4th, and then drive it round on the limit of grip, adjusting my mid corner position with the throttle rather than the steering wheel.
We ran out of fuel round 4pm, 90 litres consumed, so it was pack up and home time. Loaded onto the trailer and then a 45 min wait to get off site due to the Mallory paddock being on the in-field and there is no bridge or tunnel to get off site, so you have to wait until they periodically close the track to allow egress. Home without issue.
There is now nothing in the calendar until the Iberia trip with BookATrack in August/September. Being three, expensive track days back to back with no time for maintenance, significant checking and maintenance will be completed beforehand.
I plan to change all the oils and filters, check the torque on all suspension bolts, the diff bolts, girder bolts, and basically anything I can access. I’m going to replace the spark plugs, brake discs, brake pads, and tyres. The gearbox will also be removed and inspected, we occasionally had a 5th gear crunch, not sure if this was driver or mechanical wear but a quick inspection will be performed and the gearbox maybe swapped as a precaution. I will have the suspension setup again, this time with a touch more front and rear camber. The seats will finally be replaced with the Evo 6 Recaro seats and the 3” wide TRS 4-point harnesses.
Hopefully then it will be ready to go.
After Iberia, the car is going to go on a diet. I have bought some corner scales and a levelling gantry. Step one will be find out what the car weights and what its weight distribution is with driver and passenger on board, and then we will start removing and moving stuff to bring the weight down. Will be interesting to see how much I can get out of it without upsetting the 50/50 distribution too much, no point having a really lightweight car that handles like a bag of spanners. This reduction in weight however will probably result in needing coil overs, and I think I’m going to switch to Whiteline Anti roll bars too so I can gain some adjustability, the Racing Beat ones have no adjustment. The Kraken understeers when compared to the Hadouken on the same circuit, therefore I want to make some changes to improve turn in.
Thanks
Matt
Edited by StreetDragster on Friday 25th May 08:42
Update Time
Fleet update, the Noble is up for sale, and the covered car trailer has been sold. Now I have only the Kraken, my Golf Estate and the Mrs’s Range Rover.
I purchased an un-covered Brian James car trailer with an electric winch, tyre rack and a storage box. I now understand the difference between premium and budget trailers and it’ll be a Brian James for me in future. I sold the covered trailer as it was like towing a parachute, and it was a pain to load and unload having to remove each section of the curtain-siding for tie downs, and the gull wings opening into the street giving issues with high sided vehicles passing when loading up kerbside. Ideally, I’d be buying a Brian James RS3 covered trailer which will do everything I want it to do, but at £11k with the options I’d want, they are a bit rich for me.
The Kraken is now none road legal and track use only, giving me some more flexibility with its modifications and reducing its running costs, no need for MOT, Tax or Insurance now.
Following Mallory there was nothing in the calendar before Iberia so this was the time to get the car prepped up. The difficultly with the Iberia trip is firstly the heat, everything will get very hot on the track, and secondly, the lack of time between events for maintenance. Normally the car gets a thorough check over after each event, but there wouldn’t be the opportunity to do that on this group of three events.
First check was tyres, 3mm on the fronts, 4mm on the rears. Enough for one or two track days, but probably not three, dammit, another £600 set of tyres ordered and fitted. The originals were retained and will be used when these new ones wear out.
Onto the brakes, 2mm remaining on both the front and rear discs before hitting the minimum thickness limit. This thickness was acceptable so no need to replace the discs yet, they will be re-measured after Iberia.
Pads, the rears had a couple of millimetres left and were retained for the emergency track toolkit, the fronts had 0.15mm left, value for money extracted there. Due to the 2mm disc thickness remaining I opted to go for another set of the disc-friendly YellowStuff brakes pads all round. On inspection, I found a badly damaged braided brake line on the front passenger side caliper, the outer PVC had split, and ¾ of the braid circumference underneath was damaged. All other corners fine, so I replaced that brake line with a new one and ran the line slightly differently to the caliper.
Replaced the spark plugs, diff oil, engine oil and engine oil filter, removed and adjusted the rear Koni dampers to full stiffness (were on ½ stiffness) and generally checked all the suspension bolts etc. for torque tightening, play in wheel bearings etc.
The main task was to remove the gearbox and address the small leak it had, in the end I decided to replace the gearbox completely so I swapped the tail cases over on the new gearbox to the one modified for oil cooling and then got it all back on the car, bit of a risk as the ‘new’ gearbox (a low mileage used) had never been tested and the first time it would be used would be on Estoril. Due to the oil cooler lines being down the girder, I didn’t want to remove it from the car to do the swap; this made the change a little more difficult, especially on your back with the car on axle stands. Not impossible though if anyone is considering similar, but if you don’t have pipes down the girder, I’d take it off.
The Mitsubishi Evo 6 Recaros were finally installed with the 4 point 3” TRS harnesses. Allan had to hybrid Corbeau sub-frames (from the USA), with Recaro sliders (also from the USA) and a fair bit of welding to get everything in, and in the car as low as possible. Initial fit put the seat too far over towards the sill, putting the pedals in odd positions and too high, so helmet clearance was worse than standard. Thankfully the modified sub-frames now fit spot on, and clear the B-pillar. The passenger side though required a small section of chassis stiffening removing as the raised ‘lump’ fouled the slider, and a slider needed a trim with the angle grinder to clean the mounting bolt. All in though and looking good, and front/rear sliding works great. (BTW After this picture was taken the seat belts were altered to cross over behind the seats)
At a few recent track days I had been surprised that the water temperature had been getting up to some higher levels than I would expect with an alloy radiator and the massive bonnet vents. On inspection, I discovered that the foam at the bottom of the radiator which seals to the under-tray had gone missing and there was a gaping hole underneath the radiator. Given that the air will take the path of least resistance, it could explain the higher temp’s due to the reduced airflow through the radiator core.
However, the under-tray is not rigidly mounted (on my car at least) in the centre and flaps around a lot, making it difficult to get a decent seal. I decided to make a bolt in piece of metal to do both jobs. Turns out, there is no structure at the bottom of the radiator to mount anything to, so I extended the radiator mounting brackets forward, then put a cross piece between them. A vertical rib on the top sealed the bar to the radiator, and a piece of door seal rubber ‘P’ material on the bottom seals to the under tray. The under tray then is bolted up from the bottom via spacers into captive nuts, clamping the seal to keep everything secure. Hopefully that will be enough to divert the air up and into the radiator and get temps down a little bit. Whilst the front end was off I also removed the number plate and opened up all the mesh in the standard grill. I probably have a little too much air now in the that area and maybe an increase in drag accordingly, will see how coolant temps manage then may start to gradually reduce the air pressure in that area.
Another part that has had some work is the camera setup. Not sure I have mentioned it in this story but I have a GoPro Hero 2 and I hate the damn thing, it’s the biggest lump of junk I have ever been duped into buying (IMO). These cameras are marketed on being a rough and ready camera, which will perform its task of recording under extreme conditions, which is not my experience. It glitches, it tells you its recording when it isn’t, it starts recording and then randomly stops, corrupts video files when playing, I even bought the WIFI backpack and remote for it so I can trigger it down on the bumper and confirm its recording. This has its own problems, loosing connection with the camera, disagreeing between what’s on the camera and what is displayed on the wrist controller, range ok some days other days it’s down to a foot, just general garbage.
The camera batteries are very slow to charge, they don’t last long enough in the camera, accessories and attachments for them are very expensive, and I don’t trust it to do what I what it to, when I want it too. I've tried firmware updates (some of which bricked it and I needed to spend hours getting it back to the state it was pre-update, the ‘Pro Tune’ firmware being the most memorable), different batteries, different SD cards, finally swapping the camera chassis itself, the second one being only slightly better. With all that in mind, I barely use it now.
I still want to record though, and with GoPro being the market leaders in this sort of thing presented a problem, what to do and who else to go with. I decided that I wanted HD, and I wanted some telemetry, preferably a lap time and some speed data, I don’t need predictive lap time though. I don’t have a great deal of time to spend sat on a pc combining loads of data feeds together so I wanted an all in one solution that is simple to use.
Right place, right time, a Race-Keeper HDX2 turned up for sale at a really good price with two bullet cameras, external microphone and OBD2 adaptor. I jumped at it as they have some really cool features like auto start and stop once the car starts moving, separate dual HD camera feeds, 100MHz GPS, and the OBD2 connection gives all the car data (speed/revs/coolant temps/etc.). Hopefully it’ll pull some good video in Iberia. A 256GB SDHC class 10 SanDisk Extreme Pro card was purchased for it, stunned that you can get that much memory on an SD card nowadays.
Mounting the cameras though, well that was a bit of a challenge. The cameras are much larger that the ‘normal’ bullet cameras, and heavier, requiring a decent strength bracket. I wanted a view out of the windscreen, and then one of me so I can see how I’m moving the wheel, where I’m looking etc. This presented some issues.
I didn’t want to use a suction cup arrangement on the windscreen, they are too big and bulky, I took some measurements and thought I could use an off the shelf solution as the cameras have a ¼-20 UNC thread (standard tripod thread) in the top and bottom of them to assist with mounting. Mobius make a self-adhesive windscreen mount for their dash cams with this thread, so bought a mount and attempted to fit it. Works well, and puts the lens about 15mm from the glass.
The internal camera though, there was nothing to mount this to without a roll cage being in the car. Where the camera wanted to be was in a bit of free space, I couldn’t realistically mount it anywhere ideal without a long arm which would be prone to vibration. I settled for the structure in the roof around the rear screen, but it needed to be about 4-5” long to get the camera at the right angle to also see out the windscreen. I cut away some headlining to find the structure (headlining is being discarded after Iberia so I simply cut it with a Stanley knife) and set about making a bracket for it. The bracket I made from 0.8mm steel plate, and joined the camera using parts from their roll cage mount, without the roll cage obviously.
It took some work to make this bracket, I first made a cardboard template but that wasn’t rigid enough to allow for accurate aiming of the camera to make sure it was in the right place, I then tried it with stiff foam (the headlining material) but that wasn’t stiff enough, and I had no datum’s or reference points to work from. In the end, I simply made it out of metal, tacked it together, checked it, cut the tacks, lather, rinse and repeat. Once I had adjusted it to how I needed it, then made the braces and welded it up properly. I held the bracket to the car with M6 bolts into nutserts.
One thing that really did help though is Race-Keeper has a HDMI output which allows you to setup your cameras properly. Simply power the system up, plug it into a TV or your phone if it can take HDMI inputs and adjust your cameras to get the view right, very handy, similar to the GoPro’s WIFI viewfinder, if you can ever get it to work lol.
Main unit needed to be secured with the cables pointing either forwards or backwards so that the G-sensor works properly and within reach of all other cables. As the install was temporary for Iberia, I put it on the centre rear armrest. I made up a mounting plate for it (the rear of the Race-Keeper has a comb arrangement to locate the box) and secured it onto the armrest with rubber bobbins to cut down any vibration. The excess cables were stored within the armrest, and the lid then screwed shut. The GPS sensor went on the rear shelf, the microphone in the stale air vent behind the driver’s side rear tail light, and the OBD2 port tapped into the standard connector under the dash. That was it for the temporary Race-Keeper install, after Iberia, when the interior is out, it’ll be installed more permanently, hopefully up front, where the ashtray is on the standard car.
That was it for car preparation, I had to get the car to Donington for BookaTrack to load it onto their transport (Donington is where they are based), and I also wanted to shake it down before the trip as I had an unknown gearbox fitted, and had broken into the oil systems. On the 18th of August, conveniently there was an evening at Donington ran by Javelin.
I organised with BaT to drop the car off after hours, and then booked onto the evening session. I only need to do 20 laps or so to bed in the brakes and tyres, get the fluids up to temperature and confirm no leaks, etc.
It was arduous trip down to Donington, with heavy traffic, and I’m not sure I like evening sessions either as everybody seems way over zealous due to the short track time. The Kraken however was all good, no leaks, no issues, everything working as it should, brakes and tyres scrubbed in nicely. All good, I left the car with BaT and headed back, the next time I would see it would be in the paddock at Estoril in Portugal. I took filled jerry cans, wet tyres, tools and spares, fingers crossed we have everything we need.
No car jobs to do meant I had a bit of time to myself, this inevitably means I will end up buying car parts off the internet. Before I knew it, I had picked up 8off 17”x8” Mitsubishi Evo 8 Enkei alloy wheels from Rochdale, 4 silver ones with rubbish tyres on which I didn’t need, and 4 white ones with new Kumho W700 215/615/17 motorsport wet tyres on which I wanted. Elsewhere I also got some ex Clio cup series Michelin slick tyres in 205/610 17 sizes for £40 a tyre.
The intention is to go down to 17” wheels without spacers as part of the cars diet and also to run motorsport slicks/wets instead of road tyres now that no MOT is required. Downside to this is that the gearing will be further reduced to the equivalent of a 5.8 rear diff, I wanted to avoid that but will see how it goes.
Despite the weight penalty, I've also gone for a Safety Devices Front and Rear bolt in roll cage with double door bars. The risk of rolling with slicks is apparently considerably greater, and many track day organisers insist on them. Its cheap insurance if it ends up being required. I may also fit a plumbed in fire extinguisher.
In the garage, I've decided to take the opportunity to install a flush mounted scissor sill lift. This will require considerable groundworks in the garage so best done whilst I have no cars around, should give me plenty of access to the underside of the car without needing to use blocks of wood and a 4-step jacking process as it’s so low, and it’ll get lower on 17’s.
September rolls around and its collection at 5am and off onto a plane heading to Iberia. On this trip we have me, Allan, John B and Leon. Land in Lisbon, collect our hire car and head down the coast towards Estoril where we have 2 nights booked, lovely place.
First night was just a walk around and some tea, then the following day we set off for some culture. Over to Sintra to have a look at the castle and suchlike, then some beach destinations, Praia Da Adraga which was lovely and picturesque, and then some hire car off-roading over to Praia Da Ursa which required a proper hike down to the beach and back up to the car. Didn’t expect that!
In any case, it was a decent day spent out and about and we had seen some nice areas of the local region. Return to Estoril for some Pica Pow (local fried meat dish) and sleep.
Next day, its Estoril circuit for the track day and the Mazda’s made it without any issues, checked them over, all good, then out on track with the others. I think we were some of the slowest cars there, all the other stuff being Porsches, Caterham’s and Audi R8’s, but we still held our own out on track. Mazda’s performed well in all regards except for the heat, it was 37 degrees in the afternoon and it was just too hot for the engine oil, coolant, gearbox oil, air conditioning, tyres, and the drivers! Ended up being 5-6 lap sessions with frequent cool downs, which worked well.
From Estoril, it was into the car and drive down to Lagos to a villa we had hired for four nights. Lovely it was, I would thoroughly recommend it (“Villa Lucy”). Time then spent in Lagos walking around the marina, on the beach, eating and drinking, chilling at the villa, etc.
In the middle of our Lagos stay was the Portimão track day, which was excellent! Portimão is a great circuit, lots of blind crests and sweeping corners, really challenging and satisfying when you get it right. Got chatting to a lot of other people on the track day and managed to jump in a number of other cars, including a Porsche 997 GT3, which was really cool. Cheers John if your reading. Also got a run out in a Noble M400 too which was really good. The car had 97k miles on the clock and had done 180 track days! Amazing! Cheers Rob for that. Rob’s Noble track time had made me question if I should take my Noble down from sale, I gave it some considerable thought and in the end decided that it was still the right thing to do.
Heat again was an issue for the Mazda’s, as it was another 35 degrees but the shorter sessions again dealt with it nicely. John, being on BlueStuff pads and grooved discs had to do a pad change at lunch which was hard work in the heat, but everyone pitched in to get the job done quickly, well, everyone except me lol.
I was running YellowStuff pads and OEM solid discs, got through all three track days on the same brakes which were good, although I’ll admit the braking in John’s car is better with more pedal feel and perceivable braking power. However, I can still brake down to the limit of the tyres which is as much braking force that can be practically applied.
From Portimão it was another couple of days in Lagos before we headed over to Jerez in Spain, stopping at the Golf Course next to the circuit.
This place was a 7-star affair and wow, it was nice, well above my normal hotel standards. It had a buffet for both evening meal and breakfast and both of them were the best buffets I have even seen, no complaints at all.
Onto the final track day, Jerez, this was also an excellent circuit, unlike Portimão it’s a circuit that is quite open and flows really well, it didn’t take long to be getting some decent lines and pace sorted. Again, heat was an issue but the short sessions dealt with it. Got a run here in a Porsche 996 GT3 RS on slicks, this was an experience! Cheers Adrian if your reading. Hot in that car though, Perspex windows with little air windows, no air conditioning, fans blow hot air, no carpet or insulation on the bulkheads etc etc. Epic experience though.
Finished all three days without any major car issues at all, had met some interesting people and thoroughly enjoyed myself. There was a little knock developing from the front right-hand corner somewhere that will need some investigation, and I have chargrilled the exhaust heat shield but all is well.
The Race-Keeper performed well too, being totally fit and forget and recording good footage of the event. A lap of each track, and some bloopers are shown below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ah3rilCSSk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey9MyhFmWdc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs86UUxEttI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9evrAh_LW0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_GoMxcFLq4
From Jerez, we then headed down to Fuengirola in Spain for 4 days of chilling out, which turned out to be anything like.
We hired scooters for a day and did a 60-mile tour of the local area, including a hike up to “Antena Mirador” just outside of Benalmadena. This took some 2 hours to ascend on our 50cc scooters, as it’s nearly a 1km high, but only 20 mins to get back down ha-ha. Total cost for the day was 3 euros in fuel and 18 euros hire, bargain.
Leon did some fly boarding down in Marbella, he’s a snow boarder anyway so whilst he inhaled his fair share of sea water, he appeared to pick it up pretty quickly and was soon Ironman-ing it around the skyline and even doing some diving, very impressive. The rest of us watched from a little dingy and that was still a good way to spend a morning.
On another day, we got Jet Ski’s for a bit which was a good laugh, even though they had to be restricted as if they weren’t restricted you would need a license to use one in Spain.
At some point, we went to a water park which was a riot, right up until the point in which I cracked a rib. That made the rest of the holiday a pain killer induced blur.
Just before leaving, we hired some Segway’s for a tour of the Benalmadena harbour, 10 euros well spent there.
And then it was home time
Not a bad way to spend 12 days on the continent
A week later John and I took a ride down to Donington to collect the Mazda’s. The Kraken is on lay up for a while whilst this sill lift installation into the garage is finished. I want to do some major work on it over winter 2017.
I’m moving to Tein Monosport Coilovers with A-EDFC, stripping the interior and removing any unnecessary weight, 17” wheels and proper slick tyres, Perspex side windows, roll cage, and 6 point 2” harnesses to better match my Simpson Hybrid FHR whilst hopefully retaining the Evo 6 seats if possible. I’m also going to remove the under drive pulleys and reinstall the OEM ones, this is to see if the decreased/increased water flow helps with the higher water temperatures. I can’t help but suspect the water pump, even though it was a new genuine Mazda one installed when the engine went in, I may move to an electric water pump if I’m still having issues. There is also the knock/clunk developing which feels like the front right-hand corner to investigate.
I've decided against home-setup for the suspension and corner weighting after talking to the owner of ‘Centre of Gravity’ who was out with some of his customers cars in Iberia. He knows his stuff and I think I’m going to let them do an initial setup so I have a datum to work from in future.
Thanks
Matt
Fleet update, the Noble is up for sale, and the covered car trailer has been sold. Now I have only the Kraken, my Golf Estate and the Mrs’s Range Rover.
I purchased an un-covered Brian James car trailer with an electric winch, tyre rack and a storage box. I now understand the difference between premium and budget trailers and it’ll be a Brian James for me in future. I sold the covered trailer as it was like towing a parachute, and it was a pain to load and unload having to remove each section of the curtain-siding for tie downs, and the gull wings opening into the street giving issues with high sided vehicles passing when loading up kerbside. Ideally, I’d be buying a Brian James RS3 covered trailer which will do everything I want it to do, but at £11k with the options I’d want, they are a bit rich for me.
The Kraken is now none road legal and track use only, giving me some more flexibility with its modifications and reducing its running costs, no need for MOT, Tax or Insurance now.
Following Mallory there was nothing in the calendar before Iberia so this was the time to get the car prepped up. The difficultly with the Iberia trip is firstly the heat, everything will get very hot on the track, and secondly, the lack of time between events for maintenance. Normally the car gets a thorough check over after each event, but there wouldn’t be the opportunity to do that on this group of three events.
First check was tyres, 3mm on the fronts, 4mm on the rears. Enough for one or two track days, but probably not three, dammit, another £600 set of tyres ordered and fitted. The originals were retained and will be used when these new ones wear out.
Onto the brakes, 2mm remaining on both the front and rear discs before hitting the minimum thickness limit. This thickness was acceptable so no need to replace the discs yet, they will be re-measured after Iberia.
Pads, the rears had a couple of millimetres left and were retained for the emergency track toolkit, the fronts had 0.15mm left, value for money extracted there. Due to the 2mm disc thickness remaining I opted to go for another set of the disc-friendly YellowStuff brakes pads all round. On inspection, I found a badly damaged braided brake line on the front passenger side caliper, the outer PVC had split, and ¾ of the braid circumference underneath was damaged. All other corners fine, so I replaced that brake line with a new one and ran the line slightly differently to the caliper.
Replaced the spark plugs, diff oil, engine oil and engine oil filter, removed and adjusted the rear Koni dampers to full stiffness (were on ½ stiffness) and generally checked all the suspension bolts etc. for torque tightening, play in wheel bearings etc.
The main task was to remove the gearbox and address the small leak it had, in the end I decided to replace the gearbox completely so I swapped the tail cases over on the new gearbox to the one modified for oil cooling and then got it all back on the car, bit of a risk as the ‘new’ gearbox (a low mileage used) had never been tested and the first time it would be used would be on Estoril. Due to the oil cooler lines being down the girder, I didn’t want to remove it from the car to do the swap; this made the change a little more difficult, especially on your back with the car on axle stands. Not impossible though if anyone is considering similar, but if you don’t have pipes down the girder, I’d take it off.
The Mitsubishi Evo 6 Recaros were finally installed with the 4 point 3” TRS harnesses. Allan had to hybrid Corbeau sub-frames (from the USA), with Recaro sliders (also from the USA) and a fair bit of welding to get everything in, and in the car as low as possible. Initial fit put the seat too far over towards the sill, putting the pedals in odd positions and too high, so helmet clearance was worse than standard. Thankfully the modified sub-frames now fit spot on, and clear the B-pillar. The passenger side though required a small section of chassis stiffening removing as the raised ‘lump’ fouled the slider, and a slider needed a trim with the angle grinder to clean the mounting bolt. All in though and looking good, and front/rear sliding works great. (BTW After this picture was taken the seat belts were altered to cross over behind the seats)
At a few recent track days I had been surprised that the water temperature had been getting up to some higher levels than I would expect with an alloy radiator and the massive bonnet vents. On inspection, I discovered that the foam at the bottom of the radiator which seals to the under-tray had gone missing and there was a gaping hole underneath the radiator. Given that the air will take the path of least resistance, it could explain the higher temp’s due to the reduced airflow through the radiator core.
However, the under-tray is not rigidly mounted (on my car at least) in the centre and flaps around a lot, making it difficult to get a decent seal. I decided to make a bolt in piece of metal to do both jobs. Turns out, there is no structure at the bottom of the radiator to mount anything to, so I extended the radiator mounting brackets forward, then put a cross piece between them. A vertical rib on the top sealed the bar to the radiator, and a piece of door seal rubber ‘P’ material on the bottom seals to the under tray. The under tray then is bolted up from the bottom via spacers into captive nuts, clamping the seal to keep everything secure. Hopefully that will be enough to divert the air up and into the radiator and get temps down a little bit. Whilst the front end was off I also removed the number plate and opened up all the mesh in the standard grill. I probably have a little too much air now in the that area and maybe an increase in drag accordingly, will see how coolant temps manage then may start to gradually reduce the air pressure in that area.
Another part that has had some work is the camera setup. Not sure I have mentioned it in this story but I have a GoPro Hero 2 and I hate the damn thing, it’s the biggest lump of junk I have ever been duped into buying (IMO). These cameras are marketed on being a rough and ready camera, which will perform its task of recording under extreme conditions, which is not my experience. It glitches, it tells you its recording when it isn’t, it starts recording and then randomly stops, corrupts video files when playing, I even bought the WIFI backpack and remote for it so I can trigger it down on the bumper and confirm its recording. This has its own problems, loosing connection with the camera, disagreeing between what’s on the camera and what is displayed on the wrist controller, range ok some days other days it’s down to a foot, just general garbage.
The camera batteries are very slow to charge, they don’t last long enough in the camera, accessories and attachments for them are very expensive, and I don’t trust it to do what I what it to, when I want it too. I've tried firmware updates (some of which bricked it and I needed to spend hours getting it back to the state it was pre-update, the ‘Pro Tune’ firmware being the most memorable), different batteries, different SD cards, finally swapping the camera chassis itself, the second one being only slightly better. With all that in mind, I barely use it now.
I still want to record though, and with GoPro being the market leaders in this sort of thing presented a problem, what to do and who else to go with. I decided that I wanted HD, and I wanted some telemetry, preferably a lap time and some speed data, I don’t need predictive lap time though. I don’t have a great deal of time to spend sat on a pc combining loads of data feeds together so I wanted an all in one solution that is simple to use.
Right place, right time, a Race-Keeper HDX2 turned up for sale at a really good price with two bullet cameras, external microphone and OBD2 adaptor. I jumped at it as they have some really cool features like auto start and stop once the car starts moving, separate dual HD camera feeds, 100MHz GPS, and the OBD2 connection gives all the car data (speed/revs/coolant temps/etc.). Hopefully it’ll pull some good video in Iberia. A 256GB SDHC class 10 SanDisk Extreme Pro card was purchased for it, stunned that you can get that much memory on an SD card nowadays.
Mounting the cameras though, well that was a bit of a challenge. The cameras are much larger that the ‘normal’ bullet cameras, and heavier, requiring a decent strength bracket. I wanted a view out of the windscreen, and then one of me so I can see how I’m moving the wheel, where I’m looking etc. This presented some issues.
I didn’t want to use a suction cup arrangement on the windscreen, they are too big and bulky, I took some measurements and thought I could use an off the shelf solution as the cameras have a ¼-20 UNC thread (standard tripod thread) in the top and bottom of them to assist with mounting. Mobius make a self-adhesive windscreen mount for their dash cams with this thread, so bought a mount and attempted to fit it. Works well, and puts the lens about 15mm from the glass.
The internal camera though, there was nothing to mount this to without a roll cage being in the car. Where the camera wanted to be was in a bit of free space, I couldn’t realistically mount it anywhere ideal without a long arm which would be prone to vibration. I settled for the structure in the roof around the rear screen, but it needed to be about 4-5” long to get the camera at the right angle to also see out the windscreen. I cut away some headlining to find the structure (headlining is being discarded after Iberia so I simply cut it with a Stanley knife) and set about making a bracket for it. The bracket I made from 0.8mm steel plate, and joined the camera using parts from their roll cage mount, without the roll cage obviously.
It took some work to make this bracket, I first made a cardboard template but that wasn’t rigid enough to allow for accurate aiming of the camera to make sure it was in the right place, I then tried it with stiff foam (the headlining material) but that wasn’t stiff enough, and I had no datum’s or reference points to work from. In the end, I simply made it out of metal, tacked it together, checked it, cut the tacks, lather, rinse and repeat. Once I had adjusted it to how I needed it, then made the braces and welded it up properly. I held the bracket to the car with M6 bolts into nutserts.
One thing that really did help though is Race-Keeper has a HDMI output which allows you to setup your cameras properly. Simply power the system up, plug it into a TV or your phone if it can take HDMI inputs and adjust your cameras to get the view right, very handy, similar to the GoPro’s WIFI viewfinder, if you can ever get it to work lol.
Main unit needed to be secured with the cables pointing either forwards or backwards so that the G-sensor works properly and within reach of all other cables. As the install was temporary for Iberia, I put it on the centre rear armrest. I made up a mounting plate for it (the rear of the Race-Keeper has a comb arrangement to locate the box) and secured it onto the armrest with rubber bobbins to cut down any vibration. The excess cables were stored within the armrest, and the lid then screwed shut. The GPS sensor went on the rear shelf, the microphone in the stale air vent behind the driver’s side rear tail light, and the OBD2 port tapped into the standard connector under the dash. That was it for the temporary Race-Keeper install, after Iberia, when the interior is out, it’ll be installed more permanently, hopefully up front, where the ashtray is on the standard car.
That was it for car preparation, I had to get the car to Donington for BookaTrack to load it onto their transport (Donington is where they are based), and I also wanted to shake it down before the trip as I had an unknown gearbox fitted, and had broken into the oil systems. On the 18th of August, conveniently there was an evening at Donington ran by Javelin.
I organised with BaT to drop the car off after hours, and then booked onto the evening session. I only need to do 20 laps or so to bed in the brakes and tyres, get the fluids up to temperature and confirm no leaks, etc.
It was arduous trip down to Donington, with heavy traffic, and I’m not sure I like evening sessions either as everybody seems way over zealous due to the short track time. The Kraken however was all good, no leaks, no issues, everything working as it should, brakes and tyres scrubbed in nicely. All good, I left the car with BaT and headed back, the next time I would see it would be in the paddock at Estoril in Portugal. I took filled jerry cans, wet tyres, tools and spares, fingers crossed we have everything we need.
No car jobs to do meant I had a bit of time to myself, this inevitably means I will end up buying car parts off the internet. Before I knew it, I had picked up 8off 17”x8” Mitsubishi Evo 8 Enkei alloy wheels from Rochdale, 4 silver ones with rubbish tyres on which I didn’t need, and 4 white ones with new Kumho W700 215/615/17 motorsport wet tyres on which I wanted. Elsewhere I also got some ex Clio cup series Michelin slick tyres in 205/610 17 sizes for £40 a tyre.
The intention is to go down to 17” wheels without spacers as part of the cars diet and also to run motorsport slicks/wets instead of road tyres now that no MOT is required. Downside to this is that the gearing will be further reduced to the equivalent of a 5.8 rear diff, I wanted to avoid that but will see how it goes.
Despite the weight penalty, I've also gone for a Safety Devices Front and Rear bolt in roll cage with double door bars. The risk of rolling with slicks is apparently considerably greater, and many track day organisers insist on them. Its cheap insurance if it ends up being required. I may also fit a plumbed in fire extinguisher.
In the garage, I've decided to take the opportunity to install a flush mounted scissor sill lift. This will require considerable groundworks in the garage so best done whilst I have no cars around, should give me plenty of access to the underside of the car without needing to use blocks of wood and a 4-step jacking process as it’s so low, and it’ll get lower on 17’s.
September rolls around and its collection at 5am and off onto a plane heading to Iberia. On this trip we have me, Allan, John B and Leon. Land in Lisbon, collect our hire car and head down the coast towards Estoril where we have 2 nights booked, lovely place.
First night was just a walk around and some tea, then the following day we set off for some culture. Over to Sintra to have a look at the castle and suchlike, then some beach destinations, Praia Da Adraga which was lovely and picturesque, and then some hire car off-roading over to Praia Da Ursa which required a proper hike down to the beach and back up to the car. Didn’t expect that!
In any case, it was a decent day spent out and about and we had seen some nice areas of the local region. Return to Estoril for some Pica Pow (local fried meat dish) and sleep.
Next day, its Estoril circuit for the track day and the Mazda’s made it without any issues, checked them over, all good, then out on track with the others. I think we were some of the slowest cars there, all the other stuff being Porsches, Caterham’s and Audi R8’s, but we still held our own out on track. Mazda’s performed well in all regards except for the heat, it was 37 degrees in the afternoon and it was just too hot for the engine oil, coolant, gearbox oil, air conditioning, tyres, and the drivers! Ended up being 5-6 lap sessions with frequent cool downs, which worked well.
From Estoril, it was into the car and drive down to Lagos to a villa we had hired for four nights. Lovely it was, I would thoroughly recommend it (“Villa Lucy”). Time then spent in Lagos walking around the marina, on the beach, eating and drinking, chilling at the villa, etc.
In the middle of our Lagos stay was the Portimão track day, which was excellent! Portimão is a great circuit, lots of blind crests and sweeping corners, really challenging and satisfying when you get it right. Got chatting to a lot of other people on the track day and managed to jump in a number of other cars, including a Porsche 997 GT3, which was really cool. Cheers John if your reading. Also got a run out in a Noble M400 too which was really good. The car had 97k miles on the clock and had done 180 track days! Amazing! Cheers Rob for that. Rob’s Noble track time had made me question if I should take my Noble down from sale, I gave it some considerable thought and in the end decided that it was still the right thing to do.
Heat again was an issue for the Mazda’s, as it was another 35 degrees but the shorter sessions again dealt with it nicely. John, being on BlueStuff pads and grooved discs had to do a pad change at lunch which was hard work in the heat, but everyone pitched in to get the job done quickly, well, everyone except me lol.
I was running YellowStuff pads and OEM solid discs, got through all three track days on the same brakes which were good, although I’ll admit the braking in John’s car is better with more pedal feel and perceivable braking power. However, I can still brake down to the limit of the tyres which is as much braking force that can be practically applied.
From Portimão it was another couple of days in Lagos before we headed over to Jerez in Spain, stopping at the Golf Course next to the circuit.
This place was a 7-star affair and wow, it was nice, well above my normal hotel standards. It had a buffet for both evening meal and breakfast and both of them were the best buffets I have even seen, no complaints at all.
Onto the final track day, Jerez, this was also an excellent circuit, unlike Portimão it’s a circuit that is quite open and flows really well, it didn’t take long to be getting some decent lines and pace sorted. Again, heat was an issue but the short sessions dealt with it. Got a run here in a Porsche 996 GT3 RS on slicks, this was an experience! Cheers Adrian if your reading. Hot in that car though, Perspex windows with little air windows, no air conditioning, fans blow hot air, no carpet or insulation on the bulkheads etc etc. Epic experience though.
Finished all three days without any major car issues at all, had met some interesting people and thoroughly enjoyed myself. There was a little knock developing from the front right-hand corner somewhere that will need some investigation, and I have chargrilled the exhaust heat shield but all is well.
The Race-Keeper performed well too, being totally fit and forget and recording good footage of the event. A lap of each track, and some bloopers are shown below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ah3rilCSSk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey9MyhFmWdc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs86UUxEttI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9evrAh_LW0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_GoMxcFLq4
From Jerez, we then headed down to Fuengirola in Spain for 4 days of chilling out, which turned out to be anything like.
We hired scooters for a day and did a 60-mile tour of the local area, including a hike up to “Antena Mirador” just outside of Benalmadena. This took some 2 hours to ascend on our 50cc scooters, as it’s nearly a 1km high, but only 20 mins to get back down ha-ha. Total cost for the day was 3 euros in fuel and 18 euros hire, bargain.
Leon did some fly boarding down in Marbella, he’s a snow boarder anyway so whilst he inhaled his fair share of sea water, he appeared to pick it up pretty quickly and was soon Ironman-ing it around the skyline and even doing some diving, very impressive. The rest of us watched from a little dingy and that was still a good way to spend a morning.
On another day, we got Jet Ski’s for a bit which was a good laugh, even though they had to be restricted as if they weren’t restricted you would need a license to use one in Spain.
At some point, we went to a water park which was a riot, right up until the point in which I cracked a rib. That made the rest of the holiday a pain killer induced blur.
Just before leaving, we hired some Segway’s for a tour of the Benalmadena harbour, 10 euros well spent there.
And then it was home time
Not a bad way to spend 12 days on the continent
A week later John and I took a ride down to Donington to collect the Mazda’s. The Kraken is on lay up for a while whilst this sill lift installation into the garage is finished. I want to do some major work on it over winter 2017.
I’m moving to Tein Monosport Coilovers with A-EDFC, stripping the interior and removing any unnecessary weight, 17” wheels and proper slick tyres, Perspex side windows, roll cage, and 6 point 2” harnesses to better match my Simpson Hybrid FHR whilst hopefully retaining the Evo 6 seats if possible. I’m also going to remove the under drive pulleys and reinstall the OEM ones, this is to see if the decreased/increased water flow helps with the higher water temperatures. I can’t help but suspect the water pump, even though it was a new genuine Mazda one installed when the engine went in, I may move to an electric water pump if I’m still having issues. There is also the knock/clunk developing which feels like the front right-hand corner to investigate.
I've decided against home-setup for the suspension and corner weighting after talking to the owner of ‘Centre of Gravity’ who was out with some of his customers cars in Iberia. He knows his stuff and I think I’m going to let them do an initial setup so I have a datum to work from in future.
Thanks
Matt
Edited by StreetDragster on Friday 25th May 08:43
Thanks for the update, good to read such a detailed account - keep it up!
Also, Centre Gravity - they totally transformed a friend's Porsche we used to race together. The guy even described to him how it drove beforehand by just looking at the geometry it came in with. They're very good at setting a car up.
Also, Centre Gravity - they totally transformed a friend's Porsche we used to race together. The guy even described to him how it drove beforehand by just looking at the geometry it came in with. They're very good at setting a car up.
Update time
Apologies for the lack of photos in this post, I had taken many photos, but my phones SD card corrupted and I lost the lot, gutted. A new card and cloud backup is in place now. Anyway…..
I had big plans over winter 2017 to get the car worked on, this however all stalled.
Issue 1, I bought a V8 bowrider speed boat for some reason, and then I focused too much time on maintaining that, which I then decided wasn’t for me, and put it up for sale! Stupid I know. However now the weather is improving a bit I may keep it for a while and sell it mid-summer instead, everyone loves a V8, especially me. Moving on….
Issue 2, my garage was having an in-floor sill lift installed; this required some quite significant changes to the garage. For a start, the up and over door had to go and was replaced with a roller door, this took forever to sort out, delivery late and late again, when it finally arrived it wasn’t in the best condition, the fitter had issues, once installed there were issues, but eventually it was sorted.
My garage has a false ceiling for storage, I wanted to convert this to a mezzanine giving me room to raise a car, but still plenty of storage if required, so everything up there had to come down, all wiring, piping, etc. attached to the ceiling had to be removed, false floor raised, joists cut, and the floor back down, wiring redone, and piping re done. At the time I also changed from fluorescent tubes to LED lamps.
Discovered whilst making these false ceiling changes that the actual roof is leaking, and has been for some time and ended up having the roof replaced.
Then onto the real problem of the floor, for a start I have Duratile’s down (plastic clip together floor tiles) so I had to lift most of them, then the builders turned up to cut into my 4” thick un-reinforced floor, “weekends job these groundworks” they said.
Well its 9” thick, and reinforced, it took two weekends to get past the steelwork with jack hammers, eventually through, digger in, holes dug, floor poured, shutters made, sides poured, and conduit installed. Then fitting the ramps was a logistical nightmare, they were 350kg each, I couldn’t use any engine cranes I had or could hire as they all have ‘vee’ legs, and I had to move them from one covered area into the garage, over rough ground and then somehow get them in the holes centrally. Moving them nearly cost my friend his thumb when he put his hand in the wrong place and the ramp slipped, night in A&E, but thankfully no damage. Eventually though, they were in and plumbed up.
End to end, sorting the garage and installing the ramps took the thick end of three months.
Now we are at Xmas 2017, the car has had no attention at all since getting back from Iberia, and it was feeling a bit sorry for itself, but things are on the up.
I dig it out of the car port, and move it into the freshly refurbished garage, get it on the sill lift and raise it up a bit, all good.
Concerned about higher water temperatures again I have taken Clive’s advice at Mazda Rotary Parts, who has a RX7 engine in his car and I've decided to change my radiator and water pump. At the same time, I’m replacing the thermostat, removing the air conditioning, the radiator cap, and changing the coolant.
The job list-
• Revert back to OEM pulley on the alternator
• Find the suspension knock and rectify
• Replace the suspension with Tein Monosport coil overs and Active-EDFC
• Replace the brake discs, pads and fluid.
• Go onto slicks and 17” wheels
• Get the car setup and corner weighed, probably at Centre of Gravity, I got a good vibe in Iberia from the chap.
• Ditch as much un-necessary weight as possible whilst still maintaining decent car function, no need to go major mad as the driver has a high ‘kerb weight’ LOL.
• Fuel pump replacement with a series 2 pump and head.
• Fit a Safety Devices roll cage, including front cage and door bars
• Fit a crutch strap into the seats to convert the harnesses from 4 point to 6 point
• Make a relay panel so all the electrical stuff is in one place and properly fuse protected
• Refit the RaceKeeper setup properly
• Fit Electric water pump
• Change radiator, thermostat, coolant cap, and move to FL22 coolant
• Remove the air conditioning
• Replace the grill with an OEM one, with the blanks still in behind the number plate
• Get a smaller/lighter battery if required
Off we go, car up in the air, suspension and brakes removed front and rear, and source of the knock found, the front passenger side lower arm forward mounting bolt, loose. Coupled with this, the suspension mounting bushes in the front lower arms were worn and the ball joint on one of the arms wasn’t great either. As I was also about to pay for probably quite an expensive setup and corner weighing I decided to replace the lot.
A call into Mazda provided two new, upper and lower arms; I fitted these as is and kept the rubber bushes in, seemed silly to cut out fine new rubber to put in polyurethane. That said, not a month after I fitted these items the recall came through where they would probably have been replaced FOC by Mazda, absolutely gutted, still, moving on….
Tein Monosport coil overs with Active-EDFC were also fitted at this time, with the optional GPS kit. I decided to route the control unit directly through the middle of the head unit and mount it onto the blank used for the mini disc player. Just set up in speed linear and G-linear automatic for now until I get used to it.
Front and rear brake discs and pads were fitted, EBC Ultramax this time (O.E size, plain, vented), with an upgrade to the BlueStuff pad material for more bite and feedback without the grooves that lunch through the pads as they do on John’s car. The driver’s side HEL brake line was showing evidence of failure, the ferrule which joins the flexible part to the fixed part could be rotated by hand and as I had a replacement on the shelf I changed it, but this required the hard line to the ABS modulator to be replaced also, as the collet was rounded. Brake fluid replaced again at this point too.
Then the fuel pump, I replaced the S1 Walbro uprated fuel pump with the complete assembly and pump from a S2, this is to try and combat fuel starvation on long sweeping corners. I actually haven’t had this issue yet but John has, and I can’t help but think that I’m close to having an issue. Theoretically once I’m on slicks cornering G should be higher, so I’m more likely to have an issue, so a pre-emptive change whilst the car is out of track day season.
To the front of the car, bumper off, air conditioning radiator and coolant radiator removed, battery out, ECU box out, air conditioning pump off, air conditioning pipes removed, engine bay sound deadening removed, headlight washer system removed.
Cross member relieved to give room for electric water pump, which was then mounted and plumbed into the lower radiator hose, the routing for this is not great; there is a lot to go around like the anti-roll bar. I will see how I get on with the current arrangement but a future modification would probably be to make up a metal pipe with a tight 90 degree bend in it to better match the water pump, attached to the cross member.
Water pump blanking plate fitted with a new gasket, thermostat replaced, moved to a 2-pulley belt system with OEM alternator pulley, and then the new Koyo radiator fitted with a 1.3bar radiator cap.
Following the advice in the EWP instructions I decided to run the EWP off the ignition, so it’s full flow, all the time. The instructions suggest that if you are doing this; you should drill a 5mm hole in the thermostat to aid flow.
I did this, and got a strong build-up of pressure/fluid in the header tank, went up in stages to 6x 5mm holes and still had issues, in the end I removed the thermostat altogether and the flow is spot on. However the car may now take unacceptably long to get up to temperature, time will tell. I will fit the Davies Craig EWP digital controller if required to throttle the pump in the future. One thing I have noticed is with the change to FL22 coolant (1:3 ratio) and the EWP running, the radiator low level light is on most of the time, I've unplugged it for now but will come back to it in a while and see what is going on, I've already replaced the header tank once with a new OEM item.
I managed to get all the water pipes routed, permitting the retention of the OEM battery about 1” over to the passenger side. A small standoff had to be welded up to permit this, along with a stiffening bracket to the ECU cover. Once I have some more coin I may go to a lighter battery but for now, the OEM one will do. I also had to replace the plumbing between the sohn adapter and the 2-stroke tank, to avoid the new positioning of the various pipes.
In the cabin, all the interior trim has come out, tar sound proofing removed, doors have been lightened of un-necessary parts like speakers and cross overs, but the card, glass, and footwell trim has been retained to prevent injury in case of rollover.
The electric window system has been retained for now also, along with the factory door locks. The airbag system has been removed, along with all un-needed bracketry, the alarm siren and wiring stays for now, but will slowly be removed once the engine is running again, along with the associated wiring. This is so I can confirm that each box I unplug does not interfere with the immobiliser. Stereo was retained as it controls the HVAC system, but the cd changer section was removed off the top of it to keep the weight down. All wiring for the central console, electric seats and heaters is retained for now, but unplugged and tied out the way, for the same reason that I want to check the earths and power lines in there are not used for the immobiliser in some way, once its running I’ll disconnect more things until its bare bones and still working, then I’ll remove all the wiring. Ideally I want to get down to a point where the car has working traction control if I need it, and ABS, for most of the other luxuries, and associated wiring are gone.
Roll cage fitting was an endurance, shaping the feet to fit the panels took forever, but eventually the six cage mounting feet and centre brace were welded in, painted and protected. They neglect to mention in the fitting instructions the challenges with welding 3mm steel to 0.7mm steel, which took some education. Also some of the provided bolts couldn’t be used due to clashes with the bars. However once in, it fouled on everything, mainly the door cards and the seats.
The seats thankfully were contacting on none structural parts of the seat, so a quick cleave of the plastic bolster support gave clearance.
Door cards needed the bottom half trimming off, for clearance for the door bars. I considered attempting to make door cards but the electric window switches still being retained kyboshed that idea. When I move to polycarbonate windows I’ll then move to flat cards I think. It’s not pretty at the moment but it is functional, which will do. I also got some foam padding for the roll cage bars to make things a little more comfortable, the vertical front door bar is close to your right leg when on the throttle.
Unfortunately the position of the seat doesn’t give much in the way of clearance for your helmet in the driver’s seat, so soon I will ditch the slider and mount the seat as close as possible to the deck and maybe move it even more inboard by an inch or so. I’ll also pad the roof bars.
On the whole, I think the rear cage is a good idea, but not the front and the door bars, if I went back to do it again I wouldn’t fit them.
A NRG steering wheel hub adaptor was fitted, along with a quick release boss and a Sparco steering wheel from one of Allan’s old car projects, makes getting in and out around the cage much easier with a helmet on. I didn’t bother connecting the horn, not really required on the track; maybe I’ll put it on a separate push button at some point.
The NRG hub adaptor is flawed in that the holes drilled on the back for the prongs which interface with the steering angle sensor are out by 90 degrees. Fit it as supplied and your traction control won’t work, and the indicators won’t auto cancel. Your only option, which I did, is to re-drill two new holes, irritating to do in a brand new, “bespoke” for the RX8, £110 part.
Anchors for the crutch straps were secured to the floor, giving 6-point harnesses now, 3” shoulder and lap belts, 2” crutch straps, very secure. Bracketry was then made up to permanently mount the RaceKeeper system in the back on anti-vibration mounts. OBD2 extension cable installed to extend back to the new positon for telemetry. Originally I wanted to move the RaceKeeper to the front of the car but it made more sense to keep it at the back, easier to get it level so the G-reader works properly.
Electrics then required some attention, quite a few additional circuits had/were to be added including a timed circuit to hold on the water pump and gearbox oil pump after shut down for 30 seconds, so to get them fused up properly I made a panel with a direct feed from the battery, I secured this in the rear of the car on the cross brace. Wiring to this wasn’t fun, cables had go everywhere to get the systems working in the way that I wanted it too, took ages to get it all done and neat. The EDFC system has wires all over the place, that wasn’t fun to get routed either. As part of it though I put an additional hole in the bulkhead whilst I had all the throttle pedal etc. out for access, for the inevitable plumbed in fire extinguisher line which I will fit in the future.
Following Johns light knock at Rockingham, which caused significant damage due to the tow hook, the front tow hook attachment was changed to a wire rope style, using a box section welded to two supporting plates, should be stronger than standard, and if not, I can always screw the OEM tow eye into the other side mount.
I also cut out the rear bumper lower vents at this point, removed the fog light, removed the rear bumper closing panels and removed the exhaust shrouds, all to help stop the back bumper parachuting the car a bit. BBQ’ed one of them nicely in Iberia.
Once all that was done, the car was fuelled up and then loaded onto the trailer and down to Centre of Gravity (www.centregravity.co.uk) for a full suspension setup including corner weighing. This happened to occur on the same day in which the snowmageddon returned to the UK. I got down there fairly cleanly but it was snowing when I unloaded the car from the trailer.
Really impressed with Centre of Gravity, Chris & Pete there were really welcoming and explained everything they were doing very clearly, very thorough, and nothing was too much hassle, even if a small adjustment would take an hour they got on and did it. Not to mention they bought bacon and egg butties, for the two of us who were there on the day getting work done, heroes.
By the end of the day Chris had got the car to 1501kg including the roll cage, a ¾ tank fuel load, and a pair of 85kg occupants. The corner weighing got the cross axle weights to within 3kg of each other. Geometry wise I've gone for 3 degrees negative and parallel toe at the front and 2 degrees 2 minutes negative and 04 minutes of toe at the rear. They discovered that one of the diagonal rods were not adjusted right and placed the rear on the wrong section of the camber/toe curve, so my car actually toed out with compression, when it should toe in. With lots of adjustment they got it to toe in the right way and the right amount with the adjustments available to them. All in all, I’m very happy with how the day went.
Home time though, and all the different types of weather were experienced, sun, rain, wind, snow, ice, hail, fog, some are quite entertaining with a trailer on.
Back home, all I had to do prior to Anglesey was to pad the roll cage, and to fix the inner door card on the driver’s side of the car which I had over lightened and now the window wouldn’t go up smoothly.
Anglesey comes around and the car is loaded onto the trailer and off we go. Weather was forecast to be heavy rain and wind but we managed to get there in a pocket of good weather, clear, dry and sunny all day, lovely.
Another great factor was that not a lot of people had booked on, roughly 20-25 cars in the paddock meant for lots of space on the track and lots of clean laps, excellent day all round.
The car was on another level, love its new setup, it’s so much more confidence inspiring to drive and I love the tyre feel on slicks. There are a few little bits and bobs that need sorting but nothing major, very pleased. Al and I spent most of the morning out on track back to back; car didn’t miss a beat all day. My two friends though that came along for joyrides didn’t fair up to well, one of them got out the car after a particularly long session, green in the face and worse for wear, the other one stayed in for two sessions, and lost his lunch on getting out the car, poor fellas.
The helmet clearance issue turned out not to be an issue at all, it was close to your helmet but you never knowingly contact it in normal track driving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxPiOAKsOTI
Back at base there were a few items to be addressed, the driver’s side window will not raise up smoothly, the gearbox oil pump does not run on with the electric water pump, and the rear bumper flapped free of the holders in the rear quarters.
The gearbox oil pump was an obvious one, whilst I had correctly wired the relay for the pump up to the timed side of the timer relay, what I hadn’t included in that circuit was the additional gauging. The oil temp gauge provides the earth for the gearbox oil pump relay, and hence if it isn’t also energised, the pump will not run on. A simple rewire sorted that out.
The rear bumper flapping around was a screw that had vibrated loose, the bracketry in the region of the rear bumper attachment has been trimmed back for wheel/tyre clearance and a self-tapping screw was used to secure everything. I changed this to the standard ‘drifter’ cable tie repair. Stronger in repair, and easier to snip off and remove the rear bumper.
The driver’s side window was found to be a loose nut on the attachment of the runner to the inner door card, and a dried out guide runner, simple fix.
I was also going to change the diff at this point get back to the overall ratio I had when I had the 18” wheels and the 5.350 rear diff, which I liked. However the next track day it was on is the very short and technical Three Sisters in Wigan, so I left the diff in for now and will replace it afterwards, probably with an R3 4.777 diff.
I've got a third set of wheels for it, Speedline Corse 2113 wheels this time, again from an Evo, with 235/40/R17 WR180 Nankang NS2R tyres for use on those damp days where it’s too wet for slicks but not wet enough for full wets. Only issue is that they use different wheel nuts to the ones on the Enkei’s, not that this is a big deal, I just need to remember to carry them whenever I’m carrying the wheels.
Onto Three Sisters, this is predominately a karting track and as such, is a short and narrow circuit. I had low expectations about the day, but the weather was amazing, the track was commutable in a day, really cheap, and actually really good fun.
Javelin had just starting doing events there, so I signed up. Sessioned day, 15 min sessions, 1 novice, 2 interurlte, and 1 experienced. Worked really well, not too many on track and decent runs. The track was quite challenging, they altered it at lunch to bring in some of the infield corners into the circuit, this was much more difficult. Day went really well, only one moment where I came off the track a little bit, but only a little off, if the track was 6’ wider I’d have kept it on the grey stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ9qzQW7Zzc&t=...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTJ0DCG8tNs
The oil, water, gearbox, all stayed well under control temperature wise with no issues, however the cabin temps didn’t. The rollcage blocks off the two outer vents, I still have glass windows in so I have to keep them rolled up, and the a/c has been removed. It’s a hot environment inside the car.
Coupled with that, the manifold temps appear to be under control but now the centre section is getting so hot that the heat through the tunnel is mad.
I’m planning on some additional heat shielding around the centre section, maybe Zircotec coating it, I’m going to fit a roof vent for airflow, and cut and mesh the bootlid to get the air out easier, into the area of low pressure at the back of the car. Fingers crossed that all works.
Before Castle Combe, I actually managed to get a wriggle on and get the diffs swapped over. Running an R3 diff now on the 4.777 ratio, one of the other members of our little RX8 circle has taken on the 5.350 diff, which will be a good match with his 18” wheels.
I also fitted a TRS roof scoop to get some air in the cabin, and cut out and meshed the bootlid to get the air out. Managed to retain my stripe to, conserving valuable sticker real estate.
Next job after Combe will be to make some plastic windows with sliders, because with them being glass at the moment I have to run with them up, at least with sliders and plastic glass they can be run open. I might change the mirrors to none electric ones too, then I could go to full flat door cards.
Onto Castle Combe, I was picking up a lathe at the same time so to keep the trailer light, I travelled without spare wheels, and the fuel cans were carried in the tow car.
Got out on track, and it was a decent lovely day and the car and driver was going well. Interesting dynamics though with the new vent mods. All windows up, everything works fine, roof vent and dash vents pour air in and it goes out the back fine. But any windows down at speed and in comes exhaust gas. Therefore when I fit window sliders they need to have scoops on to keep the air pressure up in the cabin.
Heat from the exhaust though was still a problem; the exhaust centre section is very hot, need to do something about the heat that radiates through the floor. I also need to do something with the oil coolers, the front of the fins are bent over a lot and I feel its impeding airflow. Some time with the needle nose pliers required to straighten them out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2gJY0Qr29k
After quite a few laps we were getting quite fast and enjoying the day, until we discovered that the cords were showing on the very outside edge of the left hand slicks. We swapped them left to right and came in after 5 laps to keep checking them, 3 more sessions later the shown cords got a little bit bigger so we packed up for the day and came home. Due to a nice combination of breakdowns and double accidents in a roadwork zone it took 8 hours to get back, awesome.
Next up was Mallory Park in August; a group of the RX8OC was attending this track day so thought we would join in. Preparation for this day was quite light, change the slicks to another set of used ones, this time Dunlop’s and 235 wide profile and that was pretty much it other than the usual fluid checks.
Track time was good, car and drivers behaved themselves all day, minor bump in the pits with another RX8, no damage to the Kraken other than a scuff which matches the other side but unfortunately the other chaps car took quite a hit.
Couldn’t quite get the stones together to attack Gerrard’s full tilt with a brakeless entry, but better than the last time I was there, a good day all round.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijhhFvZzwVM&t=...
Nothing to do with the RX8 now but after Mallory Park six of us boarded a plane and headed off to Gatebil at Rudskogen in Norway for the weekend, and what an experience that was. I've seen drifting before, but nothing like this, some proper skill on display and the cars were awesome. It was just like days of old at Santa pod when you couldn’t be sure what was powering anything, nowadays every other car is just remapped stock engine with some shiny bits.
RB26’s, 2JZ, V8’s and boost were re-occurring themes, in everything from old Volvo 240’s to Lamborghinis, awesome.
People were friendly too, if you stopped to have a look at someone’s car in the paddock, they jumped up to come and talk to you about how it’s going, problems they are having, etc., great, and their English is betterer than mine.
Expensive though, at a 10:1 NOK/GBP exchange rate, £22 for a pizza and £4 for a bottle of water gets real old real fast.
https://youtu.be/m_Xo3GDfrpA
https://youtu.be/UEbPZ_qfmbA
https://youtu.be/Z5ak1yprcAc
Once back I did a bit of work on the car, I removed the front bumper and straightened all the oil cooler fins, they were folded over and restricting airflow, keeping temps up a bit. What a rubbish job it is straightening those fins, took hours. Whilst I was all in the region of the oil coolers I removed the thermal pills and blocked up the orifices so that the coolers work all the time. I don’t suffer from issues getting the oil up to temperature so I don’t what the possible failure mode of a pill being stuck open.
I finally completed the roof vent installation by putting in the water drain, now it doesn’t dump all over the place if there is a spot of water.
I also replaced a drive shaft oil seal on the diff to cure a little leak that had started.
Oulton park next, I haven’t driven here since right at the start of the RX8 adventure, and never in the dry. It’s taken so long to update this post, that Oulton Park is tomorrow, eeek.
Thanks
Matt
Apologies for the lack of photos in this post, I had taken many photos, but my phones SD card corrupted and I lost the lot, gutted. A new card and cloud backup is in place now. Anyway…..
I had big plans over winter 2017 to get the car worked on, this however all stalled.
Issue 1, I bought a V8 bowrider speed boat for some reason, and then I focused too much time on maintaining that, which I then decided wasn’t for me, and put it up for sale! Stupid I know. However now the weather is improving a bit I may keep it for a while and sell it mid-summer instead, everyone loves a V8, especially me. Moving on….
Issue 2, my garage was having an in-floor sill lift installed; this required some quite significant changes to the garage. For a start, the up and over door had to go and was replaced with a roller door, this took forever to sort out, delivery late and late again, when it finally arrived it wasn’t in the best condition, the fitter had issues, once installed there were issues, but eventually it was sorted.
My garage has a false ceiling for storage, I wanted to convert this to a mezzanine giving me room to raise a car, but still plenty of storage if required, so everything up there had to come down, all wiring, piping, etc. attached to the ceiling had to be removed, false floor raised, joists cut, and the floor back down, wiring redone, and piping re done. At the time I also changed from fluorescent tubes to LED lamps.
Discovered whilst making these false ceiling changes that the actual roof is leaking, and has been for some time and ended up having the roof replaced.
Then onto the real problem of the floor, for a start I have Duratile’s down (plastic clip together floor tiles) so I had to lift most of them, then the builders turned up to cut into my 4” thick un-reinforced floor, “weekends job these groundworks” they said.
Well its 9” thick, and reinforced, it took two weekends to get past the steelwork with jack hammers, eventually through, digger in, holes dug, floor poured, shutters made, sides poured, and conduit installed. Then fitting the ramps was a logistical nightmare, they were 350kg each, I couldn’t use any engine cranes I had or could hire as they all have ‘vee’ legs, and I had to move them from one covered area into the garage, over rough ground and then somehow get them in the holes centrally. Moving them nearly cost my friend his thumb when he put his hand in the wrong place and the ramp slipped, night in A&E, but thankfully no damage. Eventually though, they were in and plumbed up.
End to end, sorting the garage and installing the ramps took the thick end of three months.
Now we are at Xmas 2017, the car has had no attention at all since getting back from Iberia, and it was feeling a bit sorry for itself, but things are on the up.
I dig it out of the car port, and move it into the freshly refurbished garage, get it on the sill lift and raise it up a bit, all good.
Concerned about higher water temperatures again I have taken Clive’s advice at Mazda Rotary Parts, who has a RX7 engine in his car and I've decided to change my radiator and water pump. At the same time, I’m replacing the thermostat, removing the air conditioning, the radiator cap, and changing the coolant.
The job list-
• Revert back to OEM pulley on the alternator
• Find the suspension knock and rectify
• Replace the suspension with Tein Monosport coil overs and Active-EDFC
• Replace the brake discs, pads and fluid.
• Go onto slicks and 17” wheels
• Get the car setup and corner weighed, probably at Centre of Gravity, I got a good vibe in Iberia from the chap.
• Ditch as much un-necessary weight as possible whilst still maintaining decent car function, no need to go major mad as the driver has a high ‘kerb weight’ LOL.
• Fuel pump replacement with a series 2 pump and head.
• Fit a Safety Devices roll cage, including front cage and door bars
• Fit a crutch strap into the seats to convert the harnesses from 4 point to 6 point
• Make a relay panel so all the electrical stuff is in one place and properly fuse protected
• Refit the RaceKeeper setup properly
• Fit Electric water pump
• Change radiator, thermostat, coolant cap, and move to FL22 coolant
• Remove the air conditioning
• Replace the grill with an OEM one, with the blanks still in behind the number plate
• Get a smaller/lighter battery if required
Off we go, car up in the air, suspension and brakes removed front and rear, and source of the knock found, the front passenger side lower arm forward mounting bolt, loose. Coupled with this, the suspension mounting bushes in the front lower arms were worn and the ball joint on one of the arms wasn’t great either. As I was also about to pay for probably quite an expensive setup and corner weighing I decided to replace the lot.
A call into Mazda provided two new, upper and lower arms; I fitted these as is and kept the rubber bushes in, seemed silly to cut out fine new rubber to put in polyurethane. That said, not a month after I fitted these items the recall came through where they would probably have been replaced FOC by Mazda, absolutely gutted, still, moving on….
Tein Monosport coil overs with Active-EDFC were also fitted at this time, with the optional GPS kit. I decided to route the control unit directly through the middle of the head unit and mount it onto the blank used for the mini disc player. Just set up in speed linear and G-linear automatic for now until I get used to it.
Front and rear brake discs and pads were fitted, EBC Ultramax this time (O.E size, plain, vented), with an upgrade to the BlueStuff pad material for more bite and feedback without the grooves that lunch through the pads as they do on John’s car. The driver’s side HEL brake line was showing evidence of failure, the ferrule which joins the flexible part to the fixed part could be rotated by hand and as I had a replacement on the shelf I changed it, but this required the hard line to the ABS modulator to be replaced also, as the collet was rounded. Brake fluid replaced again at this point too.
Then the fuel pump, I replaced the S1 Walbro uprated fuel pump with the complete assembly and pump from a S2, this is to try and combat fuel starvation on long sweeping corners. I actually haven’t had this issue yet but John has, and I can’t help but think that I’m close to having an issue. Theoretically once I’m on slicks cornering G should be higher, so I’m more likely to have an issue, so a pre-emptive change whilst the car is out of track day season.
To the front of the car, bumper off, air conditioning radiator and coolant radiator removed, battery out, ECU box out, air conditioning pump off, air conditioning pipes removed, engine bay sound deadening removed, headlight washer system removed.
Cross member relieved to give room for electric water pump, which was then mounted and plumbed into the lower radiator hose, the routing for this is not great; there is a lot to go around like the anti-roll bar. I will see how I get on with the current arrangement but a future modification would probably be to make up a metal pipe with a tight 90 degree bend in it to better match the water pump, attached to the cross member.
Water pump blanking plate fitted with a new gasket, thermostat replaced, moved to a 2-pulley belt system with OEM alternator pulley, and then the new Koyo radiator fitted with a 1.3bar radiator cap.
Following the advice in the EWP instructions I decided to run the EWP off the ignition, so it’s full flow, all the time. The instructions suggest that if you are doing this; you should drill a 5mm hole in the thermostat to aid flow.
I did this, and got a strong build-up of pressure/fluid in the header tank, went up in stages to 6x 5mm holes and still had issues, in the end I removed the thermostat altogether and the flow is spot on. However the car may now take unacceptably long to get up to temperature, time will tell. I will fit the Davies Craig EWP digital controller if required to throttle the pump in the future. One thing I have noticed is with the change to FL22 coolant (1:3 ratio) and the EWP running, the radiator low level light is on most of the time, I've unplugged it for now but will come back to it in a while and see what is going on, I've already replaced the header tank once with a new OEM item.
I managed to get all the water pipes routed, permitting the retention of the OEM battery about 1” over to the passenger side. A small standoff had to be welded up to permit this, along with a stiffening bracket to the ECU cover. Once I have some more coin I may go to a lighter battery but for now, the OEM one will do. I also had to replace the plumbing between the sohn adapter and the 2-stroke tank, to avoid the new positioning of the various pipes.
In the cabin, all the interior trim has come out, tar sound proofing removed, doors have been lightened of un-necessary parts like speakers and cross overs, but the card, glass, and footwell trim has been retained to prevent injury in case of rollover.
The electric window system has been retained for now also, along with the factory door locks. The airbag system has been removed, along with all un-needed bracketry, the alarm siren and wiring stays for now, but will slowly be removed once the engine is running again, along with the associated wiring. This is so I can confirm that each box I unplug does not interfere with the immobiliser. Stereo was retained as it controls the HVAC system, but the cd changer section was removed off the top of it to keep the weight down. All wiring for the central console, electric seats and heaters is retained for now, but unplugged and tied out the way, for the same reason that I want to check the earths and power lines in there are not used for the immobiliser in some way, once its running I’ll disconnect more things until its bare bones and still working, then I’ll remove all the wiring. Ideally I want to get down to a point where the car has working traction control if I need it, and ABS, for most of the other luxuries, and associated wiring are gone.
Roll cage fitting was an endurance, shaping the feet to fit the panels took forever, but eventually the six cage mounting feet and centre brace were welded in, painted and protected. They neglect to mention in the fitting instructions the challenges with welding 3mm steel to 0.7mm steel, which took some education. Also some of the provided bolts couldn’t be used due to clashes with the bars. However once in, it fouled on everything, mainly the door cards and the seats.
The seats thankfully were contacting on none structural parts of the seat, so a quick cleave of the plastic bolster support gave clearance.
Door cards needed the bottom half trimming off, for clearance for the door bars. I considered attempting to make door cards but the electric window switches still being retained kyboshed that idea. When I move to polycarbonate windows I’ll then move to flat cards I think. It’s not pretty at the moment but it is functional, which will do. I also got some foam padding for the roll cage bars to make things a little more comfortable, the vertical front door bar is close to your right leg when on the throttle.
Unfortunately the position of the seat doesn’t give much in the way of clearance for your helmet in the driver’s seat, so soon I will ditch the slider and mount the seat as close as possible to the deck and maybe move it even more inboard by an inch or so. I’ll also pad the roof bars.
On the whole, I think the rear cage is a good idea, but not the front and the door bars, if I went back to do it again I wouldn’t fit them.
A NRG steering wheel hub adaptor was fitted, along with a quick release boss and a Sparco steering wheel from one of Allan’s old car projects, makes getting in and out around the cage much easier with a helmet on. I didn’t bother connecting the horn, not really required on the track; maybe I’ll put it on a separate push button at some point.
The NRG hub adaptor is flawed in that the holes drilled on the back for the prongs which interface with the steering angle sensor are out by 90 degrees. Fit it as supplied and your traction control won’t work, and the indicators won’t auto cancel. Your only option, which I did, is to re-drill two new holes, irritating to do in a brand new, “bespoke” for the RX8, £110 part.
Anchors for the crutch straps were secured to the floor, giving 6-point harnesses now, 3” shoulder and lap belts, 2” crutch straps, very secure. Bracketry was then made up to permanently mount the RaceKeeper system in the back on anti-vibration mounts. OBD2 extension cable installed to extend back to the new positon for telemetry. Originally I wanted to move the RaceKeeper to the front of the car but it made more sense to keep it at the back, easier to get it level so the G-reader works properly.
Electrics then required some attention, quite a few additional circuits had/were to be added including a timed circuit to hold on the water pump and gearbox oil pump after shut down for 30 seconds, so to get them fused up properly I made a panel with a direct feed from the battery, I secured this in the rear of the car on the cross brace. Wiring to this wasn’t fun, cables had go everywhere to get the systems working in the way that I wanted it too, took ages to get it all done and neat. The EDFC system has wires all over the place, that wasn’t fun to get routed either. As part of it though I put an additional hole in the bulkhead whilst I had all the throttle pedal etc. out for access, for the inevitable plumbed in fire extinguisher line which I will fit in the future.
Following Johns light knock at Rockingham, which caused significant damage due to the tow hook, the front tow hook attachment was changed to a wire rope style, using a box section welded to two supporting plates, should be stronger than standard, and if not, I can always screw the OEM tow eye into the other side mount.
I also cut out the rear bumper lower vents at this point, removed the fog light, removed the rear bumper closing panels and removed the exhaust shrouds, all to help stop the back bumper parachuting the car a bit. BBQ’ed one of them nicely in Iberia.
Once all that was done, the car was fuelled up and then loaded onto the trailer and down to Centre of Gravity (www.centregravity.co.uk) for a full suspension setup including corner weighing. This happened to occur on the same day in which the snowmageddon returned to the UK. I got down there fairly cleanly but it was snowing when I unloaded the car from the trailer.
Really impressed with Centre of Gravity, Chris & Pete there were really welcoming and explained everything they were doing very clearly, very thorough, and nothing was too much hassle, even if a small adjustment would take an hour they got on and did it. Not to mention they bought bacon and egg butties, for the two of us who were there on the day getting work done, heroes.
By the end of the day Chris had got the car to 1501kg including the roll cage, a ¾ tank fuel load, and a pair of 85kg occupants. The corner weighing got the cross axle weights to within 3kg of each other. Geometry wise I've gone for 3 degrees negative and parallel toe at the front and 2 degrees 2 minutes negative and 04 minutes of toe at the rear. They discovered that one of the diagonal rods were not adjusted right and placed the rear on the wrong section of the camber/toe curve, so my car actually toed out with compression, when it should toe in. With lots of adjustment they got it to toe in the right way and the right amount with the adjustments available to them. All in all, I’m very happy with how the day went.
Home time though, and all the different types of weather were experienced, sun, rain, wind, snow, ice, hail, fog, some are quite entertaining with a trailer on.
Back home, all I had to do prior to Anglesey was to pad the roll cage, and to fix the inner door card on the driver’s side of the car which I had over lightened and now the window wouldn’t go up smoothly.
Anglesey comes around and the car is loaded onto the trailer and off we go. Weather was forecast to be heavy rain and wind but we managed to get there in a pocket of good weather, clear, dry and sunny all day, lovely.
Another great factor was that not a lot of people had booked on, roughly 20-25 cars in the paddock meant for lots of space on the track and lots of clean laps, excellent day all round.
The car was on another level, love its new setup, it’s so much more confidence inspiring to drive and I love the tyre feel on slicks. There are a few little bits and bobs that need sorting but nothing major, very pleased. Al and I spent most of the morning out on track back to back; car didn’t miss a beat all day. My two friends though that came along for joyrides didn’t fair up to well, one of them got out the car after a particularly long session, green in the face and worse for wear, the other one stayed in for two sessions, and lost his lunch on getting out the car, poor fellas.
The helmet clearance issue turned out not to be an issue at all, it was close to your helmet but you never knowingly contact it in normal track driving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxPiOAKsOTI
Back at base there were a few items to be addressed, the driver’s side window will not raise up smoothly, the gearbox oil pump does not run on with the electric water pump, and the rear bumper flapped free of the holders in the rear quarters.
The gearbox oil pump was an obvious one, whilst I had correctly wired the relay for the pump up to the timed side of the timer relay, what I hadn’t included in that circuit was the additional gauging. The oil temp gauge provides the earth for the gearbox oil pump relay, and hence if it isn’t also energised, the pump will not run on. A simple rewire sorted that out.
The rear bumper flapping around was a screw that had vibrated loose, the bracketry in the region of the rear bumper attachment has been trimmed back for wheel/tyre clearance and a self-tapping screw was used to secure everything. I changed this to the standard ‘drifter’ cable tie repair. Stronger in repair, and easier to snip off and remove the rear bumper.
The driver’s side window was found to be a loose nut on the attachment of the runner to the inner door card, and a dried out guide runner, simple fix.
I was also going to change the diff at this point get back to the overall ratio I had when I had the 18” wheels and the 5.350 rear diff, which I liked. However the next track day it was on is the very short and technical Three Sisters in Wigan, so I left the diff in for now and will replace it afterwards, probably with an R3 4.777 diff.
I've got a third set of wheels for it, Speedline Corse 2113 wheels this time, again from an Evo, with 235/40/R17 WR180 Nankang NS2R tyres for use on those damp days where it’s too wet for slicks but not wet enough for full wets. Only issue is that they use different wheel nuts to the ones on the Enkei’s, not that this is a big deal, I just need to remember to carry them whenever I’m carrying the wheels.
Onto Three Sisters, this is predominately a karting track and as such, is a short and narrow circuit. I had low expectations about the day, but the weather was amazing, the track was commutable in a day, really cheap, and actually really good fun.
Javelin had just starting doing events there, so I signed up. Sessioned day, 15 min sessions, 1 novice, 2 interurlte, and 1 experienced. Worked really well, not too many on track and decent runs. The track was quite challenging, they altered it at lunch to bring in some of the infield corners into the circuit, this was much more difficult. Day went really well, only one moment where I came off the track a little bit, but only a little off, if the track was 6’ wider I’d have kept it on the grey stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ9qzQW7Zzc&t=...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTJ0DCG8tNs
The oil, water, gearbox, all stayed well under control temperature wise with no issues, however the cabin temps didn’t. The rollcage blocks off the two outer vents, I still have glass windows in so I have to keep them rolled up, and the a/c has been removed. It’s a hot environment inside the car.
Coupled with that, the manifold temps appear to be under control but now the centre section is getting so hot that the heat through the tunnel is mad.
I’m planning on some additional heat shielding around the centre section, maybe Zircotec coating it, I’m going to fit a roof vent for airflow, and cut and mesh the bootlid to get the air out easier, into the area of low pressure at the back of the car. Fingers crossed that all works.
Before Castle Combe, I actually managed to get a wriggle on and get the diffs swapped over. Running an R3 diff now on the 4.777 ratio, one of the other members of our little RX8 circle has taken on the 5.350 diff, which will be a good match with his 18” wheels.
I also fitted a TRS roof scoop to get some air in the cabin, and cut out and meshed the bootlid to get the air out. Managed to retain my stripe to, conserving valuable sticker real estate.
Next job after Combe will be to make some plastic windows with sliders, because with them being glass at the moment I have to run with them up, at least with sliders and plastic glass they can be run open. I might change the mirrors to none electric ones too, then I could go to full flat door cards.
Onto Castle Combe, I was picking up a lathe at the same time so to keep the trailer light, I travelled without spare wheels, and the fuel cans were carried in the tow car.
Got out on track, and it was a decent lovely day and the car and driver was going well. Interesting dynamics though with the new vent mods. All windows up, everything works fine, roof vent and dash vents pour air in and it goes out the back fine. But any windows down at speed and in comes exhaust gas. Therefore when I fit window sliders they need to have scoops on to keep the air pressure up in the cabin.
Heat from the exhaust though was still a problem; the exhaust centre section is very hot, need to do something about the heat that radiates through the floor. I also need to do something with the oil coolers, the front of the fins are bent over a lot and I feel its impeding airflow. Some time with the needle nose pliers required to straighten them out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2gJY0Qr29k
After quite a few laps we were getting quite fast and enjoying the day, until we discovered that the cords were showing on the very outside edge of the left hand slicks. We swapped them left to right and came in after 5 laps to keep checking them, 3 more sessions later the shown cords got a little bit bigger so we packed up for the day and came home. Due to a nice combination of breakdowns and double accidents in a roadwork zone it took 8 hours to get back, awesome.
Next up was Mallory Park in August; a group of the RX8OC was attending this track day so thought we would join in. Preparation for this day was quite light, change the slicks to another set of used ones, this time Dunlop’s and 235 wide profile and that was pretty much it other than the usual fluid checks.
Track time was good, car and drivers behaved themselves all day, minor bump in the pits with another RX8, no damage to the Kraken other than a scuff which matches the other side but unfortunately the other chaps car took quite a hit.
Couldn’t quite get the stones together to attack Gerrard’s full tilt with a brakeless entry, but better than the last time I was there, a good day all round.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijhhFvZzwVM&t=...
Nothing to do with the RX8 now but after Mallory Park six of us boarded a plane and headed off to Gatebil at Rudskogen in Norway for the weekend, and what an experience that was. I've seen drifting before, but nothing like this, some proper skill on display and the cars were awesome. It was just like days of old at Santa pod when you couldn’t be sure what was powering anything, nowadays every other car is just remapped stock engine with some shiny bits.
RB26’s, 2JZ, V8’s and boost were re-occurring themes, in everything from old Volvo 240’s to Lamborghinis, awesome.
People were friendly too, if you stopped to have a look at someone’s car in the paddock, they jumped up to come and talk to you about how it’s going, problems they are having, etc., great, and their English is betterer than mine.
Expensive though, at a 10:1 NOK/GBP exchange rate, £22 for a pizza and £4 for a bottle of water gets real old real fast.
https://youtu.be/m_Xo3GDfrpA
https://youtu.be/UEbPZ_qfmbA
https://youtu.be/Z5ak1yprcAc
Once back I did a bit of work on the car, I removed the front bumper and straightened all the oil cooler fins, they were folded over and restricting airflow, keeping temps up a bit. What a rubbish job it is straightening those fins, took hours. Whilst I was all in the region of the oil coolers I removed the thermal pills and blocked up the orifices so that the coolers work all the time. I don’t suffer from issues getting the oil up to temperature so I don’t what the possible failure mode of a pill being stuck open.
I finally completed the roof vent installation by putting in the water drain, now it doesn’t dump all over the place if there is a spot of water.
I also replaced a drive shaft oil seal on the diff to cure a little leak that had started.
Oulton park next, I haven’t driven here since right at the start of the RX8 adventure, and never in the dry. It’s taken so long to update this post, that Oulton Park is tomorrow, eeek.
Thanks
Matt
Been a while so I think an update is due, not much to report in all honesty, the car is really reliable so it doesn't see much attention between events now.
Oulton Park was attacked, great track, car did well all day with no dramas and towards the end the slicks were getting a bit thin on the inner edges. Changed to the Nankang NS2R’s on the spare Evo wheels (white) to finish the day off. Few photos below-
After Oulton the car went on a bit of a diet, all surplus wiring and modules were removed from the car, alarm stuff, all the wiring to the doors, roof, stereo wiring etc., quite a bit came out.
Plastic (Lexan Marguard™) windows were made and installed in the front windows with sliding vents and ducts to compliment the roof vent. Turns out there weren’t much in glass vs plastic for the windows in rear doors, so I left them glass.
Surplus metal cut out of the doors to get the weight down, door cards removed etc. Replacement door cards made from two pieces of Correx™ plastic sheet, bonded together at 90 degree angles to improve the strength and rigidity.
New MRF slicks where fitted to the slicks and that’s about it
Onto Cadwell park, where the mods worked nicely, cabin cooling was good, tyre grip was good, had to block off the boot lid vent with duct tape to stop exhaust gas intrusion, the additional air into the cabin seems to have upset the pressure balance at the back which prevented exhaust gas coming in previously.
The main purpose of Cadwell Park was not for the Kraken, but to shakedown the Hadouken which had a major upgrade over winter 2018, roll cage, seats, Tein suspension, nitrous, much more gauging etc. Pleased to say that the car worked great on its initial outing, and needs little tweaking for its next adventure.
Pictures and videos from the event below-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI_uhd_fEwI
hhttps://youtu.be/x380B5NHv2M
Aintree is the next event the cars are looking to attend, no changes planned prior to that.
I've decided that I’m not going to plow much more money into the car, TBH interest in track daying is starting to wain a little as we have covered a lot of the tracks I want to drive (33 track days post Aintree) and I’m gathering interest in other hobbies, the build as well as the drive is a major interest of mine and I’m getting to the point when it needs little without massive cost. That said, I’m still interested in tracking the car, just not at the rate we have been doing, plus there are huge financial losses to be made when I eventually sell/part the car out, so there is no rush to hang up the spurs. Plus I want to get it to Italy when BookaTrack go there next.
Next jobs on the list to do a job I've been putting off, replacing the seats. Ages ago I bought a pair of Reverie Mulsanne carbon seats, which are feather weight, some 6kg for the pair. But the dramas involved in getting side mounted seats into the Hadouken have put me off the idea. As I already have them, and the side mounts, and I have done something similar before though I have no excuse not to fit them, so following Aintree that’s probably what I’m going to do.
It’ll then probably need a tweak back and centre of gravity to sort out the distribution now a lot of weight has come out of the car.
Another area I want to explore is aero, I’d like to add some items like a diffuser, splitter and wing, maybe a flat floor, but I don’t want to go to mad with the cost of it all, so we’ll see how it goes.
Thanks
Matt
Oulton Park was attacked, great track, car did well all day with no dramas and towards the end the slicks were getting a bit thin on the inner edges. Changed to the Nankang NS2R’s on the spare Evo wheels (white) to finish the day off. Few photos below-
After Oulton the car went on a bit of a diet, all surplus wiring and modules were removed from the car, alarm stuff, all the wiring to the doors, roof, stereo wiring etc., quite a bit came out.
Plastic (Lexan Marguard™) windows were made and installed in the front windows with sliding vents and ducts to compliment the roof vent. Turns out there weren’t much in glass vs plastic for the windows in rear doors, so I left them glass.
Surplus metal cut out of the doors to get the weight down, door cards removed etc. Replacement door cards made from two pieces of Correx™ plastic sheet, bonded together at 90 degree angles to improve the strength and rigidity.
New MRF slicks where fitted to the slicks and that’s about it
Onto Cadwell park, where the mods worked nicely, cabin cooling was good, tyre grip was good, had to block off the boot lid vent with duct tape to stop exhaust gas intrusion, the additional air into the cabin seems to have upset the pressure balance at the back which prevented exhaust gas coming in previously.
The main purpose of Cadwell Park was not for the Kraken, but to shakedown the Hadouken which had a major upgrade over winter 2018, roll cage, seats, Tein suspension, nitrous, much more gauging etc. Pleased to say that the car worked great on its initial outing, and needs little tweaking for its next adventure.
Pictures and videos from the event below-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI_uhd_fEwI
hhttps://youtu.be/x380B5NHv2M
Aintree is the next event the cars are looking to attend, no changes planned prior to that.
I've decided that I’m not going to plow much more money into the car, TBH interest in track daying is starting to wain a little as we have covered a lot of the tracks I want to drive (33 track days post Aintree) and I’m gathering interest in other hobbies, the build as well as the drive is a major interest of mine and I’m getting to the point when it needs little without massive cost. That said, I’m still interested in tracking the car, just not at the rate we have been doing, plus there are huge financial losses to be made when I eventually sell/part the car out, so there is no rush to hang up the spurs. Plus I want to get it to Italy when BookaTrack go there next.
Next jobs on the list to do a job I've been putting off, replacing the seats. Ages ago I bought a pair of Reverie Mulsanne carbon seats, which are feather weight, some 6kg for the pair. But the dramas involved in getting side mounted seats into the Hadouken have put me off the idea. As I already have them, and the side mounts, and I have done something similar before though I have no excuse not to fit them, so following Aintree that’s probably what I’m going to do.
It’ll then probably need a tweak back and centre of gravity to sort out the distribution now a lot of weight has come out of the car.
Another area I want to explore is aero, I’d like to add some items like a diffuser, splitter and wing, maybe a flat floor, but I don’t want to go to mad with the cost of it all, so we’ll see how it goes.
Thanks
Matt
StreetDragster said:
Nothing happened to the car, just a few things lined up to make it a good idea to give up on trackdays and try something else.
Unfortunately, like alot of cars, RX8 are worth pennies assembled but make decent money in parts, so its been broken and the shell scrapped.
Thanks
Matt
oh well the thread's been a good read , what's the new hobby going to be then ?Unfortunately, like alot of cars, RX8 are worth pennies assembled but make decent money in parts, so its been broken and the shell scrapped.
Thanks
Matt
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