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I will have to measure when I put the car in the air again. The rears are really close to being right, just a little bit of droop. The fronts could use some shortening, I'm probably gonna have to stretch my helper springs a little bit. I also had to top mount my pillow balls again, there apparently isn't enough weigh on my front end and the gas bladders were holding the car up before I got any spring contact. Moving the top of the strut up solved that. I may eventually extend the strut towers up and redo some things there
 
Air to water heat exchanger. I will probably be building a heat shield of sorts, as well as possibly using the XP rule to 'modify' the trunk lid. i will be doing some datalogging at the first few events to decide. I had a bunch of issues with it mounted up front, mostly air bubbles and leaky connections, so I am giving this a shot. If it doesnt work I will try something else.
 
Im not familiar with XP rules and how extensive you can modify the car for that class, but ive been thinking of something weird as Ive been looking over Xhead's aero work and Zip gutted rear trunk pics.

What about a rear mounted radiator? Hear me out on this.

It could be mounted between the rear strut towers, straight up or possibly angled forward with fiberglass, aluminum or sheet metal ducting directing air from under the engine, through the radiator and duct work through the trunk lid or through the rear of the car.

The way I see it, if we remove the stainless center radiator piping and front radiator, we not only lose the weight of the piping, but the weight of the coolant as well. Now with the radiator gone in the front, Xhead's aero does not have to be modified for airflow sans maybe duct work for brakes, if needed. The extreme end of this, for the truly nuts, is now possibly making a one piece fiberglass front end and even less weight.

As for the radiator now being in the back, coolant lines would be shorter and lighter but at the expense of coolant capacity....but with sub 1 minute runs we do in our cars, im sure performance electric cooling fans would more that be up to the task of cooling the car down between runs...if at all.

Yes, no, maybe so? Im stupid?
 
Discussion starter · #108 ·
The radiator air management will be changed significantly on my car once the splitter is finished. (Its very close now) Note that there is now an allowance to vent the hood in prepared. I am planning on a minor relocation of the radiator and re-routing of the airflow from it. Most of the reason for this is the OE air path creates a high pressure zone under the nose of the car, which produces lift. That will be fixed.

Rear mounted radiators have always been a challenge. I saw one that was quite well done on a C3 Corvette convertible autocrosser. The car had a hand laid, thin shell body (that replaced the original bodywork) with the rear deck mostly cut away. It had the majority of the middle of the tail light panel cut away, a tall spoiler and a radiator standing in the middle of this. It worked quite well.

Yes, you can put the radiator in the floor of the rear trunk and duct air from under the car and out the rear tail light panel under the spoiler. But that moves a substancial amount of weight from the nose of the car to behind the rear axle. That is the worst place to locate the weight.

Properly managing the airflow through the front mounted radiator will produce downforce and the additional weight, which isn't much, is all located in a favorable location.
 
Discussion starter · #111 ·
Yep. That's Chris Dorsey's car (obviously). I know Chris well, starting back in the days when he was autocrossing an X1/9 in DSP. His motor and mine are very similar with the exception of the TWMs.
 
Ive been pouring over that article. Beautiful car. I toyed with the idea of trying a gurney flap when I build spoiler v2 (which will also include end plates) but i never saw anything about them in the rules.
 
I know both the guys pretty well - it took many hours of convincing to get Sherman to take the windshield off that car. Vitek built the car to whatever he wanted (i.e. LS3) and hopes he can sway the PAC into giving him/other big-cube engines a weight break.

All the same, both cars will be fast and soon.


Had I known the Daytona 500 was going to rain out, I would have been there - car was on the trailer and everything - but we were celebrating our shop signing a long term lease with crawfish, beer, and videogames:

 
Just got a picture of one of my new front rotors.


I'm told he took 2.5 pounds off of each, and the front is getting converted to AE82 corolla rotors and calipers, which should save even more off of the stock brakes.

I think for safety purposes im going to have him change this quite a bit.
 
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