Construction Page 2
Here is the continuation of my car. After spending three hours putting the engine back into the car, I find out that the clutch disc is in backwards. So now that I have become very familiar with the car, I can now change a clutch in under 3hrs. This will be helpful at the track if needed. After getting everything back together, I had a nasty "ticking" sound coming from over the 1st cylinder. It was so loud that it could be heard from two houses away. Since it had disappeared during drivers school, everyone thinks it was a large chunk of oil dry stuck in one of the cam followers.
Here is a picture of the engine with the new K&N Filter. It just replaces the stock airbox. I have added a heat shield over the exhaust manifold to reduced the heat flowing up into the air intake tube. The orange blob in the middle is the brake cooling duct. The intake resonator was also removed, can't really figure out was it did other than something for emissions. The exhaust is the stock size with the cat hollowed out. I haven't sat down yet to figure out a good exhaust system yet. The only part that makes the car loud is the fact that it ends under the passenger door.
Below is the roll cage painted and most of the required interior is in place. The rear seat panels have to go in because of the SCCA GCR rules for Improved Touring cars. They are pretty messy to cut into place around the roll cage. These pictures are a little brighter than the ones on the previous page that also show the roll cage. As of the 1999 GCR rules, I can remove the passenger seat.
These are the Carrera suspension parts. They are from a VW GolfII. The left most picture shows the rear strut with the coil over. The middle is the front Camber plate, which was modified a little to fit the top of the Festiva strut tower (it was too big). The right most picture is the front strut housing with the insert already in place. The other pieces are for the coil over. The only modification needed to fit the VW setup was to weld the Camber plates to the strut tower. Everything else was a direct bolt in. I did need to remove some of the extra "rust" from the front hub to mount the strut housing which was about 1-2mm too narrow. Probably too much plating (it's a joke son). With the suspension in place, I was able to set the ride height of the car. It measured from the ground to the bottom of the pinch weld to be 5 inches. It was so low that the exhaust scraped the garage floor as I rolled into the driveway.
Here is a shot of the car just as I rolled it out of the garage, my makeshift exhaust system hangs a bit low. I got myself a real seat to use with some help. It mounts into the floor with a VW seat frame. The seat frame even has the Audi/VW symbol on it. The seat belts fit right into the stock anchor points. The first race weekend started with no stickers, so I had to use DUCT TAPE! When I had to start setting the car up I couldn't get an even ride height between the front and rear end, so I wound up using hockey pucks to level off the rear end of the car (the rear springs were too short). The picture on the right side is me. If you remember this car came with 14"x6" rims, it stood so tall that you could slide yourself under the body and come out the other side untouched. If you can imagine this, I stand about 6' the cars ride height is about 6.5" (ground to pinch weld). It looks like I stand about 7' tall in this picture. The car currently has 13"x6" rims with Yokohama A008R tires that I picked up for $30 each (the tires, not the rims).
Since the first race weekend, with some help, I put on some of the graphics that belong on the car and added a stripe.
This is the race weekend, and where I will be pitting all summer. Kind of a goofy setup, there are two Corvettes each producing 400-450HP no one really knows for sure, and a RaceStiva with about, lets say to be modest, 70HP. All went well over the first weekend out. I have some more tweaking to do with the engine. The suspension setup is rock solid, little or no body roll. And a couple of chances to get the RaceStiva on THREE WHEELS.