793 replies to this topic

[turbotoaster]

Im sure last year it was 15mins at warm up and 10mins in qualifying and final, could be wrong though, also alot of competitors have said that because there is so much traffic you wont get 10mins flat out, you might get 3 laps in without getting blocked if your lucky, worst case scenario theres always the splash and dash.

[turbotoaster]

One thing that is letting the car down is brakes.....but no more!!

My new discs arrived today from Kev aka SEN Lotus, just like many others on this forum, I cant praise the guy enough, such a nice straight talking bloke who helped me out massively and saved me alot of money aswell.

If you need anything making, whether your looking for an audi conversion, or like me your after one off bits hes the man to go to, call him on 07415 101868

So as usual pictures are taken in my kitchen next to my high quality £5 tesco toaster.

Here are the aluminum bells, lovely engraving telling you who they are from and what car they are going on, they are a 190.5mm PCD and weigh 777g each

One thing I like about them is all the edges have a radius on them so no sharp edges or potential stress points, more work involved but shows thought has gone into them.

Front face


Back face




Ok next onto the discs, now its traditional for the lotus community to buy AP discs, either because its what has been done or because thats what the 2 main sellers offer, these are different, Its always concerning going into the unknown but after kev doing some testing on track with them and I know another race car driver using these discs I was happy to give them a go.



These are a 308 x 25mm disc which I will be running front and rear.

Now I do love comparing so I went over the discs and took all the relevant measurements, ive then compared them to the closest AP disc that I could find.



The inner thickness of the disc is 8.3mm
The outer thickness of the disc is 7.6mm
Leaving an air gap of 9.1mm

Recommended minimum overall thickness when they are due to be changed is 22mm

They have a pad swept area of 49mm which is near enough perfect for the factory 2pots

the weight for each disc is 5kg

So as a comparison the closest disc I could find is cp4348-528 which is a 304mm disc,

that has a outer thickness of 6.6mm
An air gap of 9mm
PCD of 177.8mm
weight of each disc is 5.36kg

The weight makes sense due to the difference in PCD, and in theory if there were of comparable quality steel(which since they are massive brake casting manufacturer they should be) then you have a bit more thickness on the SEN discs which hopefully would give a good wear and heat absorption rate.

here is a picture bolted together




Just waiting on my springs and also bought a nytralon bushes to help with gear changes.

[JohnTurbo]

Im sure last year it was 15mins at warm up and 10mins in qualifying and final, could be wrong though, also alot of competitors have said that because there is so much traffic you wont get 10mins flat out, you might get 3 laps in without getting blocked if your lucky, worst case scenario theres always the splash and dash.

 

There were 20 min sessions. Many were shortened to 15mins though.

[Gedi]

You can get rotors from here http://www.reyland.co.uk/discs/

I just bought some 308's with j-hooks and am very impressed

[turbotoaster]

Ive spoke to reyland, these are the same make of disc just with different machining

[turbotoaster]

So we are finally into assembly mode!!

Dan sent me this picture over yesterday showing the front end is starting to go together.

Should be rusty free for a good while now!




Also my roll centre adjusters are being made this week, thats one final thing that is ticked off the list, least now I will be able to run the car fairly low to get the ground effects working, chatting to one of the guys who races in the lotus cup they gained on average a 1sec lap by dropping from 90mm height to 60mm so thats a good bit of info.

I will be trying 70/90, which if you take out the increase tyre diameter and roll adjusters would be 95/112 so it should be ok from a roll centre point of view.

Once its all assembled, ive done a couple of trackdays ill look at how the driveshafts are doing, as then I want to lower my engine/gearbox another 25mm to get the centre of gravity closer to the roll centre to reduce pivot leverage.

Also got my 2 pieces of 2m carbon fibre to make up my sill extensions, they will be as wide as I can make them to maximise surface area but not that wide that I cant get out of the vehicle without stepping on them,

[turbotoaster]

rear suspension fitted



One thing we come across when trying to take the brembo caliper brackets off was that you cannot get the bolts out with them hitting the hub, so basically everytime you want to change the bracket you have to push out the hub which wrecks the wheelbearing, which i dont really want to replacing every single year. So what im going to do if cut a circle out of the hub to allow for the bolts to be removed, I will of course cut out another the opposite side so that its balanced, thats a job for when I get home and bolt it in the pedestal drill

thats the rear done, the brake calipers havent been refurbished as they are only staying on for the MOT then moving over to 2 pots which I will refurbish to match the 2 brand new ones I have.



Will also need to get the ali double shear brackets from phoenix and also the brackets for the subframe before any spirited driving.

Gearbox is in, and also EP flywheel so thats another 3.5kg saved, needed to replace the clutch bearing as it was a bit mullered.

look at all the wiring and pipes everywhere, I really need to see if there is a way of simplifying all of it



tested the disc for fitment, couple of tweaks and they will be good to go!


pulled the pilbeam ARB and drop links off to refurb, the drop links have really seen better days so they will be replaced


After this its the rollbar stays and final fitment of the chargecooler and then ill be back to aero tweaking

[turbotoaster]

Little update, its finally back on the ground, will run it on elise wheels while im sorting the rest of the bits out as I will need to buy some posh rubber for my bigger wheels.



Again short term we have cleaned the arb drop links up, ill buy some new bits and make a new set but these should get me about, you can see a before and after, I swear the car lived in a swamp before I got it.



The chargecooler placement is coming along well, about as short a piping as it could realistically be to help with response, still high up which isnt great for centre of gravity but the plan is to drop the engine/gearbox 25mm for lower centre of gravity which should offset that.



Also the vain part of me is going to paint the upper inlet manifold green to match

[turbotoaster]

exhaust back on


Few bits to finish off, took most of the aero off before getting it home, so it kind of looks like its got a big german handle bar mustache with just the canards on.

Look how tiny the 15/16 setup looks on it!




Need to get an MOT and get it mapped, then aero, brakes and tyres, though I have been thinking about slicks recently as it doesnt matter what class i enter this year as its only a couple of OHW and it might actually be cheaper to buy slicks rather than road tyres

[turbotoaster]

Passed its MOT at the weekend so its now legal on the road so no massive panic when I take it for mapping.

In the mean time Im now completely skint, but I have loads of parts so decided to make a start on those.

First up was the lightweight ali fuel tank, changing that on my own on the driveway after work was a bit of fun! It was nearly midnight when I finished.

I have never seen so much dirt in my life on the shear panel, it was literally 10mm thick of sludge, must have been a kilo of the stuff, so that took alot of WD40 and 4 rags to clean up.

Next was getting the old tank out, my hands were to big to get the fuel connectors off from the interior side so I had to drop the tank and slide my hands in from below to get them off, alot of fun when it had 15litres of fuel in it aswell.

Finally out, took me 2hrs to get to this point including cleaning the panel



Next i pulled the fuel pump out to put in the new tank



The big concern I have is that I had an invoice for a 'motorsport' pump before I bought it and since im going to be aiming for 350bhp eventually I didnt want a pump that wasnt good enough, so I was expecting to have to buy a walbro 255LPH pump.......well the good news is thats exactly whats in there so thats one thing off my list

Dropped it back in my new tank and then bolted it all up, replaced all the bolts as I went with new stainless ones to hopefully make sure I dont have any crusty bolts in the future aswell.



Next thing to move onto is the brakes and side sills, but im going to try and get it weighed over the weekend first to see how light the car is.

[fezzasus]

uh. stainless bolts into aluminium = corrosion. Depends how long you plan to use this car but they will lead to penetration of the aluminium. I would change to zinc coated mild steel bolts, as the zinc acts to passivate the aluminium.

[turbotoaster]

ah ok, didnt know that

 

Another little addition.

Ive designed and made some roll centre adjusters to allow me to run the car much lower without destroying the geometry, ive never heard of anyone making these for the lotus elise chassis before, most just spend £6000 on uprights and wishbones which is way out of my budget.

The suspension software says they will work quite well as long as I can control bump and droop which with my high spring rates should be fine

[JohnTurbo]

Popular on the Civic in the form of extended bottom ball joints. I cant see how they work in my head other than making the lower wishbones a better angle.

[turbotoaster]

hey john, look at the previous page, you can see what it does for the roll centres

[Nev]

Well done Lee, you are really forging ahead with first principlist thinking

[turbotoaster]

Have to keep plugging away at it, only thing I might need to do is send the toe link further forward to get it away from the wheel, thats the next task as it will limit how thick my spacers can be.

 

This is one of the reasons I went for a s1 over a s2/vx220

 

Thats with another 16kg to take off that figure
-2kg for front rota wheels that i need to swap the tyres over
-1kg for the water bottle full of water
-5kg swap to carbon roof
-4kg worth of fuel in the tank
-4kg for swapping to ap 2 pots on the rear

So 654kg for a fully turbocharged and chargecooled s1 on the road is not bad going, i think if I was taking it hill climbing/sprinting I could pull another 15kg off that aswell.

[dewismotorsport]

Interesting project, once complete get as much seat time as you can afford, to be able to make the most of all these areo mods you need to be pushing the car hard and know the cars limits. Bedford GT circuit is a good track to test on as there is plenty of run off and nothing really to hit. Personally I'd invest in a better turbo as that cheap Chinese one won't last as often the oil seals go. A garret Gt28 would be a great turbo for this and with a .63 hot side you could have a good balance between good spool and EGT temps.

[turbotoaster]

Im hoping that once all the bits are fitted on, I will have plenty of time to be able to get on track and enjoy it, what ive tried to do is buy parts that i will only need to fit once, so everything going on the car should be a fit and forget item, so once its all on thats when the fun starts.

 

The only thing I will be changing is the turbo, i know which one I want but this cost nearly nothing so I wanted to use it as a mock up turbo and also to see how a k series spool turbos, I will be moving down to a gt2860 sized turbo as I think that will give me a nice powerband and more torquey on the road, but we will see what power it makes on the dyno on very low boost to get an idea of what the car is like.

[Nev]

654 Kg would be super duper light, almost Caterham light but in a "grown up" car

[turbotoaster]

Be good to see how our cars compare on the road nev, you have more power but more weight to go with it, I would imagine the tighter the roads, the better for me due to less inertia.

Ok bit of an update today,

Decided to make a start on my side sills,

Cutting the shape out, the skinny section is on the inside of the front wheel.



made the passenger side first, carbon panel with aluminum angle underneath to help keep the high pressure air from getting underneath, once Ive got the car to the correct race height I will bolt on rubber skirts to the ali to maximise the low pressure zone.



Added a couple tie bars for strength and there isnt any flex anymore so should be fine at speed.

Only thing I need to do is take it all back off, the ali angle to paint black, I will use black resin to seal all the edges then glue on some knock on edging.




Im also going to attach some ali angle along to the back face on top to create a higher pressure above.