Been busy with this recently - Building the fastest FWD car... ever....

[BorHor]

A friend of mine contacted me a few weeks ago to help him finish up his car for Super Lap Battle. The real chalange came down when I found out I had a bit more then a week to button up the car. It was a huge task but it seems like it is coming together.

Original thread http://www.supraforums.com/forum/showthread.php?t=611714

First entry:

48 hours of travel. I landed in San Francisco 17 hours after I left home, changed planes to Las Vegas to return to the FXMD shop. Finished up some work there, loaded the truck with the rest of the car parts, tires, etc and got back on the road. Drove to LA and picked up the hard top, then up to the Bay Area unloaded and finally made it…. Need sleep

Just want to say two things:
People always ask me why not build the AWD? Because I wanted to prove a point and as we build momentum and have the car "perfected" I might go to AWD, its basically a bolt on deal for us but at that kind of power level, to survive the abuse, it's a minimum $12,000 bolt on deal. We weren’t going to show up and beat the fastest time attack cars in the world. We just didn't have the money and time to do that, so if its going to take years to build up, why not win along the way? Then know you have built a solid foundation.

The other thing people always ask me is why we built a convertible. The short answer is… rules and it was the car I already had. There are also some mid term aerodynamic advantages until you build the perfect car, I did a big write up about the aerodynamic effects of a soft top and designed this car's body using computational fluid dynamics (computer wind tunnel). While it increases the total drag and total lift of the car, it also shifts the balance forward. The front actually has more downforce than a hard top and the rear has a lot more lift which we could overcome for now with a larger rear wing. This was just a shortcut for us to pick up frontal down force until we could complete the development of a custom roof. Custom roof are only allowed for cars that came as Convertible. In the end this will be a huge aerodynamic and weight advantage for us.

Early this year and the end of last year we realized we had a serious problem with gearbox reliability. Working with John Shepherd to develop a solution, we have been trying to find an affordable and strong solution for DSM guys. If it can live for what we do, it will take just about anything.

Shepherd built us a special new gearbox with a spray bar/cooler system and we went to the stronger AWD gearset. John Wagliardo, who was crew chief last year for Matt's other car helped out with the FXMD guys and finished up fitting the replacement gearbox along with the FXMD crew in Las Vegas.

Here is the start of the to do list

Looks simple.. reality, a lot of work.

While we were in there I got this little Tilton triple plate clutch, damn the pedal feels lighter than stock now?!?

Needed to do a complete overhaul of the Data Acquisition system so I sold off all the old bits and bought the man system, motec dash

This summer I finished the development of the aerodynamic body and reproduced it in lightweight materials. The previous parts were all prototypes and were extremely heavy.

I also worked out some final revisions based on my CFD model to a few parts of the car.

Changed the ramps before the hood louvers to decrease drag with the same downforce:

added a lip to the front fenders which also picked up a bit of frontal down with a very minor drag increase. This decreases the pressure on the backside of the fender and its tuned to be close to boundary layer height of this specific piece so the drag increase is very small

the body was originally very focused only on frontal downforce, now we are moving the focus toward a better balance once the more important frontal downforce targets were achieved, we are also moving on to drag optimization and having it setup well for an AWD car since the kit will be sold through FXMD. As we start to optimize the car, I think it's real performance will be realized.

Designed some new rear fenders:

I arrived here at the KBR shop. Unloaded the huge quantity of parts and got to work. My Crew consists of

Boris Lim, Mechanical
Bret Collmer, Fab
Steve the KBR Fab guy who is also working on the huge list of fab jobs that have to be done.

Still working on the new rear wing data...need to finish that soon!

right now I'm testing how it behaves in post stall conditions for pitch sensitivity stuff....

DSMLAB sent me a prototype of what they are working on. This is oil pan baffling. My car at high G's was starving the oil pickup. I had to fix this as the car gets faster or I will start to destroy engines:

We were still seeing a lot of crankcase pressure so a friend of mine Kevin Kovatch at Real Coatings is building me a special valve cover with improved venting. One of the infamous problems for DSM which I lost an engine to once is that bead blast media gets suspended behind the valve cover baffles. Kevin designed and built a whole new baffle system to improve ventilation, decrease weight and allow him to 100% clean any media behind it.

Bret built a new backing plate/mount for the motec dash

This is Ken La...he's tearing out the last of the factory wiring harness and installing the MoTeC dash. He's been at this about 2 days so far. Trying to get everything crispy clean with the electrical system so it's easier to work on and find problems.

This top will have started life as the Autokonexion hard top for miata. When we finish with it, it will be something else entirely. It's angles and aero were actually really close to optimal for what I was trying to achieve

So much work so little time. This car loves to surprise me every time I start working on a different section.

The car is still in little bits and pieces and pretty much looks like a pile haha but the guys are doing great work and its coming together. There are about 6 people working on the car when they can. So I have to be there when the first guy shows up and the last guy leaves plus moving the car around and picking up parts so its tough to get posts and take pics. I'll try to be better about it.

I did get a pic of the finished valve cover from Kevin at Real Coatings... BLiNg!

It is actually coming together.

LOL had to dig through shit to find this laptop just so we can power up MoTec software almost as old as I am.

---------- Post added at 08:27 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:16 PM ----------

It is actually coming together.

LOL had to dig through shit to find this laptop just so we can power up MoTec software almost as old as I am.

Got a quick update!

Engine has been coming back together piece by piece

Huge accusump to keep oil in the engine

Boris changing the suspension springs

Bret making modifications to the miata hard top to fit on the eclipse. All said and done the hard top conversion compared to a factory car -180lbs. Which makes a convertible almost 50lbs ligther than a hard top with a fiberglass hatch.

Some more pics and notes (sorry posting fast)


Bret and Boris hustling to put the car together

Calbrating temp sensors the hardcore way! Ken has been putting in over time to get all the electrical working right.

Still chasing down electrical gremlins

test rig to calibrate pressure sensors

Here it is! Got delivered to the body shop at 8am this morning

For the nerds: This is my CFD render rig at FXMD shop... counting my laptop there is a total of 22 cores. It pulls 1.2kw wall power at full tilt and can complete a full car high mesh density render in about 1 day!

Now I got the car out of my hair for two days and the systems are running non stop to work out some last minute changes to the two FXMD cars. I'm minding renders and building models in soldiworks...

Now the car is at paint right now.

 

[benchwarmer]

Dude, that's pretty awesome. Definitely keep us updated on this.

 

[honestabe]

LOL! Poor Eclipse. It looked better stock

 

[grimreaper]

Looks sweet! Put those guys to work on a supra!

 

[gsxr141]

that's cool as hell.

 

[IJ.]

Fastest ever??

 

[benchwarmer]

Well if the crank alone can walk imagine what the whole car can do!