Last Saturday Justin and I had a mini wrench day. I had taken apart the front suspension in preparation for upgrading to mk3 stuff. Bigger bearing, bigger rotor, slightly more available parts. (And provisions for ABS, which I have a spare mk60 setup that I keep pushing). I had been waiting for some parts from Ground Control that almost showed up once.
After another attempt, I received new ball seat washers for the camber plates and a top spring perch as the one that was in there was mangled to hell after bouncing around on top of an unbolted mac strut.
In a crazy hodgepodge of parts we now have a decently setup suspension;
Mk1 control arms with mk3 ball joints
Mk3 knuckles/hubs/bearings from a 2.0 4 lug car
mk2 early strut housings (the later cars used full assemblies) w/ KONI Race inserts and ebay threaded spring perches
I let Justin do the math for how low we were, how much travel we'd need/use and all the other fun junk that I am too ADD for. We're real close to the bumpstop on compression but we're also real close to fender contact. We've taken the assumption that the bumpstops will now be a consumable. Hopefully a rare consumable.
The old nonadjustable stuff and severely worn konis;
We then did a VERY rough corner weighting. As we can only adjust the front that's what we did. Again, Justin did the math because he's got the engineer brain.
I'm pretty sure that was before adjusting, didn't get a picture of after.
Then we got to the brakes. The mk3 knuckle has wider caliper mounting bosses so our adapter for the wilwoods won't work anymore. Justin did more more and he's going to draw up a bracket for me to 3d print and then we can worry about how to get a more metallic version. But we're on the right track! I have some bract ducts to route and then it can go back on the ground to see what condition the engine is in and hopefully get some seat time before the end of the year. Not race time but even autox or commandeering a costco parking lot late at night.
Driven5
PowerDork
9/12/24 5:52 p.m.
Not sure why that first drop onto the scales was ~15 lb lighter, but the weights eventually settled pretty consistently around 2305 lb. This is all with a little under 200 pound driver and not-full (1/2-ish?) tank. While we said we weren't going to chase 'perfect', where we stopped turned out we were within 1 lb of 'ideal' on each corner.
730 660
478 436
If we really wanted to get crazy, I think we could probably bump the left spring rates up (or rights down) by 50F/25R and balance out the L/R roll control.
And that is it. This past weekend Lucky Dog finished out it's Pacific Northwest Championship series at the Ridge and we... were not there.
It was just a lousy weekend schedule wise for all of us. One of our drivers got married (congrats) another of our drivers was officiating that wedding (congrats... I guess) and I was moving house. With the car's suspension upgrades not completed we decided the best course of action was to sit this one put.
There were 4 events with a total of 8 races. We managed to compete in 3 of those races. 4 of those races we chose not to enter and one of them we retired prior to starting because of mechanical issues.
Of the 199 cars eligible for the PNW Championship, we finished in 121st place.
Butt weight... their's moor.
3 of our team couldn't make it to the last race, but we have four drivers. A few weeks back I found a team looking for drivers for the ridge. They had an 80's Rabbit, a similar enough car. I got in touch with them and referred our drivers. A deal was struck and Henry would join team Hello Kitty for this race.
You know what they say, whenever one door closes another one opens, other than that it's a pretty good car.
We are eagerly awaiting the release of the 2025 schedule and rulebook.
Will our team of intrepid heros finally finish the Zippy Zonda or will they face another season in Shelly the Scirocco?
Place your bets now.
Finally got around to printing up the new caliper bracket that Justin designed. Almost perfect on the first go.
This lets us run a comparatively large 11.1" Corrado rotor on the newer knuckle instead of the little 9.5" rotor we were using. This coupled with some ducts and I think we should be okay on the brake/hubs front. Obviously we're going to make it out of metal now that we know it fits.
Well Halloween has passed us by and we now enter the long dark.
The current plan is to get Shelly into better fighting shape and continue to run her while picking away at the Zonda in the background.
I am awaiting material and a finished design for the new brake caliper mounting brackets so I can machine up a half dozen of them. The good news they are the same left to right, but I'm still a worrier. And custom part should have ample spares. I plan on making 6 brackets.
There is talk of ditching the weird mechanical injection in favour of a megasquirt MPFI system. would go a long way towards improving the performance.
The new schedule dropped yesterday. 5 events in the PNW championship including 1 new track.
The Championship will open on February 14th at Sonoma. We will probably skip this one.
April 25th Brings us back to the Ridge.
June 7th at Oregon Raceway Park
Then a quick turnaround to July 17th At Portland International Raceway.
Finally some breathing room before the season wraps up back at the Ridge on September 12th.
Will we make all of those? Will we make any of those? Who knows.
Sponsor wanted.
3 months of the off season have passed and have we been busy? No. Not really. We met up over the past weekend to point ourselves in a direction.
During the last season our biggest problem was reliability. specifically wheel bearings. We upgraded to mark 3 jetta units that are stronger and easier to replace. That nessesitated a new brake setup. With the new caliper brackets we would hop from a 9.5 to an 11 inch rotor. Quite an improvement. We'd just need a machinist to make the brackets.
Wait, I am that.
Unfortunately half the machines in my shop wet the bed at exactly the same time. Some searching and we found a shop that will make them at a reasonable rate.
Ian spent some time fabbing a set of cooling ducts to keep everything running well.
That should help.
The other problem that reared it's head in Portland was an intermittent loss of power at the top end. It's coming and going leads us to believe that it is either fuel or spark.
Our car is equipped with a Bosch K-Jetronic CIS fuel injection system.
Correction: it was. The Jetronic meters fuel in much the same way a toilet does. So we took it and placed it over there...
Up for sale if you want it.
The key to this change in direction is this glorious fuel rail.
This will allow us to run a megasquirt for true sequential fuel injection.
This will also allow us to run a coil-on-plug setup for spark.
I don't know if this will make the car faster, but it will certainly allow it to live up to it's full potential.
Awesome, should be a nice upgrade, although I do have a soft spot for k-jet.
