Do a Tiburon! I've always liked the way those cars looked.
Do a Tiburon! I've always liked the way those cars looked.
Sorry to hear about the death of the Woo. This makes me sad.:-(
Well if you are going to perform a new build I would go for the Haccent, just to remain different from the crowd. But that is me.
Again sorry to hear about the Daewoo death.
We've run a 1995 Accent (X3) in ChumpCar for a few years and now WRL (Team HACKcent). In case it's helpful, here are a few things we've learned the hard way:
Tiburons look better but weigh significantly more than Accents (our car stripped, caged, and race-ready is about 1900lbs at the moment), however many parts from the Tiburon/Elantra will bolt up. I think the struts from certain years of Tiburon/Elantra will bolt right up, but we ended up making cheapo coilovers with an eBay kit (for a Miata IIRC) so we could cut off the large stock spring perch to allow more room for larger wheels and tires and more camber.
We run a 2.0 Beta engine with the the transmission and drive axles from a 97-99 Accent. Avoid 95-96, the later X3s already had the transmission crossmember in the correct spot and should just bolt in (we had to mod ours). We used the clutch and pressure plate from a '95 Scoupe Turbo and drilled a new hole through the chassis engine mount on the passenger side. It's a tight fit, but that's all we had to do to get the engine in. After several endurance races including a 24 hour roval at Iowa Speedway that really pounded on it, the soft engine mount allowed the bracket to hammer into the stamped steel edge of the chassis engine mount bracket. We ended up modifying the engine mount to be stiffer and have not had any problems since.
Tiburon/Elantra front wheel bearings use a double ball bearing, while the Accent uses opposed tapered roller bearings. The tapered roller bearings seem to hold up much better so we've stayed with Accent spindles. We use NEO grease to keep them running well and haven't had a wheel bearing issue since switching grease.
15" wheels from a first generation Volvo S40 will fit, they even have a provision for the bolt heads from the Accent's captive rotors. We've also used wheels from a 240SX (S13) but we had to open up the center bore just a bit. When we decided to modify the front brakes we moved to a cheap aftermarket wheel to fit over the larger system and allow us to run wider tires.
Brakes have been a big problem for us endurance racing. There aren't any really good brake pad options for Accents or Tiburons in the US. Rather than spend a fortune on custom pads, we just switched to Wilwood part# 120-9333. It's a reproduction of GM Metric calipers, but with a 2" bore that matches the stock Accent master cylinder well. We did have to make our own brackets for them. These calipers are spec for a lot of circle track classes so you can get nearly any pad compound for them inexpensively. Probably not as easy to get in Korea though. We use brake rotors from a 2004 Sonata IIRC. They have the correct bolt pattern, diameter, and thickness to be a good match for the calipers. Accent stock rotors are captive so we removed them and machined down the lip of the hub to fit inside the Sonata rotors. From measurments I am certain the hubs from a '99 Tiburon (RD) would work unmodified with Accent wheel bearings and spindles - I just haven't gotten around to testing it yet.
We run now a 15x8 wheel with low offset to fit over the bigger brakes.
We haven't tried it (yet) but I'm reasonably confident the Delta V6 from a 03-08 Tiburon (GK) would physically fit in the engine bay and only weighs about 40lbs more than the Beta 2.0 from what I've found. Not really sure what I'd do for the transmission and axles. For now we've been very happy with the reliability of the Beta engine.
Great information. Thanks!
I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do next, but this gives me a lot of ideas. Whatever it is, I'm almost certainly going to go Hyundai. The only thing about an Accent that gives me pause is that I'm gonna be driving the thing on the street for a couple years at least. The girlfriend did tolerate a rainbow colored 98 Nubira with improvised rocker panels, though ...
BTW, the guys I race with here in Korea aren't big fans of the Delta. For a Chumpcar application with stockish power levels, it would probably be fine. But with boost/rpm, they haven't held up very well compared to the bulletproof Betas everybody and their brother runs. This is mostly second hand, of course, seeing as my experience has been much more along the lines of trying to keep oil in the bottom half of crappy Daewoo engines.
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