Rocinante, The Hyundai Avante

Thank you, sir. I'm excited to make this thing cooler and cooler.

First step in making this car cooler is fixing the brakes.

When I bought the car there was noise from the front brakes. I figured it was just rust on the rotors from sitting for a couple months. That and the pads looked fine. However, I do trackdays, which means this needed to change.

Cross drilled rotors make me unhappy. Visions of a rotor exploding at the end of the front straight somehow create a sense of unrest in me. Weird, I know.

Also, driving around for a couple days didn't make the noise go away. Hmmmm.

Cross drilled rotors .... grrr. Still, no sign of what was making the noise. Pulled off the rotor and found this on the backside.

For whatever reason, this car had absolutely lunched the inside pads while only taking about half the outside pad.

Anyway, I got super lucky because the dudes whose shop I used just happened to have a set of Grandeur slotted rotors that a customer had ordered but never picked up.

Also, during this little tear down I discovered that I have wheel spacers at all four corners and the two piston calipers from the Elisa (v6 Tuscani).

The spacers stay unless the torque steer gets silly (remember, I've still never gotten this thing to full boost) because they make the car look mean. The calipers stay unless they are the reason for that weird pad wear.

ssswitch wrote: It's a good thing I held off on buying a new monocle, because I am fully expecting the existing one to fly off of my face and land in my champagne out of surprise.

Hahaha!

I officially need to make monocles and champagne a regular part of my life!

Also, somebody needs to put this in the magazine.

I've already ordered the new monocle but it won't bring back the rabbit-fur top-hat that I punched my arm through in surprise.

Man, someone dumped a ton of money into that thing.

Doesn't Garrett write the A/R on the cold side housing?

Worn inside pad on a sliding caliper is usually a stuck caliper so only/primarily the piston pad is working

2.0 right? That's the best version of that car IMO. The V6's were just too heavy and lacking.

Yessir.

In stock form, I probably prefer the V6. That said, the beta is a much tougher engine and handles upgrades much better. I'm still breaking it in, but the thing is frickin fast. I can't wait to see what happens when I get it up above 5k rpm.

I just checked the turbo. It's definitely a Garrett GT28. On the hot side it says ar .82.

That can't be right, can it?

DaewooOfDeath wrote: I just checked the turbo. It's definitely a Garrett GT28. On the hot side it says ar .82. That can't be right, can it?

It's aftermarket, so anything is possible.

Break in period is finished. Redline is available.

I suspected this thing was fast but man, I believe the best phrase is to describe what just happened is "E36 M3s and gets." 100 mph just sort of happened on accident.

Pictures coming soon -

Long story short, the turbo is working correctly, I'm getting better and better at rust repair and powrsteering is, after all, a desireable thing.

Also, it doesn't feel quite right calling the Tuscani Rocinante since it is a different car. That said, they share a lot of parts and I feel the Tuscani is a continuation of the Rocinante project. As such, the blue car is hereby christened "Brocinante."

A few more minor upgrades since last time. I've got new pillow mount camber plates (by "new" I of course mean "fished out of a dumpster") that let me dial in 2.5 degrees negative.

Also swapped on fresh metal for all the panels with rust, pictures coming, and played with shock settings.

Alright! Here we go. More rust repair because rust repair is the holy sacrament around which my life revolves.

This is what the car looked like when I bought it. Looks pretty solid, no? Well, look a little closer at the slight roughness above the front wheel. That's a rust hole. It had brothers and sisters, as well. A couple on the undercarriage and on the hood.

However, I am a resourceful person and an artistic genius, so I set about correcting these minor and barely visible blemishes.

The result, I'm sure you'll concur, looks much better. I was going for an avante guard style called "female repellent" and in this sense, I feel it's real progress. The fender is NOS from a Hyundai specialist and the hood is a cast off from a friend of a friend's racecar project. It might be hideous, but at least it's no longer rotting away.

Luckily I found an insurance repair place that was willing to do a respray for a decend cost and now it looks like this.

If you want to see the full write up, check this out. https://bengarrido.com/2017/02/16/fear-and-loathing-and-elderly-korean-cars/

Have you ever gone to the dyno telling yourself that you have too much power as is and should really focus on turbo lag?

I did that today and so, naturally, the car just got bumped from a 12psi spring to 20 psi, received a more aggressive timing curve and went from 220 whp to 262 whp.

That said, my tuner was able to get a ton more low end torque and massively reduce the brutality of the power delivery. The turbo used to really whack hard at 4k and then fall off, which made lots of wheelspin and a hell of a time judging throttle inputs.

I'd kind of suspected the original tune was a very conservative canned tune and the dyno session confirmed my suspicions. AFR was as low as 10.7:1 (now low 11's), we where able to bump the timing pretty substantially across the board, we added 8 psi and still aren't up against the knock threshold.

Now, first is almost useable, second sort of elegantly glides into controlled spin and third gear is a lovely combination of super rapid and wonderfully controllable. It feels about as fast as my uncle's old LT4 Vette.

It still doesn't hit full boost until 4k rpm, but it's making 200 lb ft as low as 2700 rpm and maintains good power all the way to 7k, which is higher than I rev it anyway.

Pointless vanity shot^ What I started with. ^

What I left with. ^ I also discovered that some value between 12 and 20 psi is the pressure at which every single vacuum line on the intake manifold blows off, which left me with a rather frightening 5k rpm idle there until I figured out the problem. Many hose clamps and zip ties later, order has been restored.

Track day report!

Good news:

1. 120 mph down the 1000 ft back straight.

2. I ran almost identical lap times with some heavy duty machines - M3/M4, TT RS, 370Z.

3. Nothing broke, except for the crappy battery. Nothing got hot, except for the brakes (which may have caught on fire ... twice).

4. Once I pulled the front swaybar, handling was pretty nicely balanced.

5. I went to the track with a friend, and was faster than him.

Bad news:

1. Legendary one tire fires. I had wheelspin through third gear. Third gear is good to over 90 mph.

2. Motormounts need poly bushings baaaad.

3. My 620 treadware tires don't cut it. Pretty obvious, I know.

4. I went to the track with a student ... and lost. My honor is forever besmirched.

More here..

So I decided to do something about the whole "brakes catching fire" thing and fabricated some brake cooling ducts.

Here's a link for now, more details later. https://bengarrido.com/2017/04/14/in-the-name-of-smaller-car-fires/

You may already know, I have heard that the 2 piston calipers and slightly larger rotors from the '04 up xg350 is a bolt on for the tibs. I believe this info enough that I have a set of xg brakes sitting in the garage waiting to try it out whenever i get off my lazy a@# and try it. There are a couple LSDs out there for this trans as well.

What are you using for engine management? I've got two elantras. They told me that they've come to an agreement that one of them needs a turbo. The mechanicals of adding a turbo are easy enough but I've never found a simple/good solution for management. No one supports these cars as they were never honda famous.

In reply to appliance_racer:

Mine already has twin piston calipers off the V6 Tiburon/Tuscani with XG350 rotors.

My transmission is actually non standard as well. In Korea they made some EF Sonatas with Beta engines, as opposed to the Mitsu 4g63 and Delta V6 stuff the US got. Mine has a Sonata beta transmission that's supposed to be the toughest bolt on 5 speed.

The holy grail is the Tiburon/Tuscani beta six speed, but that never made it out of Asia.

My engine tune is just done on a hacked stocker. I didn't do the tune, so I don't have a ton of details. I could find out more if you like, though.

Okay, so pictures of my brake cooling hack thing.

First thing I noticed ... polycarbonate is some great E36 M3! I'd never really made anything from plastic before, but polycarbonate sheeting is cheap, tough, easy to cut and easy to shape with some heat.

Anyway, I definitely needed to do something for brake cooling ducts because I kept getting brake fires. When it comes to driving style, I'm definitely one of the "more balls than brains" types. The easy button here would be to pop out my fog lights and stick some hose in the holes.

I didn't want to do that for two reasons. First, I like my fog lights. Second, in my experience, aerodynamics is often an area on cars you can cheaply improve. I noticed that the stock Tuscani bumper and aftermarket intercooler setup allowed a great deal of air to escape around the edges of the intercooler end tanks, rattle around against the core support and then blow uselessly out of the wheel wells. In other words, a bunch of air was causing drag and doing absolutely no work for cooling. Also, by allowing the air to escape between the core support and the intercooler end takes, the air pressure in front of my oil cooler, intercooler and radiator was lower than it could be, decreasing the efficiency of all three. The last two pictures above show the stock bumper and the gaps that were allowing leakage around the intercooler. Basically, I needed to build something that would manage airflow around the corners of the "mouth."

The guys at Team Spark had a really cool idea for mounting the high temp hose to the back of the ducts - that's a sink drain. We cut out the center of the drain and then spread the "tongs" out wide. The high temp hose then went inside and we clamped the entire thing together.

Here you can see how the polycarbonate blocks the leaks while forcing all the air in the nose to either cool the brakes or go through the intercooler/radiator/oil cooler. All mounted up and tucked inside the bumper. The stock bumper's contours block the flow from escaping around the outside of the duct, preserving efficiency. Another area of concern I wanted to address was the tiny, upper grill inlet. I can only guess this was a styling decision on Hyundai's part because the airflow through here blows directly on the hood latch and upper radiator support. The area behind this upper grill is also connected to the empty space the lower bumper inlet blows into, meaning any airflow flowing through the upper inlet creates a higher pressure region for the lower intake, limiting flow through the lower inlet. In other words, that inlet is somewhere between useless and slightly harmful. So, fixification time.
Clear polycarbonate block off plates mean this modification is basically invisible.

The next step in the car's aero development is going to be building a fiberglass plug from the original hood and then modifying that for proper venting. Hopefully, the blocked off upper grill will help create a slight vacuum and suck air up and out through the vents.

Excellent work on the brake ducts.

You mentioned somewhere that part of the tiburon/Elantra under steer issue was due to a toe change in the rear. Did you ever devise a solution for that?

In reply to appliance_racer:

Thanks.

I think the Tiburons run a significantly lower rear ride height (from the for aft link's perspective) than the Elantras. As such, the link is pretty close to parallel on the Tuscani (Tiburon) which means it doesn't toe in nearly as much.

You could do the same thing on the Elantra by lowering the rear suspension and keeping the front stock height but that would look seriously goofy and if you lower the front, the roll center will go subterranean and your camber curve will deteriorate very badly.

If I still had the Elantra, I would modify the chassis side for-aft link mount to lower it an inch or two. The idea is to get the link parallel to the ground so that there's very little toe effect on compression or extension. The Tiburon/Tuscani doesn't seem to have that problem as the link is near parallel as it sits.

Did you ever check proper operation of the calipers? If they're a sliding type and not sliding smoothly you will wear the inside pad and could overuse it to the point of lighting it up :)

In reply to DaewooOfDeath:

Thanks so much for the info. I'm happy to see other people playing with Hyundais.

In reply to jfryjfry:

I got it moving a couole months ago. I should probably check again.

In other news,

a) I have replaced the stock wheels with some new, subtler rolling stock painted a barely noticeable shade of bright green.

b) I need to get better at editing video.

c) The brake ducts super duper work! Last track session before the duct install I lit the brakes on fire twice. Now, with bigger, stickier tires, 50 more horsepower and later braking points not only did I not have a fire, but I could barely even smell the pads.

d) I need to change the spark plugs because these ones are leaking. Yes, evidently, that's a thing. (Look carefully at plug three)

e) Took three seconds off my previous best lap time at Injae Speedium.

f) Fixed the motormounts and man, were they hilarious.

g) My greatest enemies have challenged me to a setup challenge. Do it our way, they say. It'll be faster, they say. My brow is so furrowed right now you could almost plant corn on my forehead.

h) The turbo lag is probably costing me 2 seconds a lap. Grrr. Still don't know why a relatively small GT28 is not spooling until 4k RPM.

i) Man, there was some cool stuff on the track with me. Even better, all the expensive stuff was slower than me!

j) Only two cars drove away from me all day. Here they are.

That orange Kia Pride (Rio in the US) was 15 seconds a lap faster than me!