The car had a solid third-in-class finish at the OVR Enduro event and ran very well. The biggest problem that developed was that the breather was spewing oil, so I think a catch can is going to be necessary. Otherwise, everything was running really well and the car was actually pretty fast. I’ve had it out on the road a little bit since getting some newer street tires from the junkyard — I can mount three tires in under and hour with that manual machine, thankyouverymuch — and the performance has been quite good. I’ve got some parts in and I’ve got a bit of a list of fairly minor things that I need to do to make the car complete:
- Blow off valve / surge valve doesn’t appear to be working. I’m getting compressor surge noises when I lift the throttle, so something has to be done about that. I’m thinking that I may uninstall the Forge bov and the injectors and go back to the stock surge valve and the original injectors. That should put a few bucks back in the budget. Either way, I need to keep it parked until I work out the surge valve problem.
- I have an AEM UEGO that I bought used. I want to install it in place of the narrowband to do some tuning and then pull it out for the Challenge (unless I have enough budget room remaining, then I may just leave it in).
- Tim gave me an old oil pressure sensor and gauge that I would like to FMV and install
- I’ve got a big-ole box of parts en-route, in theory, which should include a catch can, boost gauge, MSD coil, and a short shifter. The catch can needs to be installed for sure, and I would really like to add the boost gauge to the dash. I’m thinking that where the radio used to be would be a good place to put in a filler panel with holes for the three gauges.
- I bought a set of ebay coilover sleeves and springs to try to stiffen things up without a drop. The SRT-4 springs are just way too high and don’t give me enough suspension travel right now, and will certainly not be any good for the autocross in Gainesville. It looks like I’m going to need to grind off the perches from the KYBs, my only concern is that the spring rate is going to be so much higher than stock and that’s going to cause the rebound damping to be more than the struts were likely designed for, so I’ll probably tear through the KYBs pretty fast. If I can get them to last through the end of September, I’m okay though.
- I need to find something to cover up the door panels. I’m thinking that some formica just might do the trick.
- There’s way too much heat under the hood. The first thing I need to try is to increase the amount of induction I can get from the cowl by raising the hood pins in the back a bit to cant the hood forward. From there, I might look in to cutting some vents.
- I’ve started to try to insulate the hot-side intercooler pipe a bit. For the Enduro event, I loosely wrapped it in a couple layers of aluminium foil and that seemed to work really well. I have some fiberglass insulation and some large clamps that I might try to use to cool it further. I’m trying to get that rubber coupler in the rear to hold up longer.
- It would be nice to have a working fuel gauge, but that’s a pretty much last-minute thing. I can always carry a gas can on the trip to Florida so I can figure out how many miles I can get on a tank.
- I should fix the driver-side window net