I’ve been running the car, but haven’t written much about it so far. There have been two events in OVR (with another two rained out) and I also went to a National Challenge event in Alabama. I’ve led my class and been placing high overall in the OVR events and in AL, I placed second in class and second overall. So, things are looking pretty good, but I need to work a little bit on my dry(er) surface performance.
I still haven’t gotten the Phantom Grip installed yet, but I really need to have that done soon, so I might need to make that a priority. I did put new exhaust on the car, which has worked out well. When I was in AL, I managed to rip the exhaust completely off the car, so I needed to repair that. I bought about $170 worth of 3″ pipe and a Magnaflow glasspack resonator from Jegs, borrowed a flux core welder and built up a new exhaust system:
It sounds great and flows much better — I actually had to enrich the fuel map a bit to compensate. Amazingly, it’s making significantly more power, but it actually much quieter, so it’s a win all the way around. My next step with the exhaust is to replace the O2 housing, since that’s still necked-down to 2.25″. I’m thinking that I can do that with a flange, some 3″ pipe, and a weldable O2 bung.
In addition to the pipe, I welded up cross members that are bolted to the floorpan so that even if the exhaust comes loose again, it will not be able to drop to the ground. That means I may need to re-weld it or re-attach it at some point, but I don’t have too much worry about destroying any of it.
After the event on 28JUN, however, I discovered that it doesn’t quite give enough clearance on the rear suspension:
I really thought that if anything bad would happen, it would be the exhaust pipe caving in, but apparently the pipe was stronger than the control arm. I have some spares, so that’s not a problem, but I’m going to need to alter that back bit of the exhaust to compensate. My thought is to first cut the straight section that runs right-to-left in front of the gas tank, rotate the aft section by a couple negative degrees, and then re-weld. While that will clear the control arms, the rest of the exhaust will then angle upwards towards the bottom of the body. To remedy that, I’ll need to cut the post-suspension part of the exhaust and weld in a slight downward angle to level it back out.