Hey, I totally forgot to show you guys the new Where2Race Motorsports T-shirt. Check it out, these turned out awesome.



Get your hands on one today, $18 shipped to your door. I only have a limited supply of Large and X-Large at the moment. Drop me a message at info@where2race.com for details.

-Britain

I want to give you guys a quick update as I prepare for the SCCA Nationals in Lincoln.

At the Packwood NT, we continued to struggle with lack of rear grip. Although I have tried several adjustments, springs, sway bars, etc., I just can't get the balance like I want it. If I compensate for the rear grip, then the car suffers from understeer. If I adjust that out, I have trouble keeping the rear end under control. Either way, the current set-up was just not working.

Therefore, short of completely changing the suspension to something from the 21st century (that is coming soon), I decided to take my tire contingency winnings and get a set of Hoosier Radials. For reference, my old set-up was 23.0x9.5x15 cantilever fronts and 22.0x10.0x16 rears, both bias ply in R35B compound. My new set-up are 23.0x10.0x15 R25B fronts and 23.5x12x16 R75 rears. The thought here is that the softer fronts will allow them to heat up faster and provide good front grip and the rears will last longer and provide more mechanical grip from the wider width.

In order to fit the larger wheel tires properly, I was forced to rebuild the rear wheels. I first disassembled the 3-piece wheels.



Unfortunately the older wheel barrels were not BBS and where actually welded together at the seam. I therefore had to source 5" inner halves and 7" outer halves to make this work.

Here are the wheels assembled. Gotta love the "dish"



Now I was able to mount them to the car and see exactly how far they were going to extend past the fenders.



For the fender profile, I decided to follow the profile of the tire instead of maintaining the fender profile. Here is my quick and dirty wheel profiling tool.



The first cut was actually the hardest part. This isn't the best picture of the procedure that I used because I actually created a pattern out of hardboard as a reference while I cut.



Here is the approximate location of the rear tire, there is about 2" or clearance all around.



The 12" tires extend out about 1.5", hence the reason to cut the rear fenders.

The next day I was able to finally get the new tires mounted. They look awesome.



With them mounted on the car, you can compare the size of the 12" to the older 10" wheel.



Check out the "dish"



Here is a great picture of my daughter that JP had posted in the paddock.



And mounted on the car...so sexy!



Final shot with the car on the ground and all the new sponsor stickers added.



I then took the car to get the alignment changed from a Bias Ply set-up (i.e. minimal camber) to a Radial set-up (i.e. maximum camber). We were able to get about 2.6degrees of camber all around and the toes just about where I wanted it. We have now ran into the issue that all the suspension adjustments are maxed out and I can't adjust them any more if I wanted to. The rear has no shims left and the front is using a set of Wevo CamberKing plates that have the shock mount offset inboard. If I want further adjustment then I will have to go a different route with the suspension.

I will get some more pictures of the car in action this weekend in Packwood. This will be my only test & tune opportunity before I leave for Lincoln next Sat.

-Britain

Holy crapola that is alot of wheel & tire back there. Your a skinny dude but you sure have a fat ass . Seriously though those really are wide. Hopefully it will help with your rear end issues. At least until the suspension fixes for next year. I look forward to the packwood pics & to hear how it feels with this new setup

She's a cutie. Daddy's girl too, I'd suspect.

Why do you need all that power, anyway? Couldn't you get grip back by just dialing back on the boost?

Slippery slope. And really cool stuff.

A new test for the 901 trans. It's gotta be gettin' close to its point of maximum abuse.

I was thinking the same thing. That's a whole lot of tire back there. Keeping my fingers crossed your light enough for the 901 to handle it.

Looking awesome as usual, Britain! Can't wait to see it in person next week. Go get 'em!
Mark D.
P.S. Are you running the Pro finale?

Thanks guys...new set-up feels great. Just gotta drive it harder with the extra grip.

Not attending the ProSolo Finale.

-Britain

Christ that looks mean!!

Great work Britain, I can't image how hard that first cut was!!

YPAF, even if it's JP's ole sheetbox ;-)

He's in Lincoln NE this week for Nationals...

Wish him Luck!!!

Well...you win some and you lose some.

The experience at the 2011 SCCA Solo Nationals was an interesting one. First off, the drive was very long...we made it 18hrs to Cheyenne, WY the first day and crashed at my brothers place and then another 6.5hrs the second day. Next time I might give myself a bit more time to make the drive to make it less painful.

Anyway, we when arrive we were overwhelmed at the size of the place. The paddock area alone was 0.7miles long. There were great looking cars and towing rigs everywhere. I was pitted next to Leeds Gullicks 914 and Jacksons 914 was a few rows over...kinda cool.

So we started off on Monday running the practice course. Car is running great despite the higher altitude (~3500ft), thank god for modern day fuel injection and a turbocharger. However, right away we starting picking up more and more understeer at the tires heated up. We went back to increase the rear spring rate and try it again and are still struggling with an on-throttle push that made the car very undrivable. That evening we made further changes like moving all the ballast plus some (50lbs) to the front trunk of the car and putting the front sway bar on full soft. All of this made small incremental improvements but made for a difficult weekend.

My conclusion on what happen is that once the rear tires got some heat in them they were very grippy on the concrete in the hot conditions and were overwhelming the front tires. We were unable to experience these types of conditions locally in Packwood due to the lower grip surface.

Here is a video of my runs on both the West course and the East course. You can clearly see how bad I was struggling with the car which is why my times were so off the pace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA7kQjCvp2s

Wow, I got tired just watching that run...its one long slalom.

Maybe you need more tire up front, or less in the rear.

Rich

Now...we must move on and further the development of the car. One thing that was pretty obvious at Nationals is that the 40+ year old Porsche suspension has some serious shortcomings when compared to modern cars. Therefore, I have decided to go down the path of converting the chassis to a double a-arm set-up and I am starting with Lotus components.

Just before I left for Nationals, I was able to locate a wrecked Lotus in Utah and it worked out perfectly to swing by on the way back from Lincoln.

I was able to get the front and rear suspension parts from. I was also able to source the both subframes. The rear unbolts from the car and the front required a little sawzall action.



Here are all the components I sourced from the wrecked Lotus. The passenger front upper control arm and the passenger rear lower control arms are bent and new ones will need to be sourced.



Passenger rear components. This arm is actually bent and will be replaced


Front passenger components. Everything check out here...still need to get the proper 14mm star bit to remove the broken wheel center from the hub. Check out the broken shock.


Front driver side components. Everything here checked out fine.


Driver side rear...all good here as well.


This is the front subframe assembly after about 3 hours of trimming with the combination plasma cutter, sawzall, cut-off wheel. That is the scrap pile in the back I must say that Lotus engineers did a great job in packaging on these cars. All the pick-up points appears to be intact and should be good for mock-up.


All excess material trimmed around each suspension pick-up point in order to aid in bolting and unbolting the components during mock-up.


All the components cleaned up and laid out. Having a little issue removing the rusted bolts holding the rotors on the hubs, I will tackle that again later.


This project will start off a little slower than my engine conversion because I have lot of measuring and mocking up to do. In addition, the car will attend a few more local events before getting torn apart for the winter.

Stay tuned,
-Britain

More tire in front is the proper response

The 10" rear tires were not enough to hold down the power of the engine...which is why I went to wider rear tires.

The front suspension suffers from too much scrub if I go wider with the current set-up...hence the need for double a-arm set-up.

-Britain

More, better, faster.... Oh Yea!

Do you intend to use the front bulkhead assembly from the Lotus? If so, how do you intend to attach it to the 914 tub?

Wild project! Like JP has said in the past, that is one slippery slope!

Good luck with this and thanks for sharing. This is a great thread.

Nope, that bulkhead assembly is just for mock-up purposes. I will fabricate my own to fit the chassis.

-Britain

Awesome! Progress is good

Best thing you could do for a 914 is put a real suspension from lotus on the thing!

Can you legally put rear suspension on the 914 in XP?

I think the Boxster had a "slight" handling edge over your car on the West course.

2100 lb Boxster getting done on West course with 200 HP.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bSamEj-9CA

Well maybe East course too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ0r1g2HgOM

FYI we were running 315 rears and 285 fronts. A6's rule!

Slight handling edge is an understatement...I had horrible understeer that I couldn't dial out. In addition, when I got back to Portland I determined that I didn't have full throttle either. Even with my 40year old suspension I shouldn't have been that far back behind the Boxster.

-Britain

Lol! You seemed to have "throttle issues" at San Diego when the boxster cleared you by couple seconds too. A lot more development has gone into that Boxster since you ran against it at National Tour. We got 10 more hp by fixing headers and by intalling more free flow exhuast, sorted suspension with full mono balls and better GT3 rear arms and while it was only 60 lbs lighter than when you saw it in San Diego it has far more weight up front. Over 100 lb change in front weight bias. I spent many weekends after getting it back from Brad pulling more weight off back so we could put radiators back up front. Based on few straights in video your car was getting to speed fine. As you know West course wasnt about power but holding speed. Your corner entry speeds were much slower then both me and my co-driver. We were carrying more consistent speed in slaloms as well. And the gearing with 18s was Eriks plan that paid off big.

Look at Tobys Times against Zust in 2010 NT in his FP BMW when he ran XP. He cleared your FP car by even more than his co driver and Evan in the Boxster.

http://www.scca.com/documents/resultfiles/results16.pdf

Zust only beat him by second and a half. Boxster beat Toby the new FP national champion on the West course this year. Don't underestimate the car it is very quick. I can assure you Boxster put appropriate distance on you. You will see once you get real suspension under you. But then we were prepared and well rested for Nationals with a car that we froze development on months before nationals. We had weekly calls etc to get it set. Had all spares we needed too and then Chose the right driver to get job done. Fast guy with mid engine driving experience. We didn't show up to Nationals to sort the Boxster.

Once you get real suspension under the "914" you should be able to keep up with the Boxster. You are on the right track but have to say you are doing exactly what I said would have to be done to make a 914 nationally competitive. I didn't have time or resources to spend several years developing a full on XP 914 build like this one. With suspension mods your likely 2 years out from being ready now. Boxster was quick and simple path to a national level car in FP. Very capable car right out of the box. Erik who drives a national level SSM car says Boxster out handles his Mazda. And Boxster has abs. You have abs plans too? We did lots of work on brake balance this year. Car was amazing under braking. Especially that fast sweeper. I was under driving the car.

Good luck with the lotus suspension. This should be very interesting!

What do you want me to say Grant...I have explain the amount of issues that I had so comparing times is not relevant. I rolled the dice and made a change before Nationals and I ended up paying for it. You are correct, I had slow corner entry speed...the car pushed so badly that it was the only way to get it to turn. However, you are not correct about the throttle issue. I didn't know exactly what was wrong so I had turned the boost up almost all the way to get that kind of speed. After fixing the throttle for this past weekend's event I had those kinds of speeds at the lowest boost setting possible, the difference was night and day. I can now light up the rear tires easily, something that I couldn't do at Nationals. I will continue the development of the car and try again next year.

-Britain

Ok...this winters project has official begun. It was very difficult to make the first cut, but after four 12-15hr days we finally have a Lotus double a-arm front suspension mounted in a 914. In the spirit of the SCCA X-Prepared rules, I wanted to integrate the assembly into the unibody the best that we could without completely tubing the front of the car.

I began by mocking up the Lotus suspension assembly in the Lotus front sub-frame.



Then I secured the hub and built a quick jig to locate the chassis pick-up points to translate to the 914 chassis.



This is the completed front jig.



Start of rear suspension mock-up. The lower front mount is actually part of the Lotus chassis and not part of the rear sub-frame assembly so I had locate it separately for the jig to be properly built.



Driver side rear mock-up.



Driver side rear jig in place.



Driver-side front and rear jigs completed. I passed a solid rod through the lower pick-up points and it is interesting that the arm length of both front and rear are the same.

With the jigs completed, it was time to remove the stock Porsche suspension. It is amazing how much time and effort one can put into the stock set-up and still not overcome the compromises. (Full Rollerbearings, raised spindles, Elephant tie-rod droplinks, S-calipers, Carrera rotors, Wevo strut tower mounts, seam welded control arms, bump-steer rack spacers, etc. etc.)



With the stock stuff out of the way, it was time to put the Lotus jig in place.



Now....skip ahead 4 days of gruel work...and you get this...



Like I said previously, we did out best to integrate into the stock unibody of the 914 chassis in the spirit of the SCCA rules. Additional support will be added once the shock mounts are completed and the cage is tied in.

Here is the stock Lotus rotor/wheel mounted and suspension set on middle adjustment hole with lower a-arm parallel to the ground.



Side shot:



Inside look of the control arms and the lower subframe. One of the days I will strip all the undercoating and make it look all pretty.



Placement of the steering rack. Adjustment built in to allow for changes in both the control arm height and bump-steer. Again, additional bracing will be added to the mounts as the steering rack takes a lot of force.



Placement ideas for the front shocks. No, I won't be running two shocks...the outer shock will be replaced by an adjustable push rod and a rocker assembly will be designed and installed in this approximate arrangement.

I have a few additional parts to design and make before completely finishing the front assembly. I will then move on to the rear as I believe that it will be a bit more challenging. With both ends completed, I will cut out the existing cage and built a new one that ties everything together.

-Britain

BTW...all the suspension parts from the car will be sold if anyone is interested.

I'm interested in the suspension. I'll PM.

And again, wow. Wow. Wow.

Great work, Britain. Since you are no longer using the 914 inner fender strut mounts will you be cuting away sheet metal for weight savings?

Adding Lotus components to your Porsche 914 chassis made me think of some historical precedents. In the 60's George Follmer attached a Lotus 23 chassis to his Porsche 2.0L and proceeded to win the USRRC championship. Also I want to say that Porsche bought wheels and suspension components from Lotus for some of their early 550 Spyder-type racing cars, but I am not sure of the details, something I read, long ago. These little bits of random information keep swirling around in my head....

I am actually using the inner fender for part of the support of the subframe so I am not sure how much more I will remove. I need to be in the spirit of the XP rules so I don't want to go overboard with tubes everywhere. The material in those fenders is pretty thick and structural so I will take advantage of that.

Regarding the Lotus suspension on early Porsche racecars, I was specifically walking around the paddock at Rennsport Reunion last week taking pictures of early Porsches suspension designs.

-Britain

Looking good Britain.

Man what a job, unbelievable amount of work.

So the attachment points of that weight reduced subframe are on the body sheet metal (where you can see them in the picture) and where else?

There are metal plates for the rear crossbar into the frame rails. I will be adding addition plates from the front subframe to the inner fender panels. In addition, there will be tubes from the a-pillar bars of the cage to the front cross member. From that I will add tubing to pick up the upper control arm mounts.

That is just amazing. When you mentioned this project up at Rennsport, I was having trouble visualizing...pictures tell the story nicely.

VERY Nice!

There was at least one Lotus-Porsche. There were also a number of Elva-Porsches (three or four were at the Quail last weekend), and of course the famous "Poopers".

The Lotus uprights and brakes were used on the 904s, I think.

--DD

This is apparently a Lotus 19 with a modified body and a 911 engine. It ran at Rennsport IV.


Porsche-powered Lotus (?) by cjcam, on Flickr

What do we call it now? The ShitsubyusBox

It is looking great Brit! Excellent work as usual

I like it, I like it.......

Very, very nice!!!!! good choice the Lotus parts, very strong and light!

take a look at these; even kinky-er!!

front racing hubs

rear racing hubs

racing wishbones


you're not done pimpin"



PS: use the S2 wheelbearings with ABS rings/sensor incorporated and use a racelogic traction control.....you will be truly amazed......

So why did we pick the Lotus suspension instead of running a 928 front spindle with custom a-arms and a multilink 996/997 setup in the rear? It would all be Porsche stuff. You built the subframe, so building it using Porsche parts would have been easy.

Hey Hontec, I have seen those parts....very nice and quite spendy. Maybe someday I will win the lottery and get those.

Regarding the wheel sensors, I am planning on using the stock wheel sensors to integrate ABS onto the car using the Bosch 3-channel or possibly the 4-channel system.

-Britain

At this point it is irrelevant to use the Porsche stuff. I like the Lotus parts because they were built for a lightweight car running 16" wheels. The late model Porsche stuff is why to "beefy" for my needs and would have been significantly more expensive.

-Britain

This is such a wild project. I dig it, and the logic behind it, Britain!



pete

Thanks Pete. It is moving along quickly. I have listed all the parts I have taken off the car in the classified, lots of very good items.

http://www.914world.com/bbs2/index.php?showtopic=150607

-Britain

I think its new name should be Jason. (Halloween hack and slash fest)

nice work so far Brit!
looking forward to more progress reports and finally seeing it on all fours again.

Britain

Yes they are pricey, but if you're looking for every bit of weightsaving....

Regarding the wheelsensors: take a look at the racelogic traction control system, it uses inputs from these sensors (all 4 wheels) and it will make a difference of day and night to your driving and lap times...........


racelogic

Randall

Hey Randall - does the racelogic work as an ABS system as well as wheel spin?

How is that project of your coming?

The Racelogic system is purely traction Control. ABS is for people that lack anticipation!

My project was put on hold the last few weeks since I had to put some work into my Honda S2000, hadn't driven it for a year and it needed some love.
Almost done and then back to the 914

Awesome project! Can't wait to see the finished result.