Justdrift 2016 Season Opener

Season opener was great! The car was running really well and there were some great drivers to throw down with.

The only downside to the day was the fact that I was melting spark plug wires like crazy. Every 5 runs or so I would have to bring the car in and replace the wire. The wrap on the header had worn through.

You can really pour on big angle towards the end of the course!

Huge thanks to @beamteamtyler for taking these rad shots!

Tubular Rear End and Widebody

I finally made the decision to do a completely tubular rear end. The benefits in weight savings, utility, safety, and simplicity are enormous. The rear is not going to stay like this, I am building a fiberglass rear end as well. With this I can have plenty of confidence to get close to the walls on oval tracks.

The fiberglass widebody is coming along nicely. The plugs for the molds are complete and I am building the molds for the front fenders right now.

Each fender was built using 24 individual pieces of sheet metal and smoothed using filler.

Once the metal "plug" is completed, I lay the gel-coat, fiberglass and resin.

The front fender mold (on top) and final product (on bottom).

The rear end molds were built right off of my spare S30 chassis. These are stock over-fenders.

Over-fenders fit up on the car using Riv-Nut inserts.

65° of Steering Angle Achieved

Its been quite a lot of work achieving 65° of steering angle, there was quite a bit of fabrication involved. The way my front suspension and steering is set up has no interference, rubbing, or clearance issues.

Achieving huge angle is all about creating clearance for the wheel and the suspension components associated with the hub and steering knuckles. Creating this clearance is all about designing a good lower control arm and moving the wheel away from the frame. This means you must create a much longer LCA and move the shock mount point farther from the center-line of the car. Moving the shock mounting point for this kind of clearance means cutting out a portion of your frame. You also need longer outer tie rods.
 

The knuckles were shortened to the extreme, basically as much as they could be. I also reinstalled the rack spacers, however I shaved each of them down to .080" thick, from their original .145" to create the perfect stopping point.

I took the car out for testing shortly after, everything worked great!

 

All Star Bash 2015

All Star Bash was a ton of fun! I was driving really well both days. In the morning on both days I was battling fuel delivery problems, the foam in my fuel cell was breaking apart and clogging my pre-filter so i was constantly unclogging it. Other than that the car was working very well.

Thanks to everyone doing media that day getting some great shots!

Street Driven Tour! Also, I crash at Irwindale

Street Driven Tour Vegas

Street Driven Tour was awesome! Car ran great. I didn't get too many tandems, it took a while for all the drivers to get comfortable driving with each other. I lead many tandem runs, that's just the way it worked out in the que.

I really didn't have any problems with the car until late in the day, my handbrake locked up on me. I decided to pack up at that point and fix the problem at home, which was an easy fix.

 Got some fantastic photos thanks to amdrift.com  and http://www.ulfelderphoto.com!
Photos on the bottom are from Street Driven Tour, entire album can be found at Street Driven Tour's Album
Videos can be found on my Instagram @DriftTheZ

Irwindale Crash

Well, I managed to mangle my car pretty badly. I made a mistake coming into the second bank at Irwindale Speedway. The car is functionally fine, however the aesthetics are less appealing currently. The rear end has been smashed and needs to be chopped and replaced, the plan is to build a wide-body out of fiberglass for the entire car. Which, in the event of an accident can be taken off and replaced at the track.

Justdrift Round 4 Willow Speedway

Round 4 was fun but also disappointing. Practice was not going well on Friday because I was having trouble with my front wheel clearance. My front tires were rubbing up on both my front tube frame and also my rear wheel well near full lock. As a result I would spin out when I got too much angle.

I changed my front tires from soft Federal 245's to a harder compound 225. This fixed the problem completely and now I have plenty of clearance, I also did not notice a loss of grip on the front from the different compound and size.

Practice on Saturday went very well and I thought my qualifying runs were good but it turns out that they were not enough. I knew I was far from the wall but I still thought that I would qualify.

Photos taken by Matt Ulfelder from his blog Matt Ulfelder's Blog on Round 4 and also from Winding Highway Studios from their write-up Winding Highway Studios. Top photo taken by AMDrift.com AMDrift.com