The Build Part 2 Overview
Can you say Rotrex Supercharger, Injector Dynamics 1000cc injectors, optimized gearing, ceramic clutch, Ground Control suspension, and a lot more! Read on...
After spending a full year driving the car in Autocross events, we have become addicted. The car was originally built for fun driving on the street and to learn about building cars, but now we are going to go more purpose-built for the SCCA Solo (Autocross) SSM (Super Street Modified) Class. Quite accidentally, our original build fit pretty well into this class, and we think we can have a highly competitive car with some carefully planned updates, and of course, continual improvement in our driving skills (which is 90% of the battle). SSM is pretty much anything goes as far as the suspension and drive train goes including engine swaps, turbo's, superchargers, you name it, as long as the engine is from the same manufacturer as the car. What you cannot futz with is the basic chassis and sub frame members and the OEM suspension geometry must remain unchanged. You also have to keep your interior and things that make it pretty much a daily driver and you are restricted how you lighten or strengthen the chassis. Tires and wheels are pretty much open and you can modify fenders accordingly. If you are interested, hear are the rules.
We spent the entire Autocross season on street tires, the Bridgestone RE-011s were pretty good, but no match for the sticky Hoosier slicks most people run in our class. We kept it this way as the words of wisdom to beginners is that it is better to learn on street tires to get a better feel of car control. One of us would typically place in the top 3 in our class for events, with Brian soundly beating me by considerable margins in most events, ahh, youth and good reflexes. We learned a lot about how to drive thanks to the great instructors available in our New England Region SCCA club, many of them repeat national champions. We also got a good feel for the car and some good feedback from experienced drivers who drove the car as well. We did make some mid-season changes to the suspension setup, which made a phenomenal difference, which we will discuss below. The other mod's are planned for this winter and are pretty cool, we think.
As we move along, we will update this site to show you what we did and how we did it, and in the end, how it all works out. While this is purpose built for Autocross, many of the mod's are beneficial and cool for other applications as well including drag, track, or just plane making a kick butt car.
We should point out, that the CRX is an extremely popular car for Autocross and Track and is highly competitive at all levels of racing. Says a lot for the chassis and light weight, shame they don't make cars like this anymore (except Lotus, to bad it has a Toyota engine :-) ). So we were starting with a good platform. Here are the changes we are making along with a brief description of why, you can click on each section to get the details:
Suspension: 600 lb/in rear and 440 front springs and Koni Yellows (Ground Control) for improved handling and better rotation of the rear
Front Crossmember: Revert back to Stock front crossmember (to comply with SCCA SSM class rules), this was a hell of a job
Wheels and Tires: 949 Racing 15X9 front with Hoosier A6 275 35 and 15X8 rear 225 45 for a competitive tire setup
Steering: Quaife quick ratio rack for a bit more response in the steering
4.06 Final Gear: 4.06 Final gear to reach 72mph in second, this will allow little or no shifting in autocross for improved times and ridiculous 0-60 times for fun
Clutch and Flywheel: While we had the tranny out, we inspected the clutch and flywheel and found some nasties, so and upgrade had to be done.
Supercharger: Increase power over a broad powerband to match gearing: Rotrex supercharger (KraftWerks) for added 100+HP
Hydraulic Clutch Conversion: Free up some much needed space up front and clean up the engine compartment
Other Stuff - coming soon