Another Mustang, LS3 power

My first event in Kansas City Region I got my butt handed to me.  9th place out of 13 cars in CAM-C.  I needed more seat time in the car and the 275 Federal's just can't keep pace with 315 Rivals.  Who knew...

The next event was the annual Solo School.  I made about 4 runs before my slave cylinder died and I lost my clutch.

At this point I was done messing with this trans and decided to go a different route. The TR-6060 came out and got sold.

I got a new set of wheels that I never used and ended up selling almost immediately.  These are Cosmis Racing S5R's in 18x10.5.  With "Racing" in the name and around the same price as Enkei, Forgestar, Konig, etc. you would expect a decent wheel.  Instead they are just a cheap Chinese cast wheels and weigh 29lbs each.  Look nice though.

After pulling the transmission the car had to sit outside through a midwest winter while I collected parts for another new transmission.  My C10 was occupying my workspace.

On nice days I worked on stripping more weight out of the car.  I went through the interior wiring harness and stripped everything I didn't need.  Someday I might completely remove the factory harness and make a new one with the bare minimum.  There are still things I don't need in here.

I was previously using a Tremec TR-6060 from a 2010 Camaro.  This is a great transmission.  Internally it is the same as a T56 Magnum.  It's downfall is that it uses a fixed yoke instead of a slip yoke because the Camaro has IRS and the driveshaft never moves from it's fixed position.  This causes all kinds of problems with a solid axle car because the the axle is constantly moving up and down and thus causes the driveshaft to need to change length.  As you know the driveshaft doesn't really change length(though it can), instead it uses a slip yoke in the transmission so the driveshaft can move in and out to make up for these variations.  Not only that but this is a very heavy and from the factory it has issues with slave cylinders.  I'm done with this trans.  I initially wanted to buy a T56 Magnum or TKO, these are both good options but after everything I'd be looking at $4k+  That's a hard pill to swallow.

My solution; A company called FABBot started making adapters to use an Aisen AR5 transmission behind a LS using a slightly modified 4L60 bellhousing.  This is the transmission that comes in a Chevrolet Colorado along with slightly different versions that were used in the Saturn Sky and Pontiac Solstice.  When Chuck Mallet built his LS2 swapped Pontiac Solstice's, he kept this transmission in the car and they did just fine.  I probably wouldn't throw big sticky drag slicks on the car and start dumping the clutch from 6k but I think for my purpose with this car and the relatively light weight it will do just fine.

This trans uses a standard GM 27 spline output shaft and same transmission mount as a TH-350 or 700R4

I opted for the powdercoated bellhousing that is already modified by Fabbot.

Here is the trans ready to go in the car.  The clutch lines run somewhat close to the header so I used this black insulated silicone sleeve from DEI to keep the fluid from getting hot.  This setup uses a stock Colorado slave cylinder.  I will replace the shifter assembly later.

I had the to move my transmission mount forward a couple inches because this transmission is much shorter than the 6 speed.  

I also had to enlarge the shifter hole.

I cut the mounting tabs off my subframe connectors, made new tabs, and moved the whole thing forward a couple inches.

I had a new driveshaft made by Precision Shaft Technologies(PST), this is the same company I used for my old driveshaft.  I talked to The Driveshaft Shop and they didn't seem like they wanted my business so I went elsewhere.

Since the new transmission doesn't have provisions for a cooler I repurposed my old trans cooler to be my new power steering cooler.

Because I had to move the transmission crossmember forward it now interfered with the exhaust.  I took this as an opportunity to add in some flex joints.  This is something I had wanted to do for awhile and was just in too much of a time crunch to do it when I originally built the exhaust.

I also notched the tops of the tubes to make sure there was plenty of clearance around the crossmember.  I didn't wanted it to rattle or hit on the crossmember because that little E36 M3 drives me nuts.

Installed back on the car. 

While all this was going on I ended up getting a pretty good deal on a mostly complete black interior.  I can't stand the tan and have hated it since day one.

I ordered some new carpet from RockAuto to give it that new car look, lol.

With the seats back in it.  I'll figure out something to do with the area around the shifter at some point but the center console isn't going back in.

I used some sheet aluminum to cover up the hole around the shifter then added some sound/heat insulation.

The fans on the oil cooler and now power steering cooler were mounted but never wired up.   I didn't want to just mount relays on the fender or something because I think that looks like crap.  I ordered a cheap bare fuse box off Amazon for like $10 and wired all my fans into this.  The main radiator fan, oil cooler fan, and power steering cooler fan.  They are all controlled by the Holley.

This is just with the main power wires connected.  There is a 8ga cable that runs to a power stud where my main battery cable runs through the floor to the starter. This should carry plenty of juice for anything I ever want to run off this fuse box.

Completely pinned

3 fuses, one for each fan.  1 relay for each aux fan and the main radiator fan is split between two relays.

Mounted on the fender and wired up to the fans and the Holley.

At this point the car is finally together and drivable for the first time in 5 months...

...so I decide to take it apart again. haha

After driving it a couple times I discover the new transmission doesn't really like my 4.10 gears.  1st gear is 100% useless and 5th gear just isn't tall enough for any highway driving.

So I pulled the 4.10's and put some 3.55's in after spending way too much time on the gear ratio calculator.

I got a set of stock GT side skirts off of the same parts car I got the interior from.  I thought the Roush side skirts looked pretty out of place without the side exhaust to go with them.  Side exhaust wasn't a real option because of my full length subframe connectors, it's likely possible but not a route I wanted to pursue.

The problem is that the side skirts were black and needed painted to match the car.  The problem with that is that not only did they need paint but so did several other parts of the car.  The Laser Red was more like Laser Pink.  I'm just not the type of person to drop $5k on a paint job, especially on a car that see's track time and could be wadded up into a wall at any moment.

I started looking at other options.  I'm not a fan of plastidip.  I don't have the facilities or knowledge to paint it myself.  The last real option was a vinyl wrap.  I started looking around and ended up getting a quote for $2900 to do the car.  Thanks but no thanks.  I watched about 6 Youtube videos and decided to give it a shot myself.  How hard can it be right?

I started by ordering just a small piece to try it out and see how it looked.  I went with red because I thought it might help hide small imperfections since the car was already red.  This was my first try wrapping anything ever.

I was incredibly impressed with how this looks.  Most of the wraps I had seen were weird matte or color changing so it never really hit my radar but this was awesome.  It honestly just looks like paint.  I decided to go ahead and do the whole car except that the red didn't really match the paint at all and I never like red to begin with.  I determined that if I was going to do all that work that I was going with a color I liked...

After I decided on the color for the wrap I went ahead and ordered another set of wheels.  The Cosmis Racing wheels I previously bought are just crap Chinese cast wheels.  They weighed 29lbs each!!  I sold them and went with some Konig Dekagrams.  These are a flow formed wheel, size 18x10.5 +18 and only 21lbs each.  Some Forgestars or Enkei's were also an option but it seems like EVERYONE has those.

Test fit.  The front wheel lip is between coils on the spring on the inside.  A smaller spacer should fix this.

Once the wheels showed up I needed some nice sticky rubber to stuff them into.  There are only 3 competitive options in a 200tw tire for autocross. BFGoodrich Rivals, Bridgestone RE-71R's, and option 3; Yokohama A052's.

These are 295/35-18's and look right at home on the 10.5" wheels.

Not only did I gain over an inch of width over the 275/35-18's on 9.5" wheels, I lost 6lbs per corner.

Bonus; with the correct offset wheels I lost another 5lbs from the rear by getting rid of the bolt on spacers.

This is such an awesome project.

I did have to make a little bit more room to fit that big of a tire on the front without looking like a brodozer.  I didn't want to run a spacer if possible. Pretty simple solution.  I swapped to a shorter coilover spring.  No other changes, the fender aren't even rolled.  They do rub the sway bar at full lock but so did the 275's so not a big deal to me.  I never go to full lock on the track anyway.

Here you can clearly see how the shorter spring allowed the necessary clearance.

Going from a 12" Summit Racing brand spring to a 8" Eibach spring dropped some more weight off the front of the car and unsprung weight at that.

That's a lot of meat on the ground.

In reply to infinitenexus :

Thank you, it gives me something to waste lots of time and money on.

With the wheels squared away it was time to get back to the wrap. 

I previously made a thread covering this in much more detail.

https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/build-projects-and-project-cars/diy-vinyl-wrap/154717/page1/

I started with the rear quarter panel and just worked my way around the car.  It took a couple months for me to get this done.  We had a baby right in the middle of me working on this and spent a week sitting in the hospital.  Plus it was really hot outside and I only worked on it a couple hours at a time.  If I spent all day on it with someone to help I think I could get this done in 3-4 days, maybe less.

The wrap went pretty smooth until I ran out of vinyl.  The vinyl I was using was Vivvid brand that I purchased through Amazon so I just hopped online and clicked "order again".

Oops.  The color I originally bought was called "Gloss Dark Grey".  I thought it looked kind of light to be called "Dark Grey" but other people had mentioned something similiar in the reviews so I liked it enough I went ahead and used it.  This time when I ordered more it actually looked like "Gloss Dark Grey" and was labeled as such.  Now I had to figure out what color was actually on the car so I could get more.  Amazon customer service was completely useless partly because they just told me to order more of the one I bought before *eyeroll*, and partly because their customer service is very lacking in the English speaking department.

I sent Vivvid an email and posted something on Instagram about the situation. This was on Sunday.  7am Monday morning THEY CONTACTED ME!  I guess someone in their social media department had seen my post and forwarded it up to the appropriate people before they even got my email.  They asked for a couple pictures so they could match the color.  They had it figured out by that afternoon and a roll of the correct color was sent out at no cost to me.  Very impressed with that customer service.

With the new roll of vinyl I had enough to get the car finished up.  Again, much more detail of this whole process in the thread I linked above.

Here are pics from a little photoshoot I did right after finishing the car.

No poke with a 295 on the front, according to the internet you can't do this.

A little video walk-around showing the wrap.  It honestly looks like paint, most people don't even know.

Now that the car was back together it was finally time to get back on the track.  It had been almost a year since the last time I ran the car.  But, sometimes no matter how ready you think you are, the universe has other plans.

I was signed up to run autocross with Kansas City Region but the week before the car starts running like crap and I notice the O2 sensor had stopped working.  I ordered a new sensor that arrived just in time for the event.  It didn't work either.  Not wanting to risk hurting the car and not wanting to waste the money I had already paid, I ran my brand new Ford Fusion that had just gone over 1000 miles.

It didn't do too bad either!

I started talking to Holley about the issue I was having with my HP.  They sent me another new oxygen sensor that also did not help.  Holley ended up sending me a loaner ECU to take that out of the equation.  With the loaner ECU the problem was fixed immediately.  All the "bad" 02 sensors worked too.  The problem was in the ECU.  I sent it in so they could test it.  After bench testing they claim that it worked fine and the 02 sensor read correctly.  I got it back and tried it in the car, same E36 M3.  After going back and forth with Holley for the next couple weeks they tell me that there is nothing they can(are willing) to do because my HP was out of warranty but they offered me a small discount on a new one.  A $1300 dollar ecu isn't something I expected to have to replace after 2 years.

My ECU still worked completely fine other than the O2 sensor driver had failed.  This meant I couldn't use closed loop, something the Holley is very good at.  I didn't feel like dishing out another grand for a new ecu so I decided to improvise.  At this point I still had the loaner ecu so I put a secondary wideband in the car and fed the signal into the Holley so I could at least monitor my AFR's.  I had this older AEM wideband that I was using in my '79 C10 that was just sitting around.

 At some point I lost the backing plate.  Not a problem, I have a 3d printer so I drew a new one up in Fusion 360 and hit print. VOILE!

Now that I can monitor AFR's and be sure I'm not going to hurt the car, I double checked my tune and got the car ready for the next event.

I had pre-ordered one of these rear spoilers from Carter's Customs and it showed up just in time to go on the car before loading it up.

I got the car loaded on my new trailer for the first time and was ready to go.  While the car is street legal, the place we run at is 1hr 30min away.  The car will make it there just fine, but like last time when the slave cylinder resigned, getting home can be an issue.  Plus it saves my tires.

Here is some of my local competition.  The guy that drives the Sticky Motorsports Camaro is the 2019 CAM-T national champion(in a different car).

The car performed great!  I took 2nd place in CAM-C behind Keith and placed #15 overall out of 117 cars.  Had to shake a little rust out after not driving the car for over a year at this point but it has alot more left in it.

Oh i like the vinyl thread a LOT.

Teh boxster's paint is trashed and I'm more of a blue guy myself.  

Over the next couple months I basically went to every event I could find just to shake the cobwebs out and give the car a thorough shakedown.

This is from an event with Ozark Region SCCA

Ready for battle.

This surface was SLICK and dusty.  The car did not do too hot down here.

Here are a few random pictures from events and some in car video.  I don't remember which events these were from but they were all Kansas City Region SCCA.

This event I placed 2nd in CAM-C and 10th RAW out of 104 cars.

This one was 1st in CAM-C and 13th out of 98 cars.

This event I remember pretty well.  There was a big jump right in the middle of the long straight and after the jump I kept hearing a loud "tink" sound.  Like metal to metal.  The first time it happened I just stopped on track because I was sure I broke something.  I couldn't figure it out and eventually came to the conclusion it was one of the coilovers springs popping back into place after becoming unseated over the jump.  I ended up DNF'ing on 3 of my 5 runs and never really recovered.  Ended up in 3rd for CAM-C and 13 of 98 overall.

I took a trip out to Kansas for an event called the Lake Garnett Grand Prix Revival.  This is a pretty cool event.  They have a ton of vintage race cars and shut down public streets to have exhibition races around the lake.  I didn't enter for any of the track events this time but I did enter the autocross.

I ended up in 2nd in my class and 2nd overall.  I was the fastest car there that ran on gasoline... I got beat by a Tesla 

With the season coming to an end it was time to start thinking about what I needed to do for the offseason and getting ready for next year.  First on the agenda was getting my C10 pulled out of the basement to make room for the Mustang.  I'm not a fan of working outside, I'm soft. 

So much room for activities now!

I had to pull the bumper off the Mustang because the entrance ramp to the basement is so steep but I got it down there.

I wanted to redo some things on the front of the car to help cut weight and so I could box in the radiator so to help with that I ordered a tubular bumper support from MAF Racing.

I was also never really happy with how flimsy the rear spoiler was.  The 3d printed brackets that it came with were nice but started to warp after being out in the sun and I had to constantly retighten them because the material would compress and they would loosen up again.  I make some new brackets out of aluminum that were better braced and also added a 3rd bracket in the middle of the trunk to get rid of the flex.  This setup is pretty dang solid.  With the car in neutral I could push it by the spoiler now.

Quite the build!! Was the original back seat delete covered in HF moving blankets? Because that diamond stitch actually looked awesome. 

Last event of the season.  We had 11 cars show up for CAM-C.  Weather was beautiful. I was back in 3rd place until my last run.  Last event of the year and last run of the day, just had to send it.

I got the win in CAM-C and 9th fastest RAW out of 136 cars.

Now it was time to start the offseason upgrades.  After running the car 6 times in 3 months plus a day-long Solo School I had a pretty good idea of the direction I needed to go with the car.

My main goals for this winter were:

1. More camber on the front and front end grip.  Possibly higher spring rate.

2. Clean up the front end of the car.  Simplify and drop weight.

3. Increase cooling capacity

I just bought a set of my own scales so I started by weighing the car.  This is how it pulled off the trailer after the last race.  Basically full tank of gas.  3057lbs. I was honestly surprised the car was this light.  The last time I had it on scales it was 3191lbs with the 6 speed and old wheels plus a few more things.

Next I started disassembly.  I wanted to simplify the front end and remove weight.  This is what I started with.

Still a few more posts to go to get caught up with where I am today.  To be continued...

In reply to java230 :

It was just some really light fabric that came from either Walmart or Hobby Lobby.  I did think it looked pretty cool had the rest of the interior not been tan.