The Traccord - 2003 Honda Accord Coupe

*disclaimer*

Seth was unable to join me today in what you are about to read. He had family things to do but wanted me to drive the Accord at an Autox for feedback. 

*Disclaimer*

Ahem......this is a big thoughts and data dump after a day of autocross and Adventure!!! 

And boy.. did we put the capital A in adventure today in the TrACCORD. 137 miles covered today, 10 autocross runs between 2 drivers.............. and 1 new oil cap...more on the oil cap in a moment. 

My buddy Taylor and I started this adventure yesterday driving down from DFW to Houston to crash in the grosh apt. Last night.

 I'm currently typing this up as we drive back to DFW to go Autox Taylor'ss SSC car Tomorrow. We're dumb.

Our day started walking out the door at 6:30am to get an early start on the day, we wanted to get kolaches on the way and arrive when the gates opened at 7am. 

Shortly after pulling onto the road I started smelling oil and thought to myself... Huh... That cannot be the Accord... Seth just topped off the oil yesterday and it's not burning oil bad enough that I should be able to smell it like this.... Probably just a truck ahead of us, and shook it off. 

Stop a couple miles down the road and get kolaches and when we're sitting in the drive thru there is nobody in front of us and I get a whiff again... And then I get the smell back bad when I pull on to the road and at that point alarm bells are screaming in my head. Pull into the gas station immediately and pop the hood.

Upon opening the hood, my worst fears are realized, There is no oil cap on the motor... 

Onus on me to not have checked the car over before I took it out but Seth accidentally left the cap loosened/off. 

No panic though, because there's minimal oil on the hood cowling and motor, so we've dodged a major bullet. By this point it's about 6:50 and we're across the street from an advance Auto parts. That doesn't open till 7. 

Get in contact with Seth who is horrified and luckily hasn't left his house yet. He rushes to me after I realized that no advance in my area has the part I need. Sit and wait for Seth to arrive with oil caps from various vehicles in his stable... And while I'm waiting it's now become 7 and I realized that Honda dealership parts departments are now opening... Dealership on the way isn't responding to calls, but one 20 minutes out of the way is and has the oil cap. So by the time Seth gets to us I've already found and secured a new oil cap... 25 miles away... this is workable even if AAA has to tow the car to the dealership, I'm willing to use a service call for this. 

Seth arrives and none of the caps are a direct fit but the one from the FJ is the same size as the hole.... So.... We do what any reasonable individual would do and we Daisy chain looped zip ties in a y formation to hold the Toyota oil cap over the oil cap hole in the traccord motor. 

Pictures because this REALLY did happen...

Apologies for photo quality, I was rushing and didn't focus my phone camera correct and didn't bother to reshoot it because.....

At this point it's now 7:20am, regsitration closes for the scca event at 8:30am and we have to go out of the way for the oil cap I've got at will-call, at the out of the way dealership. 

We can do it but we're going to cut it close. 

Make a last ditch effort at the on the way Honda dealership but they're closed and don't open till 8. Which is in 20 minutes with no knowing if they have the part. And we're 17 minutes from the out of the way honda dealership which is 12 minutes from the site... 

We pop the hood and the Toyota cap is still in place..... this is working.

Drive like a grandma the 17 minutes to the other Dealership and by some miracle we arrive with the Toyota cap still in place. Pop the new cap on and book it to the Autox and arrive at 8:15 and drive straight into tech with the zip tie chains still on the motor much to the laughs of all my friends working tech inspection. 

Now... On to how it drives... Seth sent me out with no information beyond what's here. He held back all his thoughts to give my mind a clean slate. For the past 12 months I've been working on left foot braking based upon input from Seth. But after solo Nationals I've been going back to single foot driving to try and not overbrake.... It cost me at Nationals.... and this would hurt me today. 

Car drives extremely well with a couple of concessions.. and once we drove around them it became very controllable. 

It's extremely easy to upset mid corner- I'll come back to this, because I didn't remember this from before. 

It's got tons of grip right up until it gets upset. 

Seth held back that he raised the front 1.5" with this new setup. Just the way it bolted together. 

This isnt a huge issue until it's in a corner and I couldn't lean it on the bumpstops which I could before. Now it sits and pogos if you ask the corner to do too much and change the way it's loaded in a corner. We're definitely at/really beyond the limit of the stock OTS koni damping with the new springs. I guarter spun and slid the car on both of my first runs because I was trying to drive the Accord like my focus with just 1 foot and it wasn't working. It would build transition momentum and then go TOO far on the 3rd transition and I would have to catch it and loose a bunch of speed grabbing the brake. The car doesn't have enough power in Current configuration to pull itself straight like the focus can with 1 foot. 

Now Taylor wasnt having this problem with his left foot braking and so I switched back to LFB for my 3-5 runs. 

Taylor and I kept dropping time on each other runs 3-5 as we both got more an more comfortable in the car. 

We ended up with times about 2 seconds slower than our local hotshoe Zack Sober(2nd place finisher in XP RX-7 at Solo Nats 2017 and 2016). Who was driving a GS Focus ST on RE71's. 

My best was a 51.1... and I think I hit a cone and Taylor with a 50.9 with a confirmed cone. Sober did a 48.8 in the focus. 

We finished with times equal to those run by the STS drivers Seth was behind very badly a few months back.... The car has gotten a LOT faster once you learn to drive around the flaws in the setup. 

And on a hilarious side.... A corner worker came up to us during the lunch break and said... "Did you guys lose your oil cap?

A oil cap came out from under your car while you were in the slalom.

I set it on one of the big cones out in the grass"

Sure enough... It's the missing oil cap... 

Post event we went to meet a buddy of mine in Rice Village downtown and the village has TERRIBLE roads, 3 inches dips for manhole covers and uneven pavement on every street,  the car handled them with ease... Even with all our gear in the car and 900lb of 3 people. 

I gotta hand it to Seth... This car looks good. It's about an inch of drop from looking awesome. 

Also my thumbs hurt... I've been typing this for over an hour in the car......on my phone.

So I flaked. Left the oil cap on top of the motor for the second time in my life. We found out that there are a surprising amount of different sizes of oil cap. Zip ties to the rescue. Spacecadet passed his co-driver test by remaining calm and sourcing the part to fix things in time to make the event. The car is too high in front for autocross, but it is one heck of a dialed in street car right now. Getting proper feedback from an experienced driver is important for development. Going to add camber with the arms,  probably drop the front a bit, and see how that changes things. There is still the possibility of additional roll stiffness with bars. 

mazdeuce - Seth said:

So I flaked. Left the oil cap on top of the motor for the second time in my life. We found out that there are a surprising amount of different sizes of oil cap. Zip ties to the rescue. Spacecadet passed his co-driver test by remaining calm and sourcing the part to fix things in time to make the event. The car is too high in front for autocross, but it is one heck of a dialed in street car right now. Getting proper feedback from an experienced driver is important for development. Going to add camber with the arms,  probably drop the front a bit, and see how that changes things. There is still the possibility of additional roll stiffness with bars. 

and a pinch of LFB????

mazdeuce - Seth said:

So I flaked. Left the oil cap on top of the motor for the second time in my life.

Part of being a team is we accept and share responsibility as a team. I should have double checked the car over before it left your property. 

Getting proper feedback from an experienced driver is important for development. 

This statement still makes me chuckle a bit......3.5 years ago I was trying to not get lost on course. still funny to this day and it feels good to be able to give real feedback and be the crazy one wanting to drop the car 3 inches to be perfect.  

A very nice member of the Houston Region shot some photos at the autox saturday and he caught the traccord in a couple! 

Random candid photo on the trip back to grid from the finish with myself at the wheel. 

Photo of Taylor driving the car in the Slalom. 

It's almost not unattractive. Almost. 

needs more cowbell.............

I think it needs matching lime green wheels

Needs more 315/275 stagger tires.

what?.......someone has to say it. 

In reply to klodkrawler05 :

Needs more supercharger/J motor before more tire. 

Half cage, 400hp, more tire. Eventually.

Shrugged off the kitchen this morning so I could go do something, anything, other than work on the kitchen, just for a bit. I decided to put the upper arms on the Accord. They're good stuff and honestly look like modified stock arms. 

I also lowered the front a bit while I was in there and adjusted the arms for all the camber. I'm somewhere between 2.5 and 3 I think. Being level isn't a strong suit of the Grosh. I still need to adjust toe but a quick spin around the neighborhood shows that the car is moving back in the right direction. 

those a-arm pictures might be good inspiration for some Challenge builds

Maybe a dumb question, but what is keeping the 4 bolts holding the camber adjustment from loosening?  If the answer is nothing or crappy split lock washers, I'd suggest correcting that before driving it too much, and especially before paying anything for an alignment.  I'm a big fan of Nord-Locks for that sort of thing.

In reply to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :

We'll be at a minimum adding a high strength loc-tite. 

I had the bolts come loose on the STS car in 2017 after my co driver messed with them and so I already got on Seth about things we need to be doing to prevent issues with these... back when we looked at what to order. 


 

and that was before he sent me out without an oil cap... 

You should safety-wire them.  Because safety-wire looks awesome.

And the whole bombproof retention thing too...

Started the morning trying to get more trim for the kitchen windows. HD was all out of the boards I need. Score! Off to the garage! 

The plan was to dry fit the Fastbrakes kit to make sure everything is good. First we load the pads and make sure the caliper/pad/rotor all works out. It does. 

Then pull the old stuff off and bolt it all up without the lines to see if all of that lines up. It does even though I forgot to take a picture. Put the wheel on to check caliper clearance. Miles. 

Then take it all back off again to pull the dust shields. Vice grips still have a place in the modern tool box. Also needed a bit of dremeling to cut the shields apart and get them off the hubs. 

And then you just sort of put it all together. And it works. It took me a couple of hours to think through the first side and take pictures, but the second side was 40 minutes. It's no more complicated than replacing stock calipers. Fastbrakes did good. 

Getting harder to downplay the car. It's still slow, but it's getting fancy and slow. 

Data! You all want data. 

Stock calipers have a single 55mm piston. This calculates out to 2393 square mm. 

The Wilwoods provided have about a 40mm piston. Well, four of them. To calculate equivalencies you just calculate the area of two and get 2513 square mm. Pedal travel will be a little longer but I doubt I'll notice. 

New caliper/pads/line weight just shy of 6lbs 12oz. 

Stock caliper/pads/line were too heavy to weight at once on the scale so we have to do some math to come up with 9 lbs 13 oz. There is a lot of weight to be saved with these calipers. Superlight indeed. 

A worn stock rotor weighed 13lbs and the new Maxima rotor was 22lbs. That's a lot of rotating mass, but it's also a lot of mass to put heat into. 

Do they work? They stop the car. They also have a ton of air in them. I bled them. Started the car. Pedal to the floor. Bled them again. Moved the car outside. Pedal is mush. Figured out that I can bleed the outer upper screw with the wheels on. Bled out more air in the driveway. Drove around the block. Bled out more air. Drove around the block again doing a half dozen stops to get things smokey. Now the car is sitting overnight so I can bleed them again tomorrow. The pedal is getting better. The car certainly has enough brake to put itself into ABS without much effort even though it feels crappy. I think I just need to work the air out, make sure the pads got hot enough to bed, and drive it. Track day in three weeks so I need this to work. 

mazdeuce - Seth said:

Getting harder to downplay the car. It's still slow, but it's getting fancy and slow. 

We've now turned it from a spoon into a camping spork.... weird but correct for the right situation. 

I love following this build. I'm a member at MSR-H.  I can get you access (unfortunately not free) for testing and general hooning.

Dougie

In reply to dw :

I may take you up on that. We're doing the PCA event Dec 1-2 but depending on how the spring works out more testing is always better than less testing as long as I have tire money. 

I went back out bled the brakes this morning and we have pedal. Great pedal. I may get a bubble or two when I do a full flush before the next event, but I'm pretty sure we have ALL the brake now. If I can figure out how to keep things cool then we're in business. 

It's almost not unattractive. Almost.

It's a public nuisance, is what it is- I've been having difficulty in avoiding the local Craigslist site since you started, and the last month or so has caused an exponential increase in the urge. Thanks for sharing! 

davefla said:

It's almost not unattractive. Almost.

It's a public nuisance, is what it is- I've been having difficulty in avoiding the local Craigslist site since you started, and the last month or so has caused an exponential increase in the urge. Thanks for sharing! 

Yep, those are cheap to pick up as auto's, haven't found a manual yet. thankfully.... really though, soon as my wifes fiesta is paid off... look out.

"If I can figure out how to keep things cool then we're in business. "

So you two is there a path forward on this topic(ducts,hose,shrouds)?

Front valence fog light grill plastic thingy where it all starts?

FunkyCricket said:  

Yep, those are cheap to pick up as auto's, haven't found a manual yet.

My interest is in running the occasional autocross, and the car would have to do the occasional school pick-up to justify its place in the garage. An automatic would work great in that scenario. I think. (My next autocross will actually be my first.)