FC Rallycross/Stage Rally/Ice Racer

[ITSWILL]

That's pretty impressive for what it is. The torque curve is pretty flat too.  I think it would be very interesting to see it run the quarter mile. Shouldn't have too much trouble running consistently.

[fidelity101]

I think its just barely quick enough for bracket racing so maybe I could earn some cash because being consistent in that vehicle is pretty easy.

[toplessFC3Sman]

Wow, so that wild-ass-guess base tune from the bottom half of my turbo map got you that far? I'm glad you were able to squeeze a bit more out of it, those are healthy numbers! What did you do to bump up the output - spark advance, more fuel at WOT?

[fidelity101]

Well there is room for more I feel, wanna do a tune session together on the dyno sometime?

because mostly I don't understand the ignition side of tuning the rotary and during a practice rally stage i smashed the resonator and during sno*drift i busted it partially too so my exhaust has been somewhat clogged. I have replaced it with a straight pipe and now its loud as hell and could use a retune.


Went to the test and tune for NASA rallysport a few weeks ago and I had a test stage with unlimited laps! did forward and reverse direction split between morning and afternoon runs. The 2.5 minute stage was brief but fun! sand/dirt/rock/field mix so it was pretty good to see how it did on the various surfaces.

also with NASA you do helmet cam
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The car did great the tune did great, we ended up richening the top end a bit but and I was able to pull all the way to 8500 in 3rd gear through the sand, however it still wasn't running totally right and when I got home I found out why that was. I had dented my spiral flow resonator pretty bad.

A few more tweaks and it should be ready, Going to try a stiffer rear spring because its just too soft and squats and under the woops it tends to bottom out and do a tank slaper. Rear skidplate may see an improvement but maybe not until LSPR. Next true event August 5th for summer sno*drift.

[fidelity101]

Summer sno*drift is over and it was a complete & utter failure. Some minor tweaks to get through tech (no big deal) and then we were ready but the 1st stage was boulder city - just stones and loose sand everywhere the car shut down about 5 corners in, something with the fuel pump relay - jumped it and kept on going.

about a mile later the exhaust fell off at the v-band due to rocks or something, the car is too low when a full tank of gas and added spare + tools etc with too low of a vehicle to begin with. I will have to upload some video of it - if it was recording... because an open header rotary is loudest thing on the planet, it physical hurt it was so loud but POR! I literally could not hear the co-driver over the volume of it.



Shortly after that the engine died again and sweep had passed us so we we handed in our time card and we were done for the today. Verified spark/air/fuel and determined it must have been an ECU issue. Luckily the exhaust was dragging behind us hanging on 1 rear hanger. Tossed the exhaust section in the back of heavy sweep and the towed us about a mile to a recoverable area as the the stage was about to be re run shortly.

Found the issue by wiggling the connector and the car fired right up, better than push it up the trailer:



so we bust ass in service and get a new v-band on the exhaust, weld the 3 pieces together so they don't pop off and help seal some of the exhaust leak as well and fix the connector so that its properly installed. good to go after service and get to start last but we get to start. 1st stage out we get held up by an accident (spun blocking the road) then we basically transited behind 3 other cars to the end.

After that head to stage 6 and it was a blast! saw coolant temps as high as 220F but I didn't care it was running great and we were having fun. Tulips were virtually useless I don't think my co-driver said anything productive on stage all day. Then we got lost heading to stage 7 because we turned on hardwood hills not hardwood road and then got stuck in the sand, giving us a DNF for the day.



We had issued with tulips on prior transits and caused me to doubt my co-driver. I thought this was the wrong road and we saw some familiar tracks so others made the same mistake but didn't go as far as us, so I went in reverse and kept going the whole way back (1/4 mile or less) then decided to listen to my co-driver once more and went to turn around at a spot but when I lost momentum we were done and just sank.


We missed stage 7 & 8 and didn't even go to parc ferme and did not participate in awards, beaten and ashamed we headed back to camp


but well that's racing... next steps for LSPR? probably not competing - I need to raise this car in the air to gain ground clearance and the proper tow truck needs the engine replaced/rebuilt. it was awful being crammed into an extended cab f150. Probably just going to spectate this year.

[~Groll69~]

that makes for some rough racing.  Hopefully you can get the little bugs sorted out and have better luck for the next race.

[ITSWILL]

Time to make an RX7 lift kit!

[fidelity101]

yup, thats the next step. I think I can get .5 to 1" out of putting spacers on the subframe to lower the car and then get some proper rally shock setup I can increase a few more inches. then we can jump the car!

[fidelity101]

Well it’s time to get back to working on the primary project need to correct the issues from the prior failures, the December rallyX went okay even though I was having the misfire but when I added the GIANT mudflaps on for the event it and I wasn’t gunning for championship points since I was in no position to podium for the season so I went hog wild and slide it any chance I could so this photo pretty much sums up the event…




Couple big issues,
1.   Ride height – its too low
2.   Misfire
3.   Gas tank protection
4.   Car looks like shit

So I have been experimenting with the rear suspension a bit the springs at sno*drift were too soft but decent ride height, the springs at summer sno*drift were good rate but far too low and every other spring out there lowers the car which is bad for rally (obviously) so I have been the goldilocks of springs: This ones too low, this ones not stiff enough, this one is juuuuuuust right.



The RS*R is on the left which is 225lb and ~13” spring, the middle is the stock vert which is ~90lb and 15” spring and the one on the right is a 16” spring with 225lb rate…. Juuuust right! Fun fact the 2.5” coilover springs is a direct bolt on to a rear rx7 shock UNLESS you have a bilstein and in that case the spring perch needs a few minutes on a lathe to go from a 2.8” OD to a 2.5” OD to accommodate, any regular Monroe or KYB/tokicko style will work.


So while I wait for this to get completed I move onto the next open item.
I chased a few things down and realized that I should get new plugs and replace the exhaust gasket at the header as this was leaking among fixing the exhaust in general since the SSD incident so that helped but it would still misfire which I found to be bad contacts near the fuel pump relay causing an intermittent connection. With this mended I moved on upgrading the rear skid plate structure it took such a beating that all of it was virtually trash and we started over.



Due to some work/life events and poor planning I did not have the material to make the structure I wanted with the time we had available so after making a few base plates we decided to move onto what else we could do. The car was starting to look like dog poo or like a bad novel with 50 shades of white. So I wanted this to look somewhat presentable so it was time to clean up the body work because everything else was a hurry up and wait kind of thing.



Started out by removing all the stickers and making everything the same white then mark up what it should looks like, unfortunately I will be doing spray paint and this car does deserve better but oh well, it used to be a real nice car





However when I got this car 10 years agoit looked like this:





But even if you’re not clever you should be able to spot the intent 



Hopefully some better updates soon, holiday shutdown is upon us which means decent garage time ahead of us.

[toplessFC3Sman]

Ooh, I'm excited to see how it turns out! I hope to get a couple days of garage time over the break too... just not sure its gonna happen with house projects, family in town, etc.

I'm glad to see the stumbling/misfire issue was taken care of, although the oddities in the MAP signal could still cause a stumble or throttle response issue down the road. Hopefully those look better with the restrictor and shorter vacuum line

[fidelity101]

I picked up a restrictor and I will try it out but I've never had an issue of throttle response on this engine.

[fidelity101]

To aid with the coil spring indecisiveness for various setups, I figured 1 trip to the hospital would be worth the investment on a proper spring compressor instead of those sketchy threaded clamps.



They also make swapping out WAY easier and faster which is incredibly useful so I picked this one up second hand for a good deal and quickly made good use out of it. It was minutes on a lathe to get it the right size and I did manage to compress a 16” long 2.5” dia coil spring on it with a stock upper perch. I ordered a new spring rubber top hat too as mine existing ones were rotted away to nothing. However, I decided to go for a proper upper spring perches too and by doing so I managed to get the last FC upper pillow ball shock top from AWR. They have been downsizing rx7 parts in favor for other Mazdas recently…  The alternative option is buy a complete coilover version kit and only using 2 parts from it which was not appealing and Mazda sold their last one in August. They are NLA parts now from their competition catalog.
However to fit the 16” spring it was compressed 3” and had so much pre-load that it felt like 1000lb springs instead of 225. So I went with a 14” long spring and it seemed to be the sweet spot.



…with that being said the paintjob is done! I learned how to use pin striping vinyl tape to make lines and properly mask, it was pretty interesting and challenging experience ( but in a good way). I printed a bunch of photos to use for proportions and kind of eyeballed it. It was painting a color a day for about a week straight.



But it came out great! A solid 10’er just using rustoleum spray paint. I also used this as a time to increase the serviceability of my mudflaps (now that I have developed a good/proven attachment scheme) with rivet nuts and using oversized flange button cap hardware to keep these functional scrap pieces of mudflaps a functional template.

[fidelity101]

Not sure what color mudflap I will choose at the moment… but now with this setup it is more serviceable and really easy to install.


But it works for now so let’s see if it holds up through an ice racing season.

A few daylight shots too on a proper snow covered bitter day!



I used another big white vinyl sticker over all of the other stickers then painted that to get the roof to be the correct pattern.





The front is actually lowered still so it sits in a drag car mode right now but with the back higher it is much easier for me to get into now lol



Since I didn’t have the exact same front end style as the real car and it’s not 4wd it doesn’t have to be an exact copy of the Millen livery so I took to adjustment on the front end because of my fixed light situation, plus the bumper gets so beat up in the front the paint likes to flake off anyways. I figured a fun offset
All loaded up!


 It did manage to start later that day after being dragged through the cold across the state with the help of some ether with coolant temp gauge reading 12F.

Ta da!

I took it to TRF to do the rear skidplate and structure to support it, I can’t weld aluminum and then we did chat about how to gain a few inches of ride height and travel for the front suspension. currently it has 5-5.5” of travel so that will be fun. No photos of that but I will be sure to show some when its complete. After that is done then it’s going straight to ice racing! As long as the Megasquirt ECU decides to not misfire or anything… So once that is ironed out I can continue putting the stickers on it.

[toplessFC3Sman]

Wow, that looks great!

I see that you're signed up for the Ross lake event this weekend. I'd have loved to go, but there are too many other things going on this weekend. I could certainly help out with a little more tuning some time, although a dyno (or at least individual exhaust gas temps) are really a necessity to get things dialed in... my butt-dyno isn't really calibrated that finely.

To raise the front end, wouldn't you really just need some longer struts, and then extended & slightly angled LCA ball-joints that push the pivot out a couple inches. They'd need to be slightly bent to square-up the ball joint so that statically it is in the middle of its pivoting range to account for the additional LCA angle. Beyond that, the tie rod would need to be adjusted longer and the hub-side ball joint should probably be tweaked up or down with some spacers to try to get the tie rod and LCA angles about the same when the car is sitting still. If the tie rod is longer than the LCA, its angle should be slightly more level than the LCA so that the toe doesn't change as much under compression; if its shorter than having the same or greater angle is preferable (as long as you aren't binding any of the joints).

[fidelity101]

I was thinking something like this:



46mm universal motorsport shock. it would beef up the front significantly and I can get it tailored to the right travel and overall shock length