Thanks for the comments chaps,
Hi Clive, it would be nice if we had all our lads working on the car as it would have been finished a long time ago but unfortunately it’s just Allan (the ginger youth sat in the car checking gear lever position) and myself when we have a few minutes spare between jobs.
Building race cars isn’t our business we are sub-contact machinists, it’s just mine and Allan’s hobbies although it is nice to have the whole workshop (including overhead crane) at our disposal. The car hasn’t progressed at all over the summer as I’ve been racing the Scoob but seeing it on its wheels has gave us a massive boost.
I’d like to think I will do some Nippon rounds next year as they’re a great bunch of blokes and the French trophy’s really taking off for Steve Vince which my car roots are in but I’m looking at racing the RX8 in Classic thunder if it’s as quick as I think it should be.
I was asking Jim (Skyline driver) where his recent pace come from at Oulton. At Donington last year from memory he was lapping about 5 seconds a lap slower than me, since then my Scoobs lost 100kgs and were about on the same pace now! I think his car has lost a lot of weight, gained some aero but the biggest improvement is his driving. It’s sometimes frustrating watching him drive away from me on the straights but you can’t take anything away from him, he builds and spanners his own car so fair play to him.
I must admit we only found your build thread on the RX8 forum last week and I’ve only just found it on here. Carl told me last year that a customer of his was building a FD powered RX8 but that was all I knew until I found the threads. Your car looks great, it would be interesting to compare notes like how you went on with exhaust/turbo clearance with your steering column? Or are you concerned about how low your exhaust is going to run as its goes past the diff/rear frame? We were also really interested to see you’ve retained the drive by wire throttle and are using the original ECU, it really got us thinking about which way we should go with management on my car but we’d already put a lot of work into the cable throttle peddle and we’d bought the 90mm Jenvey.
Good luck testing at brands, I’ll look out for your updates!
Cheers Martin
