Tightening Schedule
Despite the massive number of delays I’ve been through in the last couple months, the project has still been steadily moving forward. At this point, I’m actually caught up with everything that’s arrived, and I’m basically waiting on the last parts to show up (and for Doug to have enough time to do some fab work) for the build to finish.
After getting the car to start up a week ago, I’d barely run it at all. It has been rainy out (and the car didn’t have a hood or a top or anything to keep the water out), and I haven’t had much free time, so I was working on the headlight project and cleaning up a bunch of electrical loose ends. I didn’t want to run the engine much since the worst way to break a race engine in is idling it in the garage. Tuesday, though, I needed to get the car over to Doug’s to get a temporary exhaust put on (connecting the stock exhaust to the Racing Beat header) so that I could street tune the car without getting arrested on noise complaints. That meant I actually needed to get the car to drive, so I spent a few hours futzing with the tune, debugging some issues (the traction control ECU was left connected but not set up, so as soon as I went above 2250 RPMs with the car in motion, it started fuel cutting — that took me a while to figure out), and working on a base map that’d get the car to drive. Eventually I got it all worked out and drove a very loud open-header Miata 20 minutes over to Chase Race, while trying to break in the motor and not rupture an eardrum, and the car made it over without any issues whatsoever.
The car comes back to me tomorrow, with cut rear fenders, a real battery bracket made up (the battery has been loose in the engine bay), and a working exhaust. From there I can debug the traction control ECU and test out the 99 ABS unit (and the brakes in general) and finish breaking in the motor.
Tomorrow (thursday), the new intake manifold/supercharger mount arrive in the mail. I can start test fitting that to the car and figuring out a tensioning system as soon as that shows up. The radiator/intercooler ship out of BEGi on Friday, the carbon parts (hood, fenders, and seats) ship out of St. Louis tomorrow (thursday), the new throttle body and connectors all shipped out today, and some miscellaneous stuff (boost gauge and hood pins) will ship out tomorrow. As such, the supercharger hopefully gets mounted and tested late next week, Doug can do the full custom 2.75″ exhaust on the 13th, and I can then immediately get the car tuned on the 14th. This puts me ready for the Slush #1 event on the 18th for the car’s first event. This, of course, assumes that nothing goes wrong between now and then…
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