gPAN - Enhanced Safety

One of our clients, P.Chuddy, sent over a great suggestion that adds another level of safety to our gPAN - but could be used on most of the oil pans.  He adds a carplug over the drainplug fitting and secures it with a hose clamp(not shown in pic).  This is a simple way to ensure that your drain plug does not vibrate out of the bung - which is not something we have seen.  Better safe than sorry.  Thanks Paul for your suggestion!

Purple Elise Track Car Build

Two weeks ago, we received a commission to build a track-only Elise by a client in NJ. Jerry requested that we build him a fast, fun and reliable car. He gave us a good budget but a tight timeline, so we went to work without delay. Luckily we knew of a vendor who stocked Tasty Lotus Bits....

We found a partially built spec Elise and bought it for him. This car needed some TLC but had a straight chassis and a good engine. The car was originally used as a Lotus Driving Experience car at Spring Mtn. After taking delivery of the car, we fully inspected it and found that it needed most of the typical wear items replaced. We dug into her in earnest and developed our project plan - 78 hrs of work to get her right. I figured we'll spend at least double that as these projects tend to be motivated by passion...a Balanced Approach was our strategy.

During the tear down, one area that I noticed needed improvement was the steering arm bolts. They were the older Grade 8.8 spec that came on some of the early cars - Lotus uprated them to Grade 10.9 in later cars. By installing 10.9 bolts, this joint, which sees significant load, will be stronger. We have some friends who have installed even higher grade bolts than this. The Grade 10.9 is an excellent compromise with added strength over the 8.8 yet still ductile enough.

The existing cage in the car was not installed to our standard. Unfortunately it was too expensive to fix, so we decided to tear it out and replace it with our new R3cage. Welding can be a challenge but there are experts who can do it properly. We would encourage anyone who is getting a cage installed to first inspect the welding capability of the shop you are hiring. Check out this picture to see an example of a poorly welded cage (as originally found on the Purple Elise). We're very happy with our new cage and will be able to sleep at night knowing Jerry will be well protected.

One of the typical wear points on the Lotus is the a-arm (wishbone) bushings. Under heavy braking, especially with track use and/or sticky tires, these bushes tend to wander. Eventually the wishbone will come in contact with the chassis - as shown below.

Most of the top bushes suffered from this on the Purple Elise so we decided to replace them, with MONOballs along with the ball joints - that we now get from our partner Seriously Lotus. We took the opportunity to get the wishbones powder coated as they were quite oxidized and nasty looking. The corners of the car will be sexy with newly finished wishbones, Nitrons, brake rotors and pads.

The rear subframe was another component that suffered some cosmetic damage. A battery had clearly come loose at some point in this car. The acid made a mess in the trunk and the leaked onto the subframe. This caused the steel to rust. My buddy, Ducati John, lent us an experienced hand over the weekend as he was quite interested in this build. We Scotchbrited the rust off and scuffed up the rest of the subframe. We primered it with Rust-Oleum high temp primer and then painted it as well. The cage was painted with the 'Hammered' finish Rust-Oleum. The subframe was reattached to the chassis and looks ten-fold betta.

Most of the work is being executed by Chris. His race experience clearly helps, as he is cranking through this car at a great clip. He installed a gPAN in the time it takes most people to read the install instructions. More blog entries are coming as we have alot more work to do....anyone note the Larini header peeking out the back? KATANA265 is getting installed....

Dry Sump for the 2ZZGE

Oil starvation is one of the track related issues that must be managed in the 2ZZGE (or any engine) because of the g forces that can be generated by a Lotus. Achieving 1.2+gs is quite common with R-compound shod Lotus. For most racers and trackday folks, our gPAN remains an excellent solution with great results. The gPAN has proven itself in HPDE, SCCA and LCS racing around the US as well as Japan and Europe. But there are a few Lotus that are pulling even higher g-loads thanks to bigger aero loads and stickier rubber. These folks can benefit from a dry sump(Wikipedia explanation:HERE). More and more clients around the world are racing their Lotus and need better oil control to protect their engines and insure they finish their race!
Four years ago I called one of the best manufacturers of dry sump pumps and pans - Dailey Engineering to develop a solution for us. Bill Dailey is a world recognized engineer in this field and (lucky for us) is located right here in town. Bill and I scrutinized our Exige and quickly concluded that it would be very difficult to incorporate a dry sump into a street friendly Lotus because of the oil tank requirements. At the time, not enough Lotus were race-only, so we decided to put the project on hold. Last year we decided to reapproach the project with the intent of focusing on a race only system. Nitron had begun working on a solution that we considered, but we then abandoned it because of certain constraints. Late last year, I called Bill Dailey again for his help and recruited a much smarter engineer than I (Ryan from Secant ) to develop our kit. Ryan's powertrain expertise and contacts in the OE world proved to be invaluable for this effort.

One of the biggest challenges to sorting this system remained the oil tank. The tank must have plenty of capacity and be designed in a manner that the oil feed does not starve during high g-load conditions. The available space in the Lotus is extremely tight so this became a huge undertaking. Ryan landed on a tank concept that is quite novel and would fulfill these needs. We are locating this tank in the engine bay right behind the passenger seat. Several other locations were considered but none filled the needs as well as the spot we landed on.

Bill worked within the space available and redesigned a 2ZZGE pan/pump (see top image) that he had previously designed for a drag application. We met several times to discuss the system, take measurements from our mock-up engine and sort out details. More phone calls, emails and visits followed. We fabbed up some brackets and tanks to confirm some ideas. Naturally a couple of important mtgs were also held at our favorite Thursday evening watering hole to debate certain issues with the system.

We are dry fitting our dry sump system this week in our car. The orientation of the fittings and lines and other details is critical to sorting a complete solution. Clearly, the devil-in-in-the-details! The Blue Car will be the test mule for this system. We will run the car on track this week and confirm the AiM based data logging system along with our new Fuel cell, oil cooler lines, Dogbox from Jubu, and possibly our new race wheels.

One of the benefits of a dry sump system is a slight gain in power. To insure we measure this difference, we want to base line the car without the kit first. We should have the system in the car and running in late May or early June.

Spec Elise Build

After the Laguna Seca Lotus Challenge Series(LCS) race, one of our clients requested that we build him another Elise for wheel to wheel racing. He was currently running an uncaged Elise SC in LCS that he also drives on the street. He was having so much fun that building a car that was even safer seemed to be a prudent decision. Developing a car that would qualify for the Spec Class within LCS was his request to us in mid July. He also wanted to be able to run at the next LCS event in early Sept. Time was clearly too tight to start from scratch.

To expedite this build, we bought an Elise that was already track prepped but needed some tweaks to make it compliant with LCS rules. This car came from our friends at R3 Motorsports who used it as a school car and also for arrive and drive. It had a cage and fire suppression system already. We stripped the car down to assess it's condition. It had seen some serious track days but was in decent condition. The car had a salvage title so had some minor chassis damage that R3 corrected.

The parts that we changed included the suspension, steering arms, gPAN, brakes, RTVbrace, airbox, hubQR, Nardi F1 steering wheel and added a fifth point harness. Several of the ball joints were torn or worn out so we simply replaced them with some of our components like our Nitron S99 kit. We gave the car a full fluid flush, including our transELIXIR and alignment. We added a set of stellaCORSE wheels from the clients SC. Since the car is not street legal, we had to wait until a track event to test her out.

The car was originally Chrome Orange but the client and his business partner wanted a yellow car. They christened it 'Saffron'. The stripe scheme was our 'Blade' design that was

first developed on our Exige. I'm pleased to report that several client's have copied this design around the country. We chose red and white as these colors were in the client's race suit and helmet. After adding the stickers the car really looked sweet. The 'Toyo' & 'R888' were sprayed onto the tire sidewalls for that finishing touch.

Of course the proof is always in the pudding so we needed to run her to see if she was fast. Steve brought her to the Streets of Willow LCS event. Our client and his partner hired a pro to coach them. The coach is a Skip Barber instructor at Laguna Seca with experience in their Lotus school cars. He was very happy with the car. So much so that he did not want to give it back! He managed to run some fast laps in the 1:32sec range with a safe margin. Saffron ran without a hitch in 105degF track conditions. Ultimately the track race was cancelled as the corner workers were getting sick from the heat.

Our client and his partner were pleased with the car and raved about its performance. We managed to deliver a track ready Elise to them in 1.5months. So give us a call if you are interested in a track focused Lotus, we can build one to suit your specific needs.