Most people who modify drift cars end spend a disproportionate amount of time on their engine. They are power obsessed, when in all honesty the engine plays second fiddle to the chassis and drivetrain setup. They’ll spend thousands of pounds on pistons, rods and big turbo’s then happily take to the road with budget coilovers and 20-year-old suspension bushes. It’s crazy.
Unless your competing at a very high level (or fancy spending a ridiculous amount of money) you’ll never EVER need more than 350hp in an S-body. A CA18 will be very reliable at 300hp on a fresh set of bearings and a Metal Head Gasket and an SR20 will be reliable up to 400hp on a completely standard long block.
Bolt-on parts for the win.
The chassis work started by completely stripping the front end and throwing a coat of fresh paint over the arches and doing a general degunk. It serves a practical purpose as removing any gunk and leaving a clean surface in the engine bay means you can see any “new gunk” (oil leaks, water leaks etc) far easier which helps with diagnosing problems.
After that it was a underseal job on the front arches and chassis rails. S13’s (especially UK ones) are getting pretty rusty now and while this one was pretty clean – a good jetwash and a coat of underseal tidies them up nicely and gives you a clean base to work from.
Next step was to build the front suspension and this started with junking the standard steering rack and replacing it with a modified version built for me by Kev or Swiftmini off Driftworks (www.driftworks.com) The modifications were to the steering rack mounting points which were moved forward by 24mm.
As you can also see from the picture – i am using a set of billet engine mounts built to my spec. They not only solid mount the engine to the chassis but mount it slightly lower in the chassis.
The crossmember was then placed back into the chassis and bolted up using R34GTT subframe hangers.
Rack and engine mounts attached.
Yesterday evening I started working on a couple of other bits (i’ll write it up later) and today the chaps from Driftworks kindly send me a set of lower arm bushes which will be fitted this weekend.
Solid mounting the engine to the chassis removes all movement from the engine under acceleration, it assists in removing transmission shock to the drivetrain (prolonging gearbox life – see this post) and also gives the engine power delivery a very liner and solid feel. The trade off is a little more noise and component ware.
The pile of junk I removed!
More to come as it happens.
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