Project Ugly Duckling. SR86. 'Haters gunna hate, Tyres gunna bake'

[maxhag]

Very Niiiace....

[ae8zn6]

Hey all, its been a little while since I bothered putting anything up here. I have been to a couple of events since BDA.

First up, I finally got off my ass and added some lock mods to this car. So up until this point I had pretty much the least aggressive lock system in an AE86... So standard manual steering arms and standard LCAs. Yup, pretty dumb for a dedicated drift car.

So I got some extended LCAs and some shortened XT130 steering arms with zero ackerman and the difference is absolutely amazing, basically Im an enormous idiot for not doing this years ago.

One event was a Matsuri event down at Collie, which was pretty rad. They ran night drifting at a track that doesn;t normally have lights just by hiring a couple light towers from Kennards. It was a pretty crazy experience because the lights weren't exactly ideal and the track surface is just surrounded by dirt, so when someone dropped a tyre it just threw dust up in the air and you couldn't see through it. So sometimes you would round a blind corner to a wall of dust, knowing someone has gone off track (and possibly spun out on the track) and basically you just had to hope for the best Plus the dust killed your eyes, during the day a pair of sunnies kept it out of your eyes, but at night your eyes just got sandblasted. They also ran reverse track on the Sunday, which was the first time I had done it and that was pretty sweet also. This was my first event with the new lock setup and I loved it, here are a couple of pics: (forgot to take my gopro)





The only downside to the lock mods was that now, despite rolling them as much as I could, the guards were scrubbing the fronts. I decided to be cheap and cut and shut them quickly (for now) just so that I didn't kill the fronts. Depending on how much I hate the look of them I may revisit or replace these guards later.



Anyway, I also entered a battle at Barbs last weekend. It was a bit weird because the judges didn't discuss the line they wanted in the driver's briefing, so I just assumed they wanted the same line they wanted for this section of the track last year. Last year it was rad because they wanted us to go off the actual track edges and onto the extensions that stop the edges getting damaged from wheel drops. So I learnt the line in practice and happened to be talking to one of the officials just before going out for qualifying and got told that using that part of the track would be counted as a spin. So when I did my qualifying runs I did my best to fix my line, but it wasn't as I would have liked it. I ended up qualifying 14th overall, so at least I still made pro class, but that put me up against the guy who went on to finish a very close second for the day

It was really my fault in the end, I did a pretty reasonable chase run, but when I led, I ran my practice line, which crossed into the track extension just before the hairpin. So my lead would have counted as a spin. Here is a video of the battle:



Also, here is a video one of the other guys took chasing me during an expression session. This is probably my favourite video of my car to date, despite the car being obscured by Jamie's head for 1/2 of it.



And a couple of photos:

[maxhag]

Good work brother....

[mals86]

Its been ages since Ive been on this site and have just caught up on your thread. Bloody top marks mate, the way this car has progressed is awesome. Although I think ive chewed most of my dl watching all the vids lol. My 86 with the sr conversion has had very very slow progression the last year or so, but steadily getting back momentum. 😃

[ae8zn6]

Thanks Mal,

Keep ticking that conversion along, I can promise you that the car is super fun to drive and I'm sure yours will be too.

I have another Matsuri weekend at Collie coming up, weekend after this one. I need to go and buy some more tyres

[ae8zn6]

Long time since I have put an actual update on here...

I went to another Collie matsuri at the end of last year, I didn't take any of my cameras down there again. I'll have to remember next time. After that I just parked up the rig for a bit, I bought a new tow car (finally) but I ended up spending heaps more than I set out to on it, so it has taken a big bite into my drifting budget (Makes sense right, now I can easily tow my car to a bunch of events that I can't afford to enter)... That's life I guess, that said, there is another reason that I have a bit less to spend on taking the car out at the moment

I have secured my time off work to head over to Ebisu for Summer matsuri in August!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111eleventyone

Pretty damn excited about that, I have been trying to get time off to go for a couple of years but work has always needed me in those particular time slots. Sounds like there is a pretty decent crew from WA going as well, so that should be good. Would be rad to have a few other people I know head over (I'm looking at you Maxhag).

So yeah, I have been setting aside cash into my Japan fund since the start of the year.

It looks like work is going to move me again towards the end of the year, if that ends up happening I will be back over to SE Victoria. Good and bad I guess, moving away from Barbs and Collie, which are both rad tracks with a good crew and several events a year, but now that I have a good tow set up I will hopefully be able to hit some of the East coast tracks that I have never had a chance to get to before (assuming any of the tracks still allow drifting by the time I get there )

I have managed to go in one event so far this year, and have another at the end of this month. They are the ADGP Driftkhana series. I started at round 2, and mainly entered because I just wanted to get the car out, even if it was just a short event. I had gone in one of these before last year and did the course wrong on every run, so it was really just a bit of fun. That said, this year I seemed to improve my navigation or something and managed to get the course right on every run. Despite having some serious cars in the line-up (like Brent Gordon's Turbo LSX S15) and my handbrake deciding it didn't want to play along, I still ended up 9th overall. Given I was just there to use of some of the last shreds of tyres I had left before binning them I was really happy with that result.

Here is a video of one of my runs sorry about the quality, it was only a phone camera and then youtube made it even worse for whatever reason:



I need to work on sticking super close to the single cones, there are two 'bonus' cones on the course and if you are able to hug them tightly enough they take 10 seconds (each) off your time. I think I'd need to be on the brake though and I'm not sure the car would be able to keep the tyres going with the extra load (and my left foot being too occupied to kick the clutch every so often).


In other news, now that we have the new tow rig, the missus is happy to sell her car. I have talked her into using the tow car as a daily and I was planning of getting a silvia or something to get around in (something cheap and fun). I had taken a few cars out for a drive and was about to settle on something when I saw and realised how badly I missed having a bigport in my life. He seems to have fallen off the planet or something, so I'm guessing I won't be buying it, but I think I will hold out for another AE86 rather than settle on an S or R chassis.

If anyone knows of a good 86 going let me know, I would prefer a hatch and prefer JDM but there doesn't seem to be much going right now for some reason. The big problem I have is the upcoming move to Victoria. If I buy something from out of state that needs engineering to get on the roads here, the engineering will only buy me a couple of months while I'm still on the West coast and then I would have to do it all over again in Vic. That's a big part of why I'd prefer JDM because something stock, or fairly stock, would meet my needs and not have any problems over pits. While I'm making an impossible wish list, it'd be nice to have a Trueno for a change as I still haven't had one yet

Anyway, that's me for a bit, Drifthana round 3 is on the 20th. If any lurkers on here in Perth are keen, let me know and I should be able to take you out of a passenger run.

Cheers

[Jimmee1990]

Car looks like so much fun, VIC is still okay for drifting too. Vicdrift have a decent comp series, and a few practice days at Calder and Winton in between.

Would be awesome to see another 86 out there also, too many S chassis.

[ae8zn6]

Too many S chassis you say? lol Isn't that the same everywhere

Yeah, looking forward to having a drive of Winton especially, looks like a good track for sliding so definitely keen.

I had an expensive week this week. Not that I spent much of it on this car, but I bought my Ebisu track car and another big purchase that I will go into some other time. Both purchases are super exciting though!

The Ebisu car is a silver R32. Basic stats are RB25DET conversion with a TD06 on it, lock upgrades and a 7 point cage. It actually looks a lot like but I guess thats just the GTR front bar and lip. Here are a couple of photos:





Back to the topic of this thread. I FINALLY (finally) got some motivation to finish my rear brake set up. Basically, when I headed out to the last driftkhana and pulled the handbrake to enter the first cone and nothing happened I decided that enough was enough and I should put all the parts that have been sitting in the garage together to complete the rear end. It was a little more work than that I guess as I needed to get some flexible lines made up etc, but its done:



Huge thanks to Ken for putting up with my terrible work ethic and slow responses to his questions as he tweaked previous versions of the adapters. I just bled the system tonight so they should be all ready to go on Wednesday night at round 3 of the driftkhana. I guess if I suck at the next one I'll have to make up a new excuse

I emphasised the finally so much because Ken has been helping me with this brake set up since I bought the diff, which has got to be nearly 3 years ago now... Hell it might even be 4 years ago But yeah, I don't use the handbrake all that much and the cable jobby was doing OK, so I never bothered ironing out the last couple of details to get the second set of callipers on and working. I retained the cable handbrake of the S13 callipers as a park brake so its a bit of a best of both worlds set up IMHO. I guess we'll see what I think of it after Wednesday, but pretty much everyone else runs a hydro, so I'm sure that it will do the job much better than the stretched cable has been lately.

[ae8zn6]

Well, Driftkhana went pretty well, though not completely without a hitch. Turns out the rush job at mounting the hydro wasn't up to scratch. I grabbed for the handle in my first run and snapped one of the brackets... It still worked OK-ish, and I had little choice but to keep using it, but yeah, less than ideal. I need to spend a bit of time refining exactly how I will have the final install. It was super weird to have the vertical handle too, in the first couple of runs I reached down for the normal handle and then realised I had gone for the wrong place.

There wasn't as many competitors as last round, but still, I ended up finishing in 4th! I'd love to say it was a close run to third, but it wasn't

That said, there was an even bigger gap between me and 5th, so there is that at least. Given I was literally on the last scraps of tyres I had lying around and the cars and drivers who placed 1-3 are all ADGP level guys I think I did really well. So the results went:
1: Brendan Greaves (currently number 6 in this season's ADGP)
2: Rauno Vainu (Driftkhana round 2 winner)
3: Brent Gordon (currently number 5 in this season's ADGP)
4: Me
etc...

So the way I figure it I won the T28 cut and shut division, lol all those lads are in some pretty serious LS powered rigs, so I'm pretty happy with my overall performance.

Anyway, here is a video of one of my runs, its not particularly tidy, as I said I was on the last scraps of tyres left over from other events, so in this run I had a tyre de-laminate and then I was putting on a spark show as well

[checkers]

I like the gauge pod. Very red car but def. stands out. Can't wait to see what you do.