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The General Leif, 142 endurance racer

Great build and I love the car!!!

I have a friend who campaigns an orange fox body mustang in the chumpcar series. I may need to build a volvo for this.

Your car is really a great setup for racing. Light, small, handles well and now with the 2.4 its dead reliable.

I think you are pretty close by. I am in Garden home (Pat pointed out your place one day as we were out and about) If you ever need a hand with anything give me a shout. I have a pretty descent fab shop here at the house.

Sean
 
I think you are pretty close by. I am in Garden home (Pat pointed out your place one day as we were out and about) If you ever need a hand with anything give me a shout. I have a pretty descent fab shop here at the house.

Sean
Might take you up on that offer. At some point I hope to get a air dam and splitter on the car. I have some ideas on a simple solution but its always nice to get a second opinion. When we get to that point I'll invite you over and we can talk about options. Or if you just want to come over and check the car out (work on it?) that would be cool too.
Marc
 
Well three weeks till the next race and work continues on the General. Got the braking system done and if life would slow down a little and the rain would let up I could get out and take it for a little test drive and make sure it's all working properly. Basically we are using 240 caliper and 164 rotors.
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We needed to make up some custom lines to adapt the 240 metric caliper to the 140 SAE fittings.
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When I find myself waiting on parts or just need to kill a little time I have started working on weight reduction. I got this from Harbor Fright to start on stripping off some of the undercoating.
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It took me about 15-20 minutes to strip off abut 1.5LBS in this fender well.
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Metal that is no longer needed in the door.
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Also working on trying to clean up the aerodynamics of the car a little. We will see how and if it works.
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Also put in a poly rear window and rear 1/4 windows that are kicked out a little to help a airflow over the drip rail and relieve any back pressure that might build up in the car. Other than a few little odds and that need to be tended to the car is ready to hit the race track. Hoping for another uneventful and maybe podium finish this race.
Marc
 
I think that you should move the air dam further forward or you may get a pocket of air under the nose which could raise the front of the car. Maybe you should have something like this:

dsc00021.jpg
 
It's going to be better than it was, for sure. The air should be directed around the car now and anything that was already going under the car before is now reduced.
 
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Looking at your front end, I don't see much of the airflow going out to the sides. What I see is most of the air going down to the ground, and then the only place it has to go is under the car. I see you have some holes and a lower air entry. If you duct the outer holes to the front brakes and cut out the ribs on the lower air entry and duct it to the radiator/oil cooler (if you have one) that will reduce the air pressure at the front, and if you add a lip to the bottom of the air dam (about 3/4" [+/-]), you may then get some of the air flow to exit at the sides, but I still think that an air dam like the one in the photo in my post would be a better choice.
 
This is just the start of seeing what will work the best. I plan on trying to let as little air into the engine compartment as possible, just as much that is needed cool the engine. That said the lower grill will be blocked off and possibly some of the upper grill. Or maybe it would be better to block off more of the upper grill and leave the lower one open (the lower grill directs air to the radiator). Thoughts on that idea? There will be a small splitter on it to help get the air out the sides. One of my ideas was to put a big air dam that basically runs from the lower part of the grill down to about 6" off the ground and run a tray/splitter back to the front X member. But I am thinking that the frontal area would be way to big and might actually slow the car down more than anything. Thoughts on this? I still would like to try it at some point regardless.

Marc
 
Looking at your front end, I don't see much of the airflow going out to the sides. What I see is most of the air going down to the ground, and then the only place it has to go is under the car. I see you have some holes and a lower air entry. If you duct the outer holes to the front brakes and cut out the ribs on the lower air entry and duct it to the radiator/oil cooler (if you have one) that will reduce the air pressure at the front, and if you add a lip to the bottom of the air dam (about 3/4" [+/-]), you may then get some of the air flow to exit at the sides, but I still think that an air dam like the one in the photo in my post would be a better choice.
Looking at the front end before, you'll see that even more air was going underneath the car and hitting the front tires/filling up the wheel wells. Now there is more frontal area, but that air dam underneath has a slight V profile to it and pushes air around the front wheels in addition to not just being an open space. We added deflectors above the extended part of the dam(~3" out on either side of the body) to further support it and direct flow around the wheel wells. We plan to eventually add a splitter underneath the air dam to help trap the air there and encourage it to go around the car - as well as pull the front of the car down a bit at speed.

The holes for the factory bumper setup do have brake ducts riveted into their openings. The center, slotted area(which was blocked off completely on earlier cars) we have run blocked off, but as Marc mentions above, it may be a better idea to grab air from that high pressure area to stuff into the engine bay instead of air at the top of the grill opening. Marc has gotten a little crazy with little ducting plates behind the grill/headlights and foam stuffing in all the cracks around the grill/surrounds. :)

Then we have to figure out what we want to do for the rear of the car... A lip spoiler of some sort(even if it's just for fun!), and then we are likely going to do SOMETHING at the trailing edge of the roof. Maybe some spoiler that directs air down the rear windshield and straight back, or just down, or just straight back orrrrrrr some diffusers ala recent Mitsubishi EVOs...?

This, of course, excludes doing the more necessary work:
- Re-securing the seat back now that we lowered it and it's at a greater angle now
- Driving the car and seeing how the brakes work. Likely re-bleeding them with some higher temp race fluid
- Re-installing the brake ducting for the front and rear brakes
- Seeing how bad the transmission is(shot synchro?) and installing a 5th gear lockout plate
- Getting an extender for the steering wheel adapter or extending the steering shaft for better seating position

Among other misc. things.
 
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First gen RX7s have front end roll under that's even worse than a 142. Here are a couple of air dams for them which eliminate the air pocket which are similar to what I'm suggesting for your car:

This one is from a Mazdaspeed member

GoldRocket2.jpg


This is my car

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Both have a fairly large cold air intake for the radiator and oil cooler, which is really needed as racing temperatures for these can be really high. Also, you'll note that the outer ends on my air dam are shaped to collect the air that isn't taken in for the rad and cooler and direct it to the sides. I think an air dam design similar to mine would work quite well on your 140.
 
The problem is, you don't have anything but a bumper above your air dam, where as we still have a massive flat nose with a large grill opening. We don't need any more cooling airflow than we already have, we actually want to block off some of it. If we block off some of it and then add a 1 foot tall WALL underneath the front grill, it's going to be blocking a TON of air and slow the car down. That is a TON of added frontal area with no where for the air to go. The "design" we have now allows some air to be pushed down and around the grill/headlights and then get caught by a not yet built splitter and forced around the car. There is a slight taper to the spoiler on there now that helps direct air around the car.

Speaking of this car, I need to go work on it... But I also need to get a car registered first, and it's looking like that isn't going to happen due to timing and other complications.
 
Nope, I just wanted to subscribe to the thread and show support. I'll help you guys out in October when I'm done with school and not getting my pile of **** 940 setup.

How's the thing coming along?
 
It's coming!

https://www.facebook.com/pages/General-Leif/238575516219662

We need to bed in the brakes, finish up the actual splitter(cardboard one is just about done), do some higher rpm/race shifting to see how the transmission holds up(Marc, we should top up the fluid after last night!), swap out the rear springs for something stiffer(we removed the rear bar), add an extension to the exhaust, check the rear brake pad thickness, finish the seat support brace...
 
The problem is, you don't have anything but a bumper above your air dam, where as we still have a massive flat nose with a large grill opening. We don't need any more cooling airflow than we already have, we actually want to block off some of it. If we block off some of it and then add a 1 foot tall WALL underneath the front grill, it's going to be blocking a TON of air and slow the car down. That is a TON of added frontal area with no where for the air to go. The "design" we have now allows some air to be pushed down and around the grill/headlights and then get caught by a not yet built splitter and forced around the car. There is a slight taper to the spoiler on there now that helps direct air around the car.

Speaking of this car, I need to go work on it... But I also need to get a car registered first, and it's looking like that isn't going to happen due to timing and other complications.

I realize the issues on your 140 are a bit different than my RX7. Actually, looking at the front of your car takes me back to the mid '60s when race car builders started to seriously look at aerodynamics, and when they started to experiment with what were then called "chin whiskers." As using wind tunnels was generally beyond the budget and availability of most of us, some devised what you could call "the poor man's wind tunnel," which consisted of setting up a good sized fan about ten feet in front of the car, and with the fan running at high speed, adding a smoke source, and then seeing where the air flow went. Some used 8/16mm movie cameras to record and study the air flow, but in those days it was difficult to get slow motion movies. Today, with videos that can be slowed down, you may want to try the poor man's wind tunnel, and see what you get with various air dam configurations.
 
Not a bad idea. Could probably do the old trick of putting some yarn on the car and get somewhat of a idea of what the air is doing too.
Marc
 
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