After contemplating the potential failure modes of the pressurized oil canister that I had just installed next to me, I though it a good idea to put a shield in front of the pressure relief valve. In the event that the air side of the canister develops a leak or the piston becomes jammed and the pressure on the oil side of the canister develops more than 140psi the pressure relief valve is designed to open to bleed down pressure so the canister wont become a bomb. This is all well and good (and if you look at the max flow of a crank driven b series pump its basically an impossibility to achieve 140 inside the volume of lines I have.) So, if anything, this was more a precaution in the event that the pressure valve itself is faulty and blows off at a lower than expected pressure (which is also unlikely as this is the same unit i have used for years in the NSX with no problems) All the same it is basically pointed directly at me, so better safe than sorry when it come to hot oil in the face. I ended up using an old carbon Comptech airscoop from the side pod of my NSX that I removed when i installed the bigger NSX-R side scoops and duct work. Part of me felt bad cutting up this old rare part, especially after seeing them go for around 1k after i'd already cut it to pieces. Whatever, it looks cool and is the perfect curvature on the X and Y to deflect any hot oil.
So picking up from just after the install last time I made the trip through downtown LA to Church automotive for a retune. I had done sufficiently enough to the motor to warrant a touch up on the fuel curves, I was NOT looking for more power, in fact I had less compression and less aggressive cams so anything 'in the ball park' would have been fine by me.
Finial stages of the tune we decided to add 2deg advance to the intake cam.
Not bad, 223hp and 151tq at the hubs on normal unspiked CA pump gas. Keep in mind that Church dyno reads notoriously high- even after the recent dynapack software adjustment.
The next track day on the schedule was a week after the dyno, the car was prepped and towed out to Streets just in time for the rain to start. I only had a set of Toyo RR's slicks with me and they had seen better days. First session was in wet/dry conditions I had noticed the car had started to develop some pretty bad under-steer into the skid pad before the front straight. As the day wore on and the rain started to really stick the track it obviously got worse and worse. I even though I was running a consistent 1:25 which is among the fastest 10% of FF cars I wasn't really concerned with the times. For me this day was really just to put miles on the new motor on track.
During the last (and dryest) session of the day I actually pulled in because the under-steering made the car almost undrivable. After a quick check of the tires I realized that I was running well past the belting and onto the cords of the front. The tires were finished and so was I for the day. The good news is is that the new b18 and tune had run flawlessly all day.
Video here:
After getting home and contemplating some things about my set up I decided that the reason I had blasted through the front tires compared to the rear was that I was running a reverse staggered set up of 9" wide front and 8" wide rears. My reasoning for setting the car up like this initially was how difficult i thought it would be, if not impossible, to properly heat up a 225 tire on a 9" wheel at the back of such a light FWD car. Now i'd gotten an idea of how quickly i'd be going through front tires running with the inability to rotate tires, I started to look for a solution. "Just dismount and remount them" you say? If only it were that easy. Its annoyingly difficult to explain to a tire shop how you need the tires mounted specifically depending on their rolling direction and where they would be oriented on the car. Not only that, but dismount and remounting tires a costly and annoying errand to have to do after every event. All in- the scales were tipped and i accepted that trying out the 9F and 9R set up may actually save me money and PITA if I could get it too work. Being the coldest months of the year coming up I figured that if I could test the set up in the worst case scenario for tire heat. If i got it to work- it would only work that much better in the warmer months of the year, and if not i didn't spend so much time figuring out data on a tire set up i would have to change again. i made up my mind and bought 2 fresh heat cycled Toyo RR's off tire rack.
Meanwhile while I waited for those to show up I test fit the fronts on the left side only to make sure that I would be able to run them without fender or trailing arm interference..
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| top down of the 9" on the rear |
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| rear forward (obviously) |
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| upper camber link |
It cleared, but just BARELY i decided that to gain back some sort of margin of error i would have to get a couple more billet spacers at the rear.
At about the same time the spacers showed up (bottom are the new ones) the new heat cycled Toyos arrived as well.
The Ra1's are a 205 width but fit very nicely on an 8" wheel. Below are left is a 225 Toyo RR vs the 205 RA1 on an 8" wheel on the right.
Crx with the new spacers and the 15x9's all around. You can see the marker on the tires telling me which side to put which wheel when rotating after events or at the track.
Meanwhile a part that I had been waiting on for some time had showed up. The Quaife quick ratio rack and pinion for an EF civic. There is alot of mis-information out there about this piece, and I still have a bit of parts collecting to do before I can put it all together but this is something that should be coming soon.
Ended up taking home first for the unlimited class in HFF that round.
As i was pulling into the trailer at the end of the day the car sputtered and died and wouldn't restart. I pushed it on and towed it home. A couple days later I pulled out the plugs and a few other things i decided to try it again- it fired right up and of there was no problem. I wonder if i managed to vapor lock it. Upon inspection I did find water that had pooled in the injector lead cups but i think that was caused but the tow home in the rain.
While diagnosing the issue I noticed a minor wiring flaw almost by accident. When logging onto the Hondata ECU app i noticed that the ECU was still seeing 12v+ when the ecu breaker fuse was pulled. After tracing my diagrams I realized that the +12v power that was going to the ISCV was looping back through the solenoid and powering a chained BUS terminal inside the ECU itself effectively reverse powering it, which is not good. The good news was, it was actually an easy fix (that was made much more complicated by the roll cage and awkward positions i had to contort into) I basically re routed the ISCV + through the 7amp fused power going to the ECU ING1 pin.
All wrapped up fresh.
To compliment the smoother flow I decided that I would finally tackle the flat under-tray panels that would lead to the diffuser. The major problem was the max length i could bend in my brake was 62 inches so I had to make the panels out of an multiple pieces. I would also have to devise a way to not interfere with the jack stand points on the chassis and box everything in when i was done to make it as sturdy as possible. Lots and lots of measuring and math.
Ill save the drama but needless to say this was a HUGE pain in the ass to do without a lift. I was laying on my back on the concrete for the full 4 days of my vacation, not sure if ill ever do something like this again. The end result, though, is great. Flat bottom starts at the fire wall and makes it way back as one single piece to the diffuser. I put fences on the bottom to channel the air and stiffen the sheets as well as keeping spill off of the exhaust channel. The exhaust now is the problem and can be improved on in about a million ways. The major benefit would be to reroute the center dump as to not disrupt the smooth airflow under the car that i worked so hard to achieve. More to come on this in the future. kinda over it at the moment.
To help the air stick to surface in a smooth manor I also installed some vortex generators on the mid rear of the roof and pre-diffuser transition.
A few days later i was back at Streets of Willow for a CCW day. this direction isn't my favorite but it would give me a good indication of the time i would run clockwise as its normally about 3/10th's slower. On the way to the track that morning there was a freeway closure due to a multiple fatality, it was GNAR, and it made us about an hour and a half late.. and because of this I missed the fastest morning session.
After a hyper speed unload and change I hopped in the car and ran a couple back to back 1:24's I was really shooting for 23's and i was SO close. For sure would have been inside the 23's had we made the early morning golden session. Oh well, there's always next time. It does give me hope for my goal of a sub 1:23:4 CW
Last session of the day i Boinked the pothole on the exit of the bowl and bent a rim- I'd have to replace that before the next trackday.
Again, for post event maintenance I checked the plug colors and drained the catch can to see what came out this. Not too bad after 3 track days. New motor seems to be super healthy.
Also after towing around in the rain the past few events I decided that I wanted to build some Lexan slider windows. Since i had an onboard fire suppression i should technically be able to run them without a problem on the SCCA tracks here in So-cal. I didn't buy off-the-shelf since I had specific dimensions i'd need to maintain the functionality of the outside accessible fire pulls. I also wanted the slider to terminate at the window net leading edge. This all meant that i would have to build my own.
One thing you need to remember when building with Lexan is that it's extremely thermal sensitive, you don't really want to tighten anything down all the way or its likely to crack once the sun starts to heat it up. In between all mating surfaces i used velcro tape to cushion all the surfaces and Ny-loc nuts on the screws so they'll hold firm without being over tight.
Now that I had windows in place I found a cool old surplus webbing from the ejection seat of a F-4 Phantom. I riveted it into place a a door-pull-closer-thingy. 
I wanted to change up the exterior look a little and pulled off some little decals i had around the car along with the Blancpain door numbers. I replaced them with my old design which i cut by hand, its a much bolder shape so it really changes the flow. I like the simplicity.
I also affixed some aprons and bulbed runners to the hood. The idea is to seal it tight against the body so there is a little turbulence or air leakage as possible. It should also increase cooling efficiency through the radiator portion that i wasn't able to duct due to the header clearance.
Did some reading up on new products from Porterfield brake pads, as I've said before i love their r4-S compound and have run it on all of my cars. After some discussion with a friend about some new releases i decided to try the new R4-1 'vintage' compound. Basically its made for vintage racers that are not normally on track long enough to get good heat in the pads; but need them to work all the same. Looks like they got it right and they have recently took off with rally racers, autocross and baja trucks for different reasons. Take a look at the graph below and see for yourself that it makes and incredible 0.5Mu at only 300f. I'm thinking this may be a good upgrade now that i have a boosterless set up and my pedal effort is higher.
So that's pretty much all on the CRX front for now. I had a double track day weekend scheduled at BW a few weekends ago. I was all ready and excited to see what the car could do but then on the drive out I just started to feel like absolute shit. I ended up turning around and heading home, which was an absolute bummer but the right call to make. I'm hoping to make it out for a do-over the weekend of the 29th (depending on weather) and shortly after at Streets of Willow clockwise on the 4th. Hopefully ill finally nab that 1:23.
In other news I was able to find a unicorn wing for the Spoon car. after getting in touch with one of the old drivers who used to race it in the UK he had sent me a few pictures off his hard drive from way back then. On a few of the pictures I noticed the car had a gen.1 jtcc/btcc wing (spoiler, really) in place on the trunk. I IMMEDIATELY started my hunt for one. I felt that was something that for sure needed to go back on the car. I had looked for one of these in the past but never had any luck, this time after a few days of searching using all my old tricks I came across one for sale in Japan. The seller was a super cool guy doing a similar restoration on an era-car of his own but needed the gen.2 wing instead of this one. We struck a deal and it was soon on its way from Japan. Like the seller had informed me when i bought it it was in pretty rough shape.
Sticker residue was all over the top surface that would need to be removed before it could be restored.
I dropped it off with a friend of mine, Mike, who is rather into detail and paint work as a hobby. He took a couple weeks and had it back to me shining like it was brand new. Really a miraculous change.
Installing it on the car was a bit of a shitshow but when we got it dialed. It. Looks. Awesome. I cannot wait to start to work on this thing, especially the past few months i've been doing a lot of research and getting really revved up. Space is the big issue for me at the moment, I'm trying to make some moves to get a spot to bring it that will allow me to take my time and do everything right.
I had the wheels mounted with the new toyoRR's on the 9's and took the chance to get some fresh RA1's i had sitting in storage put on a mismatch set of 15x8's for use as rain tires in the coming winter months.
Crx with the new spacers and the 15x9's all around. You can see the marker on the tires telling me which side to put which wheel when rotating after events or at the track.
After the first track day I pulled the plugs and ran compression to see how the motor had held up, everything look great so I put it all back together for the next weekends event at Chuckwalla raceway.
Meanwhile a part that I had been waiting on for some time had showed up. The Quaife quick ratio rack and pinion for an EF civic. There is alot of mis-information out there about this piece, and I still have a bit of parts collecting to do before I can put it all together but this is something that should be coming soon.
In the few days before the event I had decided to add some fences to the canards and splitter to help on the highspeed banked corners of Chuckwalla. After the understeering debacle at the previous event i was hyper aware of how much i hate that feeling and was trying everything i could to keep it from happening again on the super smooth surface at Chuckwalla, hopefully these would decrease spillage off of the splitter and help the front end feel that little bit more.
After driving basically out to Arizona we had arrived at Chuckwalla Valley Raceway (CVR) . It was FREEZING cold as only the high desert gets but I was excited and a bit apprehensive to try out the 9" front and rear set up on a track that is VERY different to the ones that I am used to driving. Normally on SoCal tracks you can find places where you should be doing something else to pick up time, at CVR i've found that its always things that you should stop doing that improve your laptime.
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| 45 min past palm springs |
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| Stayed the night and was up bright and early |
Because Chuckwalla is a higher speed track the event organizer split up the red group into two. Small bore, anything under 3L engines, and bigbore for the fire breathing v8's. Lap times can be close in Delta but are made in very different parts of the track. Bigbore ran first in the morning and was filled with supercharged V8's and turbo Gt-R's that absolutely screamed down the front straight.
In a few min me and the other Small bore guys were up on the grid in the s2000's, lotus' and 4cyl Hondas. I took a spot near the back since it'd been about 5 years since I had driven this track. At the high speeds you hit here and an unknown grip level at the rear wheels i figured it was going to be a good idea to take a slow approach.
When we finally pulled on track it was in the low 50's with cloud cover. Perfect conditions for PB once the tires heated up; but heating up the tires is the problem. It took me a good full 3 laps to stop having to counter-steer mid corner, I also had to be delicate coming off of the throttle mid corner and trail braking. Towards the end of the session I started to feel more confidence in the tire grip and the track layout and picked up the pace. I ended the first session at about 8/10ths effort running a consistent 2:01-2:00 mid lap time. This already was an awesome time and right on the heels of what I knew to be a front wheel drive target time.
Once back in the pits I adjusted some of the tire pressures added a splash of fuel. Motor felt great, temps and pressures looked awesome and the understeer was thankfully solved. Next session I was 3rd on grid based on my time. This time out it took me maybe a lap and a half to get the pressures and temps up on the rear tires. I now had a bit more confidence and was pushing harder earlier to load the rears on long corners which was building heat quicker. I spent the next few laps hitting traffic at the most inopportune times but the last couple laps in the session i had clear track and hot tires. I threw down two back to back fliers in the 1:59 range.
The 59's to my knowledge are among the fastest CCW fwd times that've been done with much more power. Best part to me was the CRX held third fastest time of the day overall. It was fun ribbing some corvette guys that were pitted next to me.
Ended up taking home first for the unlimited class in HFF that round.
Video here:
bonus video:
As i was pulling into the trailer at the end of the day the car sputtered and died and wouldn't restart. I pushed it on and towed it home. A couple days later I pulled out the plugs and a few other things i decided to try it again- it fired right up and of there was no problem. I wonder if i managed to vapor lock it. Upon inspection I did find water that had pooled in the injector lead cups but i think that was caused but the tow home in the rain.
While diagnosing the issue I noticed a minor wiring flaw almost by accident. When logging onto the Hondata ECU app i noticed that the ECU was still seeing 12v+ when the ecu breaker fuse was pulled. After tracing my diagrams I realized that the +12v power that was going to the ISCV was looping back through the solenoid and powering a chained BUS terminal inside the ECU itself effectively reverse powering it, which is not good. The good news was, it was actually an easy fix (that was made much more complicated by the roll cage and awkward positions i had to contort into) I basically re routed the ISCV + through the 7amp fused power going to the ECU ING1 pin.
All wrapped up fresh.
After finishing that, and since I had a 4 day vacation for Thanksgiving, I decided that I would put a few things together that I had been putting off. First I removed the carbon gurney flap and replaced it with a plexi duck bill, this will theoretically smooth the flow underneath the wing and also reduce drag at the back of the car.
Ill save the drama but needless to say this was a HUGE pain in the ass to do without a lift. I was laying on my back on the concrete for the full 4 days of my vacation, not sure if ill ever do something like this again. The end result, though, is great. Flat bottom starts at the fire wall and makes it way back as one single piece to the diffuser. I put fences on the bottom to channel the air and stiffen the sheets as well as keeping spill off of the exhaust channel. The exhaust now is the problem and can be improved on in about a million ways. The major benefit would be to reroute the center dump as to not disrupt the smooth airflow under the car that i worked so hard to achieve. More to come on this in the future. kinda over it at the moment.
To help the air stick to surface in a smooth manor I also installed some vortex generators on the mid rear of the roof and pre-diffuser transition.
A few days later i was back at Streets of Willow for a CCW day. this direction isn't my favorite but it would give me a good indication of the time i would run clockwise as its normally about 3/10th's slower. On the way to the track that morning there was a freeway closure due to a multiple fatality, it was GNAR, and it made us about an hour and a half late.. and because of this I missed the fastest morning session.
After a hyper speed unload and change I hopped in the car and ran a couple back to back 1:24's I was really shooting for 23's and i was SO close. For sure would have been inside the 23's had we made the early morning golden session. Oh well, there's always next time. It does give me hope for my goal of a sub 1:23:4 CW
Video here:
Again, for post event maintenance I checked the plug colors and drained the catch can to see what came out this. Not too bad after 3 track days. New motor seems to be super healthy.
This time I also readjusted the valves and swapped the trans fluid
Fresh new wheel ordered and tire mounted. I'll likely keep the old one and send it off for repairs and use it as a spare.
Once the normal service and prep stuff was finished. I also decided to get fabbing a few more things that id been meaning to do. First up was to make a simple make a transponder holder. Every time i go to the track i think of how shitty it looks to just zip-tie the timer off of any old part of the car. At the last event i took a stencil measurement of the dimensions and wrinkle finished some brackets into place.
Also after towing around in the rain the past few events I decided that I wanted to build some Lexan slider windows. Since i had an onboard fire suppression i should technically be able to run them without a problem on the SCCA tracks here in So-cal. I didn't buy off-the-shelf since I had specific dimensions i'd need to maintain the functionality of the outside accessible fire pulls. I also wanted the slider to terminate at the window net leading edge. This all meant that i would have to build my own.
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| Started out with a window template taken off my aluminum plugs |
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| I then heat gunned the lexan so I could bend it into shape |
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| Then i cut the sandwich strips out to create the 'frame' |
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| and counter sunk for the screws |
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| slider assembled |
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| velcro tape |
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| velcro tape |
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| you can see when open there is still access to the fire pull handle |
I wanted to change up the exterior look a little and pulled off some little decals i had around the car along with the Blancpain door numbers. I replaced them with my old design which i cut by hand, its a much bolder shape so it really changes the flow. I like the simplicity.
When installed the bulb cushions and fills in all the gaps.
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| I also clay bar'd the hood while I was at it. |
Did some reading up on new products from Porterfield brake pads, as I've said before i love their r4-S compound and have run it on all of my cars. After some discussion with a friend about some new releases i decided to try the new R4-1 'vintage' compound. Basically its made for vintage racers that are not normally on track long enough to get good heat in the pads; but need them to work all the same. Looks like they got it right and they have recently took off with rally racers, autocross and baja trucks for different reasons. Take a look at the graph below and see for yourself that it makes and incredible 0.5Mu at only 300f. I'm thinking this may be a good upgrade now that i have a boosterless set up and my pedal effort is higher.
I called over to Porterfield and they were able to make me the new pads in my back-plate sizes with only a small lead time. I can't wait to give these a try.
So that's pretty much all on the CRX front for now. I had a double track day weekend scheduled at BW a few weekends ago. I was all ready and excited to see what the car could do but then on the drive out I just started to feel like absolute shit. I ended up turning around and heading home, which was an absolute bummer but the right call to make. I'm hoping to make it out for a do-over the weekend of the 29th (depending on weather) and shortly after at Streets of Willow clockwise on the 4th. Hopefully ill finally nab that 1:23.
In other news I was able to find a unicorn wing for the Spoon car. after getting in touch with one of the old drivers who used to race it in the UK he had sent me a few pictures off his hard drive from way back then. On a few of the pictures I noticed the car had a gen.1 jtcc/btcc wing (spoiler, really) in place on the trunk. I IMMEDIATELY started my hunt for one. I felt that was something that for sure needed to go back on the car. I had looked for one of these in the past but never had any luck, this time after a few days of searching using all my old tricks I came across one for sale in Japan. The seller was a super cool guy doing a similar restoration on an era-car of his own but needed the gen.2 wing instead of this one. We struck a deal and it was soon on its way from Japan. Like the seller had informed me when i bought it it was in pretty rough shape.
Sticker residue was all over the top surface that would need to be removed before it could be restored.
I dropped it off with a friend of mine, Mike, who is rather into detail and paint work as a hobby. He took a couple weeks and had it back to me shining like it was brand new. Really a miraculous change.
I then set to work making foot plates. I found 1/8 inch thick matching carbon weave and built 3x3 sandwich plates for the top and bottom side of the trunk.
Installing it on the car was a bit of a shitshow but when we got it dialed. It. Looks. Awesome. I cannot wait to start to work on this thing, especially the past few months i've been doing a lot of research and getting really revved up. Space is the big issue for me at the moment, I'm trying to make some moves to get a spot to bring it that will allow me to take my time and do everything right.
In other-other news I bought another exhaust for the NSX, I'm giving the Titanium EastBear exhaust back and found this one for a deal, its also supposed to be quiet enough pass sound restrictions at Laguna Seca... if i ever decide to take the NSX up there. Not in love with it but it will do for now.
Actually, that'll do for now for everything. Ill update when I have more to share.
