Anyway, I figured what the hell, 'ill buy a ticket to support the homie.' and texted Jose. He got back to me and a few min later i had paypaled him the cash. Done and done.
The next night I was in the garage building some oil hoses and remembered the drawing for the car would be happening live in a few min. I put it on my speakers and listened as the drawing started. He drew 3rd place.. 2nd place, and finally the grand prize..
Now i didn't even remember what my drawing number was so when he pulled out and read '174' i was thinking to myself it sounded familiar. He went to his list that matched the names to the numbers and called out my name.
I was like "you have got to be kidding me". I grabbed my phone to look at the screen and sure enough i won the car.
Next day i Ubered out to meet Jose who had just had the car detailed. We were gunna complete the paperwork and I was going to drive it home. I arrived at the detailers and saw the car for the first time. I was stoked. Exterior-wise It had some minor dings and some clear bra issues but nothing to bad. A quick once over of the mechanical and I had heard a slight ticking from what sounded like a cracked header as well as blown shocks and motor mounts.. but hey i wasn't complaining. All in, raffle ticket and registration the car in my name was a whopping $230 bucks.
First drive home was solid, it needed tires badly so i didn't feel too bad doing big smokey brake stand burnouts at the traffic lights. The main thing I was surprised at was how responsive the paddle shifters were when it was in sport mode. The whole car went from a docile quit 28mpg commuter to a loud rev happy maniac with sport mode engaged.
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| First fill up on the way home |
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| You can see even at dusk that the clear bra was pretty beat |
Pretty much the first thing I did was get home and start to peel the clear bra off. This is a pain in the ass but basically a free way to make the car look 1000% less shitty. I just fill up a spray bottle with some gasoline and the sticky residue wipes right off with some clean rags.
Hood done, bumper started. I spent a few hours on each section. Slow going but satisfying work.
Headlights had clear bra too. It was kind of good thing as it kept everything nice and shiny new once removed.
It took about 7 hours but everything eventually came off.
After driving it back a fourth to work for a week I was decidedly impressed with the car. When I had won it i'd considering my options on what to do with it. If i just wanted to sell it and make some quick money or maybe fix some of the issues and keep it to use as a weekend car. I was pretty apparent that after only a few days I absolutely LOVED the car. I figured a good middle ground would be to fix the simple and obvious stuff, drive it some more and decide later if I wanted to sell. Two reasons. 1- If i kept it, cool. Things would be fixed and i could enjoy it more. 2- If/when i eventually sold it id be able to get more money and have an easier sale if I made some repairs. I figured a 5-6k investment could net another 7-8k in profit. After all, my profit margin was already so big that some small investments weren't really a big deal.
The OEM headers were restrictive and known to crack at the flange on cars with higher mileage. This specific ISF had 196k when I took ownership- so it'd seen its share of miles. After doing some research on the VIN through the Lexus website i saw it was serviced at a dealership in AZ and a dealership in San Diego. I surmised that someone had used it as a commuter between Scottsdale AZ and SD.
They literally had been getting it serviced at the dealership up until a few months before Jose got it from auction. The car having an 8 speed transmission meant very likely that it had spent 95% of its life at or under 2k rpms. This would also explain the sand blasted front bra that i had just peeled off.
Anyways, the first thing I did was order some PPE headers. These would eliminate the extremely restrictive bends of the OEM cast piece and get rid of the primary cat. Installing these alone would give the car better response and about 35 extra HP. God i love v8's.
Next, since I was using the car to drive to work I wanted to integrate Bluetooth and hands-free in the stereo.
To do this I got a Sound-LinQ set up and hooked it up to the back of the infotainment system.
I also picked up some KW V3 coilovers and solid motor mounts from Figs to replace the blown out shocks.
I did a brake job and got some 5x114.3 to 5x120 adapters so I could test fit my Volk ZE40 wheels that had just came off the Honda FK8 type R. This made the effective offset a 19x9.5 +30 with a 265 tire.
They looked absolutely tough as nails but I was rubbing tire to fender at the back because of the lack of OEM rear camber adjustment.
Around this time I had it in my mind that I really wanted to keep this car for the long term. The more I was reading about its development and its actual factory raced history I got more and more pumped on it. The engine itself is a work of art. You can tell its an actual race derived motor, not just a motor that has some go fast bits on it. Lexus did it right with a blank sheet design. Its got full magnesium valve and front covers and titanium rods as well as factory sodium filled valves, oil sumps in the head, clever PCV routing, SIXTEEN fuel injectors (port and direct) a baffled oil pan from factory. It also has twin fuel pumps and a completely separate firing order and fuel/throttle/steering/shift maps for the Sport mode.
Basically V8's just want to be able to breathe. Anything you can do in that department will gain you power and response. I got an air intake to compliment the PPE headers as well as an air/oil seperator and an aftermarket tune for the ECU.
After loading the tune on the ECU you hook it up to the OBD2 port and reflash the software. The new tune takes into account the new headers and intake and ups the power something like 80hp over stock. Amazing.
Since I'd moved beyond just the ''fix it and sell it" plan I started thinking about exactly what i wanted to do with the car. I mainly was curious to get it on track to see how it felt. I had been doing a lot of reading and was really interested to see if it would live up to the hype. Tracking it meant that I'd first need to do some alignment adjustments. I ordered a full set of boxed rear arms with toe and camber adjustment, I also picked up some fancy front camber arms. The thing with niche market cars is that companies can generally charge whatever they want for parts sense they are normally sole providers. This holds very true with Lexus track parts. They are NOT as cheap as FWD Honda stuff.
Here's a picture of the adjustable front upper camber arms from Figs.
As I was saying earlier, not cheap. These would typically cost about
$250 a set depending on the rose joint quality. These specific
ones were developed for a Nurburgring 24h racecar and cost over
quadruple that... yeah, ISF parts..
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| Bushing preload set with hex bolt. |
Since I didn't wanna run wheel adapters to use the Type R's Advans as a long term solution I got a set of Advan tc-4 in 18x9.5 +45 square. This will up the sizing of the front tires by over 40mm.
Bronze looks great on black cars.
Everything was beginning to shape up suspension wise. I was pretty quickly getting through my list of stuff I'd want to handle before going on track.
With me in the car it was 3925lbs A big boy. Its surprising how fast it still felt with that weight.
I also did some brake lines while changing to Porterfield race pads and some OEM rotors. Along with those I added some Motul RBF600 racing fluid
Toe adjustment link, required after setting the camber and lowering the car.
After alignment and corner balance was completed without a hitch I lined up a couple track events .
Put some re71R tires on the wheels and also added a front lip. I gotta say I'm really liking the look of these cars.
One thing that was annoying was after putting new wheels and tires on you'd need to pair the Tire Pressure Monitor System sensors to the cars ECU. If you don't- you get this very annoying full screen error warning on the dash board. This being a car that I would wanna swap out tires pretty regulatory on, I decided to make whats called a TMPS 'pipe bomb'. Its a canister that you put the tire pressure sensors in and seal airtight. You then fill it with the amount of pressure that the sensors are expecting to see. That way you are free to swap out the tires and wheels as you please as long as the canister is somewhere in the car.
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| Pressure sensors |
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| TMPS 'pipe bomb' |
After looking at some wind tunnel pictures I was able to find of the ISF being tested I decided that I wanted to come up with a wicker bill for the trunk spoiler. Not only do they look cool, but they also increase drag efficiency and decrease lift substantially. I had a piece of drycarbon laid up and started to build a wicker flap.
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| Radiused so it will sit flat when installed. |
Best way i found to affix it to the spoiler was to old fashioned 3/16th rivet. I originally wanted to make it adjustable, but this would have required drilling supports into the metal of the trunk to do so. In the end i was happy with the height and just solid mounted it.
Installed on the car. I think it looks pretty cool, very no frills, which is a cool contrast with a luxury car.
It subtly balanced out the new front lip chin spoiler i'd added.
For sway bars, a cool DIY on the front is to just drill a couple holes on the ear of the OEM sway bar. This will give you room for adjustment to dial in the front push. I started mine in the middle. Using the OEM end links for now but have a set of adjustable endlinks to be installed so I can set the preload.
For the rear i bought an aftermarket sway and end links since the OEM bar didn't have room to drill holes like the front.
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| OEM bar top, new bar bottom. Comes with bushings. |
After all that I was pretty much ready.
So the day finally came and I had the car ready for its first outing at Chuckwalla. The drive to the track is around 3.5 hours and I averaged about 32MPG on the way there listening to bluetooth stereo with the moon roof open. It was glorious to not have to load a car on a trailer for once.
Next morning was a tornado windy and in the high 80's but honestly that's considered a 'nice' day for Chuckwalla
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| I said dusty, right? |
Heres the video:
So with the stock seats still in the car I can say it was less than ideal while on track. I was having to put the seat back almost vertical so I could brace myself in the corners. Doing so while wearing a helmet meant that I was having to crane my neck and slouch a bit so i wasn't hitting it on the sun roof. Not ideal. Still though, with the car at basically full weight I was able to run a 2:01 which is a VERY respectable time. I was totally astounded at the balance the car had. The long chassis and TQ of the motor made it so I was able to power our of basically any corner at any time, much different than what i'm typically used to. Towards the end of the day as ai was getting comfortable with the weight i was flat sliding through the long double apex sections. I can honestly say that I hadn't had this much fun it a car for quite a while.
You can see here where I broke the dead pedal clean off the floor from bracing myself in the stock seat so hard . I absolutely fell in love with the car on track this day.
And the very next day I drove it into work, how freaking cool is that.
Heres where everything changed and I started to hatch plans. Not only did I wanna keep the car for sure, but I also wanted to make it faster. I could see its potential peaking just below the surface.
It was immediately apparent that the car was awesome, I was sold on it. Power delivery was super impressive and so was the transmission, I thought that this would be the cars biggest downside but it was very far from bad, and actually kinda great. There were obvious things about it the car that could be improved, like weight and transitional behavior but that's all the 'easy' and fun stuff. The idea of having a super reliable unstressed motor that was able to pound out lap after lap was very appealing.
The most apparent thing to me was I needed a seat that was more suited to G forces. Secondly, taking out weight would be huge and third some additional cooling capacity would be nice. I had another longer list but I wanted to take this in stages.
I got home and started looking for parts that would help in these areas.
I found whats basically the holy grail of ISF exhausts, Greddy titanium. This one had the separate bank pipes siamesed together. This helps with flow equalization and creates an very menacing deep growl. After all whats the point of having a V8 if its not gunna be obnoxiously loud.
The best part was that this exhaust saves 80lbs over the stock set up.
Truly a work of art.
Also looks as menacing as it sounds.
To fit the exhaust required cutting some hangers and really massaging it carefully to get it to seal tight on the header gaskets as well as sit right at the bumper.
The next thing i did was jump on the cooling. The OEM radiator doubled as a heat exchanger for the transmission fluid and were known to clog up then crack the end tanks under extreme conditions.
To get ahead of this I ordered a Koyo aluminum radiator and Seatrab stand alone transmission cooler. This allows me to run more transmission fluid and increase heat capacity. Also by divorcing the systems the water wont heat up the trans and the trans fluid wont heat up the water. It would take a bit more time to 'warm up' but it would give me some overhead while on track. Anyways 'warming up' isn't really a problem here in California.
Because I was getting rid of the compound set up I was also able to delete a bunch of hose connections and hard pipes that would flow fluid to the OEM radaitor. Simplifying everything as much as you can is ALWAYS a good idea on a track car.
Since I had the radiator out I decided to take advantage of the space and swap the water pump and accessory belt at the same time. Sure mine was still working but its always a good idea to preemptively swap things before they go bad. Especially something like a water pump.
Belt and OEM pump.
Fans transferred over to the Koya rad, ready to go back in..
I also replaced all the waterlines with silicone hoses and added the Air/Oil separator.
Next up was the replumbung of the transmission fluid cooler and adding an oil cooler. I wanted to explore placement options using a few cores that i have around. I was looking into offsetting one of the heat exchanges to the front passenger side as it would offset some of the drivers weight but the amount and complexity of brackets id need to build was going to be a huge main in the ass.
After messing around with this for a while I decided that i would just place them in the front of the radiator opening so id be able to block off the fog light openings in the bumper. Trading optimal weight placement for better drag coefficient and easier mounting solutions felt like a good compromise
I also moved the horns out of the air flow to the radiator. I needed to pull apart the loom so I could extend the hood warning switch wire then i was able to place the horns on the frame rail.
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| extended the leads |
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| rewrapped with split loom |
This is the finalized mounting of the exchanges before plumbing them. Trans fluid on the left Oil on the right.
I also looped the thermostatic waterline that used to go to the oil filter to pre-heat the engine oil. Again, in California I don't really need this type of thing.
Next was attaching the sandwich adapter and building the oil lines.
Conveniently the oil filter sits right in front of the motor on a cradle on the subframe. You can see the OEM coolant doughnut thingy that i pulled off the oil filter housing. I then needed to use a pipe wrench to remove the filter nub and replace it with an extended one that would fit an oil cooler adapter.
I then ran lines for the oil cooler from the adapter to the exchanger on front.
A really, really good idea is whenever you are changing oil or filling a system after adding an oil cooler is to pre-charge the element with whatever fluid is needed. An oil pump will take a few rotations to pump the oil where it needs to go. Cranking the motor over charges the pump, but it will first need to fill the oil cooler before lubricating the main bearings. Filling the lines and cooler as much as possible will get rid of that dead space and lubricate the main bearings much much faster.
After the spiral loom I did a second pass with split loom. This stuff is great for anti-chafing and anti impact. Spiral and split loom together means I really wont have to worry about these hoses.
Also threw on some an-6 clamps to keep everything stable and used cut hose as edging where these run around corners. I did the same to the oil side I just neglected to take any decent pictures of it.
The next thing I needed to figure out was how and where I would mount the splitter. Ive had this carbon splitter blade kicking around for a while. I measured it and lo-and-behold it fits pretty well on the ISF front end. After speaking with Amir I got a hold of some of his prototype splitter tunnels and test piece splitter fences. I'd need to align everything on the front end so i could figure out the best way to mount it all.
First thing was to figure out the angle and depth of the tunnels, they would need to clear the wheels turning radius and ideally not blow directly onto the tire.
I was able to arrange them in such a way that they'd channel air into the inside of the well behind the wheel. Im going to be sealing the fender wells off around the top to prevent spill over and increase their efficiency.
I also removed the foglights and brake ducts for weight and simplicity. I shaped carbon block offs and attached them to the bumper where the fog lights used to be.
Since getting rid of most of the plastic clips and 10mm bolts this made building a quick disconnect bumper much much easier.
Quick disconnect, for quick removal.
Now that I would have increased the pressures in the wheel wells I wanted to find a way to vent it. I was able to make use of the OEM fender/skirt styling cue and made a slit in the sheet metal. Now they are actual functional vents.
One thing that I had to figure out when I removed the brake ducts was the air venting to the ECU. The left side air duct has a separate channel that ducts air up into a hole behind which sits a heat sync that helps cool the ECU. You can see it below in the far right side of the picture. I needed to add a ram air somehow that would feed this heat sync. I used one of my many late night aerospace parts purchases from Ebay to do just that.
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| Carbon cone on screen left. |
I then drilled 4 3/8 holes in the bumper skin right in front of the air collector.
Shaped to fit the bumper contour.
Added density foam for extra sealing. Overkill sure, but whatever.
And attached a fire proof 2 1/4 inch hose
I also added a fused breaker so that I can cut all power to the car while i'm storing it or working on it.
Next I wanted to focus on the airbags. I knew that i would be tracking the car heavily and I have seen with my own eyes a number of newer cars hop a curb and bang, the airbag detonates. I do not want to take chance of this happening to me so I pulled all of the bags and SRS brain out of the car. You can see how much wiring is involved in airbags. Its a nice bonus to delete all this to.
Yellow wires indicate SRS components.
ABS brain, 10oz
Passenger knee airbag. 3lbs 14oz
Drivers, 3lbs 9oz
passenger front bag, 7lbs 9oz
Washer bottle, no fluid. With fluid was 6-7 lbs
Misc ABS wiring and brackets.. 10lbs 9oz
That's like 45lbs not even trying. That's the difference between a full tank and half a tank.
Now since everything was apart I decided to pull off all the sound deadening that was accessible. I left the stuff that's behind the dashboard for now. I went a bought some dry-ice pellets from a local ice shop and went to work.
These Lexus have a couple different types of sound deadening, some heavier stuff, some foam like stuff and some weird cardboard like stuff. Lexus probably formulated each of them to apply to specific parts of the chassis to dampen certain frequencies. This is all very fancy stuff, leave it to a monkey like me to just tear it all out.
Mid process..
The dry ice lets you freeze the tar, once frozen- whack it with a hammer. If you're lucky, and god doesn't hate you, it'll crack off on large easy to remove chunks.
All in all I was able to get around 45lbs of sound deadening out of the passenger compartment alone. Its crazy how heavy these pieces are for how thin they look.
I also did the rear section to.
Once the chunks were all gone I cleaned the residue with a rag and mineral spirits.
I blocked off the floor vents that I would no longer be using with ducting tape.
It came back looking AWESOME. To me, nothing else adds better drivers feel than a good thickened steering wheel. It looks pro and feels great- its really is one of my favorite mods to do in a car.
Once everything was out and ready to put back together I pulled out the airbag igniter from behind the horn cushion. It was almost a pound so taking it out would improved the steering feel and quickness.
Reassembled, sans airbag, ready to go back in.
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Now that I had room after getting rid of the knee airbag I reinstalled the OBDII port so you can plug it in without having to lay on your back under the dashboard to find it.
To further my quest to add lightness and aid in better cooling I got a carbon fiber hood with venting. This will reduce lift under the hood at speed as well as vent out header heat. The OEM hood is aluminum so the weight savings is kinda minor but still; weight is weight.
Next thing I wanted to do was add quick disconnects to the rear bumper to help with the broken-tab-cockeyed-bumper-alignment the car came with. While I was there I also added rear bumper vents, Mostly because I think they look cool. They may help too, who knows.
Quick latch added, Rear reflectors painted black too.
After driving to work a few weeks I would intermittently get a code for a front left bank cam motor. Once the code would throw the car would go into limp and retard the timing until you shut it off and reset the ECM code.
After looking into it I deduced was the cam angle controller that was going bad.
I was able to find the part for half price out of Saudi Arabia, US Lexus suppliers wanted $780. Talk about Lexus tax. I picked up a gasket and put it all back together for around $380. Fixed.
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| old VS new |
And finally, to address me sliding around all over the place in the car I pulled out the front Lexus seats and installed a new Recaro SPG Pro racer.
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| This behemoth weighs in at 73lbs |
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| starting to look like a track car. |
And just to stress this again for people who may be new to the blog. PLEASE ROUTE YOUR BELTS CORRECTLY.
Correct mounting and wrapping of a clicker is REQUIRED if you don't wanna die in an accident.
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| The clicker MUST go through the hip hole. |
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| ..along with the retractor belt |
CAPICHE?!?
Now that I had the car back together I put it on the scales to see what I was down to.
3429 it a 100% full tank of fuel. NOT TO SHABBY.
I had also gutted the rear doors and zip tied the windows in the up position, this was a temporary solution to something that I am working on- ill share in a future post.
After driving it to work and flooring it at every chance i got melted an 02 sensor against the header. Woops.
I replaced it with a new 02 sensor and it was fixed.
Due to not having a rear seat I was getting a booming sound from the exhaust. I cut up a piece of dry carbon sandwich and added it to the rear bulkhead pass through. It did wonders for fixing the noise.
So at this point I pretty much had the car in "test mode" it was more stripped out that i wanted it to eventually be, but it was good enough to go test the new cooling mods.
I brought the car out to Buttonwillow raceway...when it was 108 degrees. Not only would I be driving Buttonwillow during the day... but I was planning on leaving around 4 o'clock and driving to a Streets of Willow for a night event from 7pm to 3am. Two tracks in one day.
It was HOT. I drove every red session, PLUS the instructor session and two lead follow groups- that like 3 hours of track time and the car didn't skip a beat. I absolutely KILLED the tires but that was expected.
I ended up running a 1:58.1 and 1:58.2 back to back in the heat of the day. I was pumped. everything id done so far was working well and I felt I was on the right path.
I got to streets of Willow for the night sessions and with corded tires ran a 1:25 in traffic. I ended up getting home after a full 24 hours on the road that day. I was over the moon at how well the car preformed.
Videos from the day here.
I'm going to end this one here, its good of a place to stop. This is already WAY to long and I still have quite a ways to go. Ill post the rest soon.
