Yeah, pretty stoked on the framing/tracking of that shot lol.

In other news, the car's race-ready. F*ck me, I shoulda put bronze wheels on this thing from the start!



Threw the RC-1's on yesterday, removed the wheel spats and plugged the fender vents to keep the car TT5 class-legal. Still need to pull the skirts off but I wanted to take a couple photos of the car with them installed. The wheels are even brighter in person and look great. I already ordered a can of bronze wheel paint to spray my other Hypergrams the same color.

Swapped in the beefier Goodwin header late last week as well. The primaries are 3/8" bigger on the new header and look huge in comparison. I took a couple datalogs after the install and compared current MAF values to logs with the previous header at the same elevation and IAT's. I didn't find any real discernable difference in MAF values across the rev range at WOT and AFR's appear to be all but unchanged as well. From what I understand, though, torque output won't necessarily follow MAF values... Long story short, who knows if the car picked up any power lol. The exhaust note got a bit quieter and deeper with the new header, though, so that's a win.



The PO included a TDR header blanket with the header too so I removed the factory heat shield and installed that instead. Unfortunately it hides the beefy-*** primaries, but it seems to be keeping more heat away from the brake lines and ABS module so that's good.



More to come this weekend. Hopefully we can snag that Sub-2 at Chuckwalla and post a decent result in TT5. This weekend is going to be a joint event with NASA SoCal and NASA AZ so the field should be stacked. Can't wait!

 

Dude, the car is looking GREAT. The smaller header might not be a restriction now, but it definitely future-proofs the car. And who knows, maybe it picked up some power as-is.

Stoked to see you hit that sub 2:00! You got this.

 

Nice work! It's a pet peeve of mine and drives me nuts when N/A guys don't put a damn heatshield over the headers (ya I get most don't come w/ them). Just adds a whole lot of heat in the engine bay unnecessarily and/or melts s**t close by. Ya I know some ricers wanna look at them. lol

 

Look at the logs at absolute load and lambda at wide open throttle. Must see a change at the fuel mixture at least.

 

Thanks dudes! Yeah if nothing else, at least I can tell myself there’s no additional restriction coming from the header at this point haha. Plus the blanket looks sick from a form=function standpoint. I’m with you, Teg. Uncovered/unshielded headers just look silly from a functionality standpoint. Especially if they’re next to stuff that can melt.

I’ll take another look tonight. Didn’t think to reference absolute load. Been reading up on RomDrop and the NC ECU a lot the last couple weeks. Super interesting how it does its fueling calculations with the MAF and MAP sensors to get an actual idea of total cylinder fill. I spent way too long looking for a VE table in ECUedit and the ECUtek software before finding the load compensation tables lol

In other news, there’s gonna be 15 drivers in TT5 class this weekend and I started painting my other wheels bronze today. They came out really. F*cking. Bronze.



The color might actually be perfect once they get some road grime and brake dust on them haha.

 

Well sh*t, that went better than anticipated.










Got that coveted sub-2 time, took 1st place today and 2nd of 14 yesterday, dyno'd at 180whp, oh and most importantly the car still f*cking runs! Did some instructing as well and was asked by both students this weekend to drive their GR Corollas for a session, which was a blast. Made me miss having boost a bit lol.

I did ding a wheel but it's fairly minor and should be able to be repaired. All in all, about as good a weekend as I could possibly ask for. A little bit of maintenance and she'll be ready for the first Miata TTC at WSIR next weekend!

 

Awesome result!

Sub 2:00 at Chuckwalla with 180hp... those NCs work pretty well, don't they?

 

Amazing results, psyched for you. Where does this put you vs your PB in the NA? Gotta be close..

And really impressed with that dyno. Wow. I forgot, did you ever dyno the 2.0?

 

Nice driving, congrats on the result. See you this weekend!

 

Thanks fellas! Yeah, I have no business gloating but I'm pretty smitten with the car. The traction available on tap is just crazy. Really stoked on it hitting the 180whp mark too! Maybe that bigger header did actually do something.

Funny you'd ask, Nate. Actually bested my PB in the NA by 0.8 seconds... Top speed delta between both cars was over 10mph haha.

I'm definitely driving this car a lot better than the last one. Partly because it's less powerful and easier to drive, and also because the setup is much more refined than my last car. Still, the difference in traction between the two is bonkers.

Never dyno'd the 2.0 but it should've been in the 150whp range with the tune and I/H/E. That 30whp and torque bump made a huge difference in pace on track, even if the car is still relatively slow haha.

 

Damn! Pretty crazy man. If I weren't so invested in my NA I'd have jumped ship to an NC a while back. I've mentioned this before, but my buddy has one and his pace is only ~3 seconds off my car.

We partially accredit that to the NC being so much easier to drive 10/10ths, but that says a lot about that chassis. I think for a cheap lapping car now days the NC is a no brainer. That said, not too many people I've seen build them out to be giant slayers, so I'm pretty interested to see where yours goes as you keep tinkering with it.

 

Watching that E30 in front of you really emphasizes how much of the track you're using. Good work out there! I guess that's why you're the one instructing.

 

Yeah, I think the low-ish power combined with the killer handling characteristics make the NC an easy car to drive at the limit. I've been to WSIR a bunch of times now but never used the entire track in turns 8 and 9 before. I started tracking all the way out in both corners the first day there in my NC. Much easier to focus on nailing the line when it's not coming at you as fast haha. All this being said, I still sometimes miss the raw feeling of the turbo NA. More power and a flexier chassis made for a more exciting on-track experience in certain ways haha.

I agree, it's weird there aren't almost any NC track monsters rolling around. 949Racing's Kaiko is the only 300whp track NC I can name off the top of my head. There's a few guys in the midwest and east coast on the FB groups tracking turbo high-200whp NC's but none that I'd consider *****-out track monster builds. I'd imagine a lot of people are satisfied with the performance you can squeeze out of a basic 2.5-swapped build with aero. Maybe we'll start seeing more monster builds in the next few years since the NC trend seems to be picking up steam in the recent year or two.

I dunno if mine will ever end up in "slayer" status, but the fact that I can probably hit 1:55's at Chuckwalla and Buttonwillow without even bolting a turbo to the car is really exciting to me...

Thanks dude! I got a lot to work on still but I'm stoked on being able to use the majority of the track in most corners at this point. I actually hesitated on posting this specific lap because some of my shifts and inputs looked jerky to me. Probably just excitement from trying to closely chase the car ahead haha.

 

My driving lines got so lazy and imprecise when I added a lot of power. It was shameful.

I also suffered from constant changes and tinkering that never truly allowed me to become comfortable with a particular setup. If your car always has the same power, the same grip, and the same braking capacity, then you get really good at using every bit of it. I never had any consistency and my driving ability suffered.

 

I feel personally attacked by this entire post. I remember feeling like I utilized everything I possibly could when my car had 200whp. Now that it has much more then that, I feel more like I'm just there for the ride and trying to keep things pointed in the right direction.

 

Late to the party but awesome work Zak! Huge congratulations.

No lie, you had me looking at NCs and BBR ITBs a few posts ago. I had typed a large answer about ITBs, Duratecs and Caterhams a while back, but realized I would just be trying to convince you to build the engine I want haha. At the end I hope you stick with the NA life for a little while. 180whp...man that's awesome.

 

I too started reading Six's post and immediately thought, "Damn, I wonder if Wingman feels that way as well." I'd like to think that I could pilot my measly 270whp NA a lot faster now, but that's likely only a little bit true.

Thanks dude! Much appreciated. Honestly if I stay N/A, ITBs would be such a cool addition. Unfortunately, everything BBR makes costs an arm and a leg! But you might still see me build something you'd like haha. The idea of a high-comp 2.4L N/A build with super aggressive cams is still really enticing to me.

This weekend made me consider a couple additional factors moving forward, though. For one, and I almost don't want to talk about this for fear of sounding like an a**hole, contingency prizes are now factoring into this car's build plan. I haven't tallied everything up from this weekend but it's going to make a big dent in the cost that it takes to keep this car on track. The Maxxis contingency alone means it'd be dumb to make any changes that would result in the car not being competitive in whatever class it enters.

And of course, equally important, being competitive in a class is just more fun too! I never built the NA to be truly competitive in TT4 or TT3. Before and after the built motor went in, it was about 40whp shy of its limit in each class. It was still fun being packfill, but obviously this weekend was much more exciting.
So, when I bump up the power, this car's either going into TT4 or TT3 class. TT4 would allow me up to ~260whp on the RC1's at the car's current weight. TT3 would allow me 330+whp on the RC1's or ~270 on Hoosiers (who also have a NASA contingency program). So basically, if I go N/A without building the head, I'm going to be leaving time on the table in either class. This is a bummer because I was leaning toward N/A build over turbo otherwise.

TT3 is our biggest class as well, which would be more fun to race in. It's usually at least 9 competitors compared to 3-5 in TT4.

So basically... just more things to think about while continuing to consider power adders. Luckily the car's in a very good spot as-is for TT5 class, and I anticipate having a ton of fun racing it in its current spec for the rest of the year. Thanks for listening to be blab. If anyone has any input, I'm all ears and would love to hear it.

 

Every time I click on this thread, I interrupt myself while reading your updates, and check marketplace to see if there's a beat up NC available. This is turning out to be such a great build. Your NA build was also great to follow.

Congrats on breaking into the sub 2s. Looks like a blast to drive. You know how to build a car.

 

Yo dude, much appreciated! Having a lot of fun with it over here. Sub-2 was a goal in my last car and that took two years, so doing it in six months with this car feels really good haha.

Bit of maintenance and other general unexpected blunders this week.

For the last month or so, I swear the brakes have been intermittently dragging a bit on this car. After a light brake application, they'd seem to stick for a few seconds before fully releasing. At first it was such a faint sensation that I just attributed it to being a byproduct my DTC60 pads on the street (been too lazy to swap my actual street pads back in). Well, I took the car to work on Tuesday and the brakes were dragging BAD. Not super noticeable while moving at speed, but enough to bring the car to a halt pretty quickly if coasting at 5ish mph. The brake warning light on the dash actually came on a couple times too and I got codes for faults with both of the front wheel speed sensors. Didn't think the system was that sensitive. I got the car in a lift and pulled the pads and found this on both front calipers.



And matching marks on the pads.



Now some of you hawk-eyed bandits probably noticed the issue in the first picture. Look at that gap between the rotor and caliper! A quick check on their website and I found that Wilwood makes Superlite calipers for 0.81", 1.1", and 1.25" rotors. The RX8 rotors the Keisler BBK kit uses are 0.95" thick, so the 1.1" calipers are used. Dang though! So these pads have 6mm of meat left on them but I can't run them anymore because they're getting hung up on the inside of the slide clips, and soon there won't be any caliper for the backing plate to hang on to.

Emailed Keisler and hopefully can get that resolved. Edit: Andrew at Keisler Automation emailed me and said they've never run into this problem before. He suggested mic'ing my rotors and sending pics of the pads so they could see what's up. I sent a bunch of photos back and will mic my rotors later on. They've got 10+ track days on them now and I've machined them once, so they're probably close to the discard thickness. Still, they've got a shelf on the inner edge since the pads don't cover the whole rotor, and each side only has maybe 1.5mm of material removed compared to new. I'll wait to see what Keisler says next.

In the meantime, I had a spare set of DTC30 pads so I slapped those on and bedded 'em in last night. No more dragging and the brake light hasn't come on since. The pad setup is obviously suboptimal with the DTC60's in the rear but the ABS seemed to handle the bias alright on the couple occasions I reached threshold during the bedding process. From what I gathered on the interwebs last night, the ABS module is actually responsible for controlling brake bias on this car, so hopefully it just compensates. I'll take it easy Sunday morning and make sure the car doesn't do anything weird under braking. If it does, I can just throw my street pads in the rear as well.

Otherwise, nothing too out of whack to attend to this week. I put the car in the air, cut a new wheel spat (smashed one of mine in the canyons a couple weeks ago), reinstalled the spats and side skirts, unplugged the fender vents, did an oil change and rotated the tires. Today I'm gonna lower the car a quarter inch. I've been running it a touch high as a precaution against fender well rub but I haven't seen any so down she goes. I'm also going to touch up the alignment after. Hopefully I'll be able to pull more than 3.3* camber in the front with the car a little lower.
Finally, I put one of my repainted bronze wheels on the car. Holy hell, IMO they look better than the actual bronze wheels haha. Should look perfect with a light shrouding of brake dust on 'em. I'll be repainting the rest in the near future.

 

Nice driving Zak! Ya I definitely echo some of the sentiment by others here that an NC looks to make a solid/affordable build, especially if I were to start over today. There's a fast one here on the east coast that is K swapped that was at Dominion that was turning fast times. It seems like the next step is a good motor like a K (*wink* *wink*). I haven't priced out the swap but I'm sure it's pricey. Most of the spec miata guys like to poopoo the NC because they're biased to the prior gen and the NA/NB is lighter, and that stigma has continued. Clearly the NC was a good upgrade overall (the stamped steel control arms don't exactly scream high end) and a better chassis. I've seen some car reviewers say it's about 90% of an s2k for about 50% the cost. I might have to pick one up one day but I'm running out of storage and don't think I can let go of the NB.

Regarding pushing the limits, I think anything that has a more linear/consistent power delivery (NA cars) will be easier to push the limits than a turbo car. The lag is real and as boost increases the torque delivery isn't linear and it's harder to regulate. With that said, it's still a lot of fun. Good to see you're having fun and kicking butt in your NC!