When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
That blue engine looks very familiar. You probably would like to know where it landed. I'm doing a full rebuild on it - it is currently in the machine shop getting bored and decked (84mm, Supertech, 9:1), head getting valved and resurfaced, crank getting turned, new bearings everywhere. I'm going to do some light porting on the head. I'll probably keep the blue color.
Oh, glad to hear it's going to a good, happy home! Did you happen to inspect the bearings when you removed them? I'd love to know how they looked, it was still performing great when we took it out, just not quite powerful enough!
So after doing some reading and asking a few people about weaknesses of the Ecotec swap, motor mount to oil pan clearance (or lack thereof), exhaust clearance, and fuel line heat shielding were mentioned often.
We already solved most of our exhaust and fuel line issues with the V8R subframe, highly recommended for anyone thinking of this swap. But the best route for the exhaust still brought it dangerously close to the motor mount, clutch slave, and right along the same path as the fuel lines.
vteckiller2000, I want you to know the following is 100% your fault.
So first things first, we immediately voided our warranty on the V8R subframe. You can see the rectangle where the mount used to be...mounted.
Then we added some armor plating
Then forgot to take a few pictures, but here's the new mount welded and painted. I really wish I had a picture of the original mount, I'll try to snap a picture of the driver side soon. But essentially, it zig-zagged from the ecotec mount over to the stock miata location. Handy for a stock subframe, but annoyingly in the way of exhaust routing. We added the small gusset cause it looked a little spindly in the aft-fore direction, and kept the bolt on plate, now in the opposite direction, to aid in motor R&R. We also angled it out as far as possible, since it looked too close to vertical before.
Look at all that room for the exhaust now! We should really put a pipe there.
Boom.
Of course now all my heat shielding on the oil pan is in the incorrect place, but I'll fix that soon.
And before anyone asks, yes, we could have saved ~$100 by getting a mountless subframe and making our own from scratch. Using the pre-made, stock location mounts allowed us to properly place the motor and get everything bolted in and aligned before making any decisions as to where we needed to move things. I'd LOVE if V8R and MT Motorsports got together and made a ecotec specific subframe, but I'm not sure if there's demand. Also, no, we have no idea if our mount is in any other sense of the word, functional. But if we made any of these changes later, we'd have to re-make our exhaust, so doing this now hopefully solved all those issues.
Glad you did more due diligence than just trusting the "manufacturer" to make things work correctly. I don't know what kind of points mods cost, but there is allegedly some power in an intake manifold. There are plenty of sand rail shops that make sheet metal intake manifolds that face the correct way...
Next question is, what muffler to use? I had my Artech 3" turbo muffler on my own Miata while running naturally aspirated and it sounded great, I think it's a straight through muffler. So my options are:
This is a race only car, but also an endurance car. One where team communication and endurance are our biggest concerns, so having a spec miata exhaust all for the extra .2hp is going to cost us more in the long run.
#2 should be sufficient. Do you have db limits at any track you frequent?
I used a mid size borla oval with a vibrant ultra quiet resonator with my ecotec and it was very tolerable. Comparable to the enthuza 3" turbo exhaust with two magnaflows I had on my old 95.
I vote that your end game 3" setup on your Ecotec setup was quieter than the turbo BP 95 was. That was an incredibly loud car for a turbo car that wasn't straight piped or dumped.
PIR is 103, Ridge is probably similar, no sound limits at ORP, but we hope to hit up some California tracks including possibly Laguna this year or next.
Ended up ordering #12579. OMG it's huge. Slid it on to the current exhaust tip and it's gloriously quiet. Sometime soon we'll be fabricating new exhaust (again) from the 2-bolt flange near the bell housing all the way to the tip, with #12579 in close to stock location. That'll get rid of the resonator that's not doing anything, and the V-band that's in a crummy location. Currently the car is strapped into our trailer to go to body on Monday to fix a few dents we've acquired over the last 2 years of racing, then to wrap to get it's green coat back on! Then it's time to fabricate the exhaust, finish the wiring, including our new MXL2 dash, dyno tune, final corner weight and align, and off to our first race at the Ridge!
Some more updates. Car weighs in at 2020 with driver weight, cornerbalance and aligned it. Radium surge tank installed. Header and downpipe coated, heat shielded the fuel and clutch/brake lines near it. Dynoing later today. Got several new sets of FFDs this season since we've run them with great success for a few years now.
Dyno session didn't go quite as planned, HP tuners did not want to hook up to any of the laptops we tried. Turns out the HP tuners usb module was fried Big thanks to Kris at koracing for playing with intake length and filter size to bring is to 186whp/180wtq on the ecotecmiata basemap, but we'll be back to do a proper tune soon. Very pleased with the results thus far.
Did some testing a week at the Ridge Motorsports park, car was instantly 4 seconds a lap faster out of the gate, ran into an issue with a slight crack in the oil pan from manufacturing which was a drag but unlike BP motor we were able to pull it with the motor and subframe in the car. I think we a little more dialing in we'll be to take another 2 seconds off our previous best. Car is easier to drive and the flat torque everywhere really pays dividends. We got the oil pan fixed and back on, going back to the dyno to actually tune the car now that the HP tuners module is fixed, here's an untuned dyno graph.
Another test day tomorrow and then we have our first Enduro weekend. Test day will be at our home track of PIR, then heading up to the ridge Motorsports park in Shelton Washington for a pair of 7 hour Enduro. Fingers crossed everything holds together. Biggest concern will be fuel economy, car has 15 useable gallons a stock tank and Radium surge tank.
Hanging out behind the shop with some of the E46 M3 race cars weve built. Some of them will be testing with us tomorrow as well.
A little footage from our last race. Car is shockingly fast and easier to drive than ever before. Next race coming up this weekend at Pacific raceways, haven't been there in 9 years.
I like how similar our setups are, down to the same muffler choice and same model of dyno. Did you guys find any power over the MT basemap when you went back to the dyno?
0
