Grassroots Motorsports: The Hardcore Sports Car Magazine

Meanwhile, Ground Control has come up with their spacers for adapting their awesome camber plates to the quality coilovers that Progress sells for the B13 Sentra. So, between the two companies, they’ve got you covered.

Central Florida Region SCCA updated the results from this past weekend’s autocross. Congrats to Kim on her first trophy!

Unfortunately, this weekend’s autocross was cancelled due to heavy rains. That’s unfortunate as we had mounted up a pair of BFGoodrich g-Force KD tires for the fronts as a stopgap until our new Falkens arrive. We also ordered two new "old" Azenis tires from Edge Racing which we can compare to the new ones for this project. No sense comparing old, old tires to new, new tires.

Kim and Per before their first run.

"Ok, hold on tight."

Don goes for a ride. He’s been doing quite a bit of impromptu marketing for GRM.

Here is the new Progress spacer/adapter to work with the Ground Control camber plates. It properly centers the shaft in the plate’s spherical bearing.

Kim’s parents met us at the autocross in Ft. Pierce this past weekend. Don and Linda Zbin shot some pictures and even a video of our exploits.

Our Civic now has a seat that fits properly. The upholstery
is close enough to the rest of the car.

Our Civic now has the correct back seat in place, as we (finally) had some spare time last night. Removing the Civic’s rear seat isn’t hard at all, but a special technique helps. Some excellent directions can be found over at Honda-Tech.com.

Almost the entire seat assembly snaps into place, although one bolt is needed. Ours was missing, but found a replacement at the local hardware store. An M6-1.00x20 bolt got us back in business.

Before installing our stock Civic rear seat, we weighed it. The bottom cushion weighs 7-1/2 pounds, while the complete seat back (both parts) hits the scales at just under 20 pounds.

After two trips to Active Autowerke in Miami, Florida, we now have a little more power to go with our handling improvements on our Project M3.

Starting with a Turner Motorsports cold air intake, a chip upgrade, and a comparison test of five different exhaust systems, we took our 200 hp (at the wheels) M3 up to about 212 hp.

Next we dove into the fuel injection system, messed around some more with exhaust systems and did a few more tricks to boost power to about 225 hp. For full details on all that we did please pick up the June 2005 issue of GRM. The May 2005 issue will also have additional info on some more suspension mods that we made.

We installed new rotors and Carbotech Bobcat pads last night. We’re bedding them in and allowing them to cure for a few days before we retest the braking distances.

Running torn-up fender liners won’t cause the earth to stop spinning, but the setup doesn’t look so hot. SCCA Street Touring rules also say they need to be there. Yes, we know our tires are bald.

While the NASCAR Busch series racers were lapping Daytona International Speedway, we were down the street at the local pick-n-pull looking for Civic parts. We came home with a small score.

Both front fender liners on our car are torn-up, so we have been looking for replacements. New ones are about $30 each, so we have been keeping our eyes open for an alternate solution. A lot of the cars at the local yard are front-hits, and as a result most of the fender liners we’re finding are trashed or are simply missing.

On Saturday we finally found a good right-side fender liner. Price: $6.50. We still need a left-side one, however, as that car was missing it.

On an unrelated note, we have ordered centering rings for our Rotas from Wheel Dude, and hopefully they’ll be here soon so we can mount our new wheels.

We had a good weekend with our Project SE-R, autocrossing in Ft. Pierce Florida with the Central Florida Region of the SCCA. With a practice day on Saturday and a points event on Sunday, we got quite a few runs in. Per finished up the weekend running uncontested in the Expert class, while Kim was just 1 second back and took the win in STX against a MINI Cooper S. She’s a fast learner!

We’ve been noticing several things about our SE-R.

1. The current brakes stink. Literally. They overheat quickly and take 157 ft. to stop the car from 60 mph. We’re going to replace the no-name pads with Carbotech Bobcat compound pads.
2. The car has got some weird clunking going on in the camber plate/coilover area. We’re going to work on properly mating up the Progress coilovers to the Ground Control camber plates. We might actually be loosing camber as the assembly shifts around.
3. The car still understeers, while #2 might be the cause of some of this, we’re going to dial out some negative camber in the rear to allow the car to rotate. Still waiting for the new Falkens, which might also help this.
4. There does seem to be an appreciable consumption/use/loss of oil, about 1 quart every 1500 miles. We tested the compression today and found 178, 180, 180, 181, all at "new" spec for this engine. There is an oil leak on the pulley side of the engine. We’ll track that down and see if it solves our problem.

We dyno’ed the SE-R at Projekt7 Tuning in Holly Hill, FL.

Eight horsepower for $43.

We dyno’ed the SE-R yesterday to get our baseline for the project. With a claimed 140 horsepower at the crank, the SE-R put out 114 hp at the wheels on a Dynojet dynamometer. We replaced the fuel filter ($10), raising output to 115.8. We think it was the original filter. We then installed a $43 “Warm Air Intake” that we purchased on Ebay. The output rose to 124. A solid 8 horsepower gain.

The SE-R corners very flat, but had some understeer this past weekend.

We cornerweighted the SE-R using our Longacre scales. We raised the RF about 1/2" to balance the car.

We cornerweighted the car last night. Here are the before and after measurements. This was without any “stuff” in the car like a spare tire, but with about 2/3 of a tank of gas and our driver in the driver’s seat.

We disconnected the front and rear anti-roll bars to properly adjust the corner weights. After the car was balanced, we adjusted the the endlinks for the bars so that there’s no preload on them. We needed to lengthen them about 1/4″ This means that there was about 1/4″ of “twist” in the bar at rest, which will adversely affect handling.

Before:
LF: 900 RF: 824
LR: 500 RR: 482

The RF/LR crossweight was low, so we raised the RF of the car. Suspension travel is key to making an SE-R handle, so we didn’t want to lower the car any more.

After:
LF: 886 RF: 840
LR: 520 RR: 473

While we don’t claim to be audiophiles, we do know a butchered stereo installation when we see one. Not only does our current setup sound poorly, but they installer also hacked up our door panels in the process. Our current plan is to cover the tweeter holes with some oversized, custom speaker grilles.

We ran the Civic this past weekend with the Martin Sports Car Club, and it’s becoming apparent that the car needs three things to become competitive: tires, suspension and a new driver. Fortunately we have plans to replace two of the things on that list. (Maybe all three, however.) Most of the parts needed to redo our Civic’s suspension are here. Once our Konis arrive, then we can start bolting on the new hardware.

While at the autocross, however, we discussed our stereo with a friend of ours who does high-end car audio installations for a living. He gave our car a quick look-over. No, we’re not going to turn the Civic into a rolling jukebox, but the current system is sad–usually only the passenger-side tweeter works. A previous owner did install component speakers in our Civic, but they’re way past their prime. When everything does work as planned, which is rare, the sound is still off.

We currently have 6.5-inch Polk door speakers matched with Boston Acoustic tweeters–our friend believes those tweeters are actually older than the car itself. While installing those tweeters, someone butchered the inner door panels. We’ll keep our eyes open for new door panels, although the Si pieces are specific to that model: The other hatchback models don’t have the handy door pockets, while the similar EX coupe came with power windows.

To solve the problem, our friend is going to make some custom tweeter grilles for us, using his own EG-chassis Civic as a guide. These tweeter grilles will cover the hacked-up part of our door panels. We haven’t picked up new speakers yet, but we have been checking out Crutchfield’s catalog as well as eBay. We’ll probably keep our Pioneer head unit, as it seems to work well and should be able to handle two speakers. (Our car doesn’t have the optional rear speaker kit, and to be honest, two speakers should be fine for our needs.)