Leon

Mother of god, that thing F***ING RIPS.

Just keep an eye on those gland nuts. I'd suggest checking torque after each event. You should be able to easily get a wrench through the spring in order to do so. Minimal disassembly required.

Inspirational work as always Derek, well done! I enjoy following along with your design process. Is there any recent footage of your heads on a running motor? Aydin, Rebello is fantastic. They can take a long time to get things out the door and are pretty old-school but they've been thorough and accommodating to work with in my experience. They did a great job on my P90. Rob @ ZCG is incredibly into what he does. He can be intense but I respect his passion and tenacity in doing top notch work.

You will not be disappointed with Thunderhill nor Sonoma. Laguna is fourth on my list of local tracks, with Sonoma the top dog, then Buttonwillow and Thunderhill ("local" meaning within 4 hours). Laguna is the famous one with the corkscrew and all but it's by far the least technical track of the four. With that said, they're all great to drive and if you have the option to hit any one of them, you should do it.

Love the build, any plans to make it down to any Norcal road courses?

Rob @ ZCar Garage

Hey Aydin, I have a buddy looking for a 3.54 R200 in the SF bay area. Are you willing to ship?

Interesting, thanks!

I can provide two lines of reasoning: 1) this kit is clearly designed by someone with more of a propensity for fabrication rather than engineering/vehicle dynamics. It's going to be a lot of money spent on something that doesn't look fully thought-out and will still take additional work to make it "right". IMSA GTU S30's wore fat race slicks and won races back in the day without going to a double A-arm suspension. Example of a chassis with IMSU GTU history: http://www.finecars.cc/en/detail/car/7313/index.html 2) the car was not originally designed to handle 600hp nor wide sticky tires, so you're going to incur R&D costs regardless. It comes down to how much of your own work/hiring out you want to do vs slapping in pre-made OTS bits and hope they're good enough (but expecting lots of tuning and rework). Final thoughts: there sure are a lot of ways to make a from-scratch suspension worse than what you started with...

It's not the camber gain that's necessarily the problem, it's more of a benefit if not a big one. What happens is the short upper arm creates more vertical roll center migration. This will affect with the handling balance of the car because the spring and bar contribution to roll stiffness will more dramatically change during suspension travel. This is not a great characteristic to have on your front axle unless you balance it with the rear which I'm not at all confident is being done nor thought of. And to those saying weight distribution doesn't matter that much, you're being very silly. The amount of conjecture in this thread has my head spinning. As to Porsche, the 911 descended from the VW Type 1, aka the Beetle, which was not really designed with sporting intentions. Have they been successful? Very. Does that mean that the layout they've chosen is somehow optimal or even good for vehicle dynamics. Not at all. Money has a way of covering up mistakes. Look at any serious sports car conceived in the last three decades and tell me how many are rear-engined. EDIT: I'd forgotten to say, Porsche themselves wanted to very much kill off the 911 in the '80s as they didn't see a technical benefit of continuing with the platform. The only reason it's still around is because it'd become the face of Porsche and they realized they can keep milking it for what it's worth.

Nice! Yeah, it just works and fits well with the car. This feels like a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" situation.

I should say, I also FINALLY went to mount my Compe handle (steering wheel) and I may be called a heathen, but I think I prefer my Grant! I like the thicker grip, larger offset, and larger diameter of the Grant. Considering putting the Compe wheel on the market or hanging it on the wall in my garage...

Thanks Ross! Looks like you've been making some serious progress on your end as well. I am not envious but much respect.

Happy new year! May this one be more fruitful than the last. Time for an update. The Z had been down from January of 2020 for a "quick" re-gasket, meaning I got it back on the road in... November. There was a fuel drip from the carb insulators so those were replaced along with all carb gaskets. The plastic spacers and gaskets were replaced with the o-ring and thackery washer style. I went to the dyno in early December to see if I could sort my fueling with Keith's latest jets as well as figure out the high-RPM cut I've been getting. The dyno day was useful in helping see what's going on with the fueling but I couldn't figure out the cut-out. I did note that it happens at 5500RPM consistently. It was making good power though, about 193whp (w/ filters) before the 5500RPM cut. An adjustable cam gear is on its way to help further dial in the motor. Fast forward to the past week, (temporarily) installed a wideband and reworked the rear brakes (but still having parking brake lockup issues). Then I shot-gunned some things that were at hand in an attempt to remedy the 5500RPM cut-out. A fresh coil didn't do it but fresh plugs did! All it took was a set of spark plugs to get the car running way better than it probably has before. The plugs in the car weren't that old but it seems they'd gotten fuel/carbon fouled enough to cause some problems. If it happens again, I'm going to try a hotter plug but for now I've replaced with the same: BPR6ES-11. I did some runs up and down the freeway on NYE and got the main jets dialed in for our new years day drive. Swapped back to the ZX distributor from the 123 as the motor seems to run a bit better that way. I'm going to investigate this further on a future dyno day. We took a 150 mile loop around the Santa Cruz mountains, the Z got the most exercise it's ever had given how much time it spent over 6000RPM! Without further adieu, the obligatory accompanying photos: 12/28/20 - drove over to a buddy's house for the wideband install and other Z things 1/1/21 - Alice's / SC Mountain Drive

Did I just read that? Boy would I want you as my customer.

Anyone can get their hands on some software and make pretty FEA pictures. The question to ask would be, what sort of validation work has been done? It doesn't matter whether they ran their stuff through FEA if it doesn't work in reality. CAE tools help the designer iterate quickly which reduces costs and development time but the end customers only care about results. What does it weigh, how stiff is it, how strong is it, and what have you done to prove that?

Sold.

I bet when you were lower, your rear camber was closer to what the front was. That can make a big difference in balance especially if the tires are more camber sensitive. A little bit of toe can go a long way as well. Zero toe in the rear could be a big part of the looseness, depends on your rear toe compliance (rubber bushings or PU?). Also try zero toe up front or even a tad toe out to tone down the yaw rate gain a bit. YRG is essentially a measure of a vehicle's response to a given steering input--the more your point the tires out of the turn, the lower your YRG. Meaning point the fronts out and the rears in if you want to take some oversteer out. Softer springs could help but looking at how early the car oversteers during the cornering process is making me think that the main problem lies elsewhere. I could be totally wrong but that's what I'm reading in between the lines.

Nice work. That thing is loose on entry! What are your alignment settings? With how loose it is right off the bat, it makes it seem like your rear tires are shot and/or not enough rear camber and toe-in (not familiar with the S130 platform but I'll assume it's difficult to dial these in independently with the semi-trailing arms).

Hi everyone, I'm looking for a local sale on these (Bay Area, CA). I'm selling a set of Panasports in as-new condition, purchased new (no one cares but I paid over $1600 all in). They come with barely used, although aged 7 years, set of Bridgestone RE-11A tires in 225/50R16 all around. I last drove on these 1.5 years ago and they still felt great. The wheels and tires have always been stored indoors. I put maybe 3000 miles on the set before I swapped to 15" Watanabes. I'm sure people will ask about fitment. I've never had rubbing in any situation but my rear fender lips and the stock front valence are already trimmed. It will be tough for me to comment whether they'll fit your specific car or not as it depends on your suspension setup. This tire size is common in Z's and typically fits stock bodies but *may* require modifications. Bolt pattern is 4x114.3 (4x4.5) Offset is zero (ET0)

I'm having the same issue @SuperDan

And this is what makes HybridZ great. Hell yeah Derek.

Ben nailed it. Route the stock belt through the pass-through and find a way to make the buckle work (extension or donor buckle with same style receptacle will do). This is exactly how I run my S2000, using a 2g Eclipse rear seat belt buckle which matches the S2000's latch but is mounted via a cloth belt instead of rigid bracket. Not my photo:

Welcome and beautiful Z! HybridZ and CZC co-exist quite well, there's a wealth of info on both forums. And while HybridZ was formed by guys swapping V8's into S30's, there's still loads of great info regarding the original platform as well.

I love following all the stages of this project, keep it up!