Midwest Spec Racer

This is a progress report page for the new car. Pictures and specifications will be changed as progress is made.

A couple of days later we have several parts that have been plated back on the car.

A recent development to the car is the capability of making it center seat as well as right hand drive/2 seat by simply moving a few parts around. There is an option pack that allows for one version or the other or both. Switching between versions takes about 2 hours. In the picture below you can see we are currently assembling it in the new center seat mode.

All pictures below this point are prior to powder coating & plating. They will be replaced in the next few days as we make progress on the assembly.

The above and below picture show the changeable components in the right hand drive version.

The picture below shows how we have moved the shifter to the left and provided a new side bracket for the seat mount at the same time.

We have had the car out for nearly 50 hours of testing at tracks that include Gateway, Heartland Park, Motorsports Ranch (Fort Worth), Hallett, Mid America, Moroso, Roebling Road, Texas Motor Speedway and Brainerd. The chassis was mostly finished in production parts while the body is still very much temporary. The front 1/3 of the body came from production molds; the rear 2/3 of the body is a more temporary/ugly skin that was sprayed over our wood masters with a chopper gun and sprayed with gel coat.

The tests went very well as far as mechanicals and suspension is concerned. The temporary rear half of the body that gave us problems earlier has been replaced by parts that are more representative of production parts and they worked fine. Our cockpit adjustable sway bars are very responsive to input with both drivers choosing mid-point settings fror front and rear but interesting enough the split between the front and rear were completely opposite for each driver. One was 20% front/50% rear while the other was 45% front/30% rear.

The car has been well received by all of the drivers. We are listening to feedback from everyone who drives the car and implement changes as needed.

The body work will come in smaller cheaper pieces than the previous Spec Racer Toyota body (19 pieces). Smaller pieces will allow you to replace only the area damaged if you are involved in a crash and will ship standard UPS or FedEx so your shipping cost and transit times will be greatly improved.

This is no conversion, but a whole new car. I have drawn from my personal experience and knowledge gained from 28 years of road racing involvement as well as the expertise of the contacts I have made along the way. We have taken our well developed Toyota drivetrain from the version 1 car used primarily at Aspen and adapted it to this car. Link to Generation 1 conversion The Generation 2 car is wider, longer, and taller than the generation 1 car. It is still built like a tank for safety and a long service life without having to spend a lot of money to repair or maintain it. The longer and wider cockpit accommodates those really big drivers or can seat two! The two seater would make it a popular car for track days, corporate days, or driving schools. In some of the later pictures you will see how easily adjustable the driver controls are to fit driver preference. We are working with various sanction groups to create a spec class or series for the car as well.

* Dry sump oiling system with 9 qt. capacity. Water/oil heat exchanger style oil cooler.

* Engine management system by AEM with built in loop recorder for easy diagnostics.

* Powder coated frame with a choice of colors. All loose steel parts are already plated.

The car is homologated in SCCA as a CSR or ASR with the standard engine and ASR only with the turbo option. We have had independent disscussions with USERA and NASA about having a spec series or class for 2008 both of which sound promising if we can bring enough cars. They already have categories that the car will fit into for the 2007 races.

Below you can see a driver's view of the controls. On the far left almost out of view is the master switch, moving from left to right are the clutch & brake reservoirs; fire system handle on top where both driver and workers can reach it; the big black knobs are for the front & rear sway bar adjustment; betweeen them is the cockpit fire nozzle; the blue knob is brake bias; the black cover is for the optional STACK data logger download; the 3 STACK control buttons are just out of view behind the left upper side of the steering wheel; the start button is on the right side also tucked behind the wheel; the rest of the switches are on a separate plate to the far right including fuel pump selector, ignition, running lights and optional headlights high & low.

The steering column has 9" of telescoping adjustment and 2.5" of vertical adjustment withe the simple loosening of a few fasteners. The main STACK dash display moves up and down with the steering column to maintain visibility through the steering wheel plus it has its own fine tune adjustment. The pedal rack is on a sliding platform for the same type of infinite adjustment. The fuse & relay panel is mounted under the top center body section attached to the left side of the forward roll hoop. Some of the wires and cables seen in these pictures are not in their final positions so it may look a little cluttered in some areas. The hole near the center of the plate with the fire handle is for mounting your radio antenna providing a ground plane. As much as possible I am trying to engineer this car utilizing components already available in the racing aftermarket to keep cost down and make service parts more readily available to the end user. Of course this means I have to engineer the parts to adapt those kind of parts. The throttle, clutch and footrest are all the same part starting life as the clutch pedal from this Wilwood assembly. This pedal rack is mounted on a slider track with squeeze clamps holding it in position to allow for infinite adjustments by simply loosening 4 bolts.

Our test car is being built with a very high end STACK data logging and video system utilizing the standard configurable dash that comes in every car as the recording center of the system. It will have three extra modules attached to incorporate real time pit telemetry of data, synchronized video and extra sensor inputs. The things we will be logging in our test car include: dampers x4, brake pressure x2, tire temp x12, G forces x3, wheel speed x4, steering, throttle, yaw, sway bar position x2, all engine data and oil tank level. A total of 38 possible channels will be active for a combination of dash readouts with alarms, telemetry to the pits and on board logging of 30 selected channels all managed and recorded by a PIN code upgraded version of the same dash that comes standard in the car. The 2MB built in memory will record 40 minutes of data in the above example running damper channels at 50hz and most others at 10hz. This is as much of an excersise in demonstrating what can be done with the system as it is a development tool for the new car.

The installation of the suspension arms went as planned with two exceptions. We had to reposition the lower shock pickup point on the front lower control arms by 1-1/2" to center the shock through the upper control arm. The rear upper ball joint had to be moved outboard by 1" to allow for a similar shock clearance issue. This was made possible by the modular nature of the spindle design. After verifying the change on the Mitchell suspension software, I simply drilled a new hole in the upper spindle plate. The driveshafts are running in a straight line at static ride height to minimize drag and stress. The engine bay is large enough to accomodate a variety of engines including some V6 models. The engine control computer is mounted just on the other side of the firewall to make it easy to build a short wiring harness for alternative power packages.

The side crush structures are bolt on removable pieces for easy repairs. They have their own floor and will probably not contain many functional components of the car. The few components that reside there are limited to oil lines, cooler and filters seen below. The cooler and hoses will be mounted straighter after we clamp them in place with their brackets.

The picture below shows the left front suspension with aluminum adjuster tubes used for the steering arms as well as the adjustable upper control arms. The shocks are QA-1 double adjustable. The radiator assembly was removed for this picture so you could see the front suspension and bulkhead area better.

The space between front bulkhead wall and the tube 9” behind it is where we have placed things like the battery, fire system and oil tank. The space was made available by moving the coil over shocks outboard with traditional upper and lower A-frames. The radiator is mounted in a light gauge tube frame structure hanging off the front that provides a strong support for the downforce of the nose and splitter while still maintaining the safety energy absorbing features of the soft radiator structure of the past. The radiator has a 1.5" thick 3 row aluminum core that was originally used in a 6 cylinder SUV application so it will have plenty of reserve capacity for the turbo option. There will be an aluminum cover over the top of the diagonal square tubes to direct air into the radiator. The radiator assembly attached to the front bulkhead with four spring mounted bolts to allow the front end to float over curbs. Removing those four bolts and two hoses is all that has to be done for a very quick replacement of the entire front body support and cooling system. There will be a structure attached to this assembly to the left and right sides that will support the front fenders and mount the optional headlight package.

This shot of the right rear show the upper aluminum adjuster tubes for caster/camber. The rear adjustable sway bar rotary blade can be seen at the bottom of the picture, the potentiometer attached paralell to the cable is an option to allow the driver to see a display on the dash of the exact sway bar position and data log it as well. The bundle of cables is for the shifter & throttle.

The picture below shows the wing and wheels we are using in production. The wing is a lightweight molded ABS unit with a carbon fiber look. The wing mounting plates are custom built aluminum allowing for wing angle adjustments in 2 degree increments.

The 22 gallon fuel cell fits perfectly into the space as planned. There will be a sheet aluminum enclosure around it to meet safety guidelines. The cell has an oval access plate on both ends to allow for easy fuel pump replacement as well as a short run of filler hose directly to the top corner of the side body work. If you look closely you will see another small access plate on top of the cell for a large vent tube for the endurance quick fill option. You can see the dry break filler assembly sitting on the bench that replaces the filler cap assembly for the endurance filler option. Another fuel system option for endurance racing will be a second fuel pump on the other side allowing for more complete fuel scavenging in corners as well as a redundant pump in the event of a failure.

The seat we have chosen is the Ultra-Shield brand seen commonly in the Spec Miata. We will fabricate a bracket that will hold this seat in several available sizes in multiple positions for comfort and safety.Our seat has 4 different mounting angles using the plate welded to the frame rail to position the tube running across the bottom of the seat. The crotch belt attaches to this tube as well.

A second seat can be mounted in the same manner as the driver seat. If you look real close you can see the 3 center mounting tabs for the lap belt. This is to allow for various lap belt mounting points for the 5 different width seats available.

The above shot shows how the top of the seat is mounted offering for several lateral seat mounting positions as well. The shoulder belt mount bar has 6 optional mounting holes for the cross bar to accomodate different height positions for the shoulder belt.

Roll bar clearance per the GCR is demonstrated here with the yellow tube resting on the front and rear roll hoops.

The new frame is designed to accommodate a 6'6" 300 pound driver with reasonable comfort while meeting SCCA guidelines for legal roll hoop requirements. Compared to our generation one car, the frame is:

Roll hoop	1 ¼” taller
Knee hoop	3 ½” taller
Cockpit	2” longer
Enitre car	4” wider
Shoulders at rear of cockpit	14” wider
Front bulkhead	1” taller
Engine bay	4” taller

The new spindle/upright design is crafted of modular aluminum and steel components and will save two pounds on each corner of the car! Using this upright design allows us to replace crash damaged spindle parts without replacing the entire upright. Just a couple of the damaged bolt on components will be sacrificed in most cases. One benefit of this design is not being tied to OE manufactured spindles and brakes which are heavier and eventually can become obsolete. Another benefit is being able to engineer exactly the spindle geometry we needed or even slightly tweak those specs later by replacing one or two components if early testing shows a need for change. We are using a 4 piston Wilwood Dynalite caliper seen it the pictures.

This is the same piece with the brake rotor & hat installed. All of the aluminum pieces of the upright assembly and the brake hat will be anodized black for production. The steel bridge bracket of the upright will be zink gold like the bolts. The monoball ball joints seen in the picture below will be part of the upper and lower control arms but are shown here to give you an idea of how we are attaching them to the upright. The steering arm is a bolt on bracket attached to the two holes seen in the aluminum plate just below and to the right of the lower ball joint. This location allows for no toe changes required when adjusting camber since the camber will be adjusted from the upper control arm. Bump steer change due to chassis adjustments will be minimal due to this location as well but any needed bump steer adjustment will be done at this easily accessible location.

The brake rotor is a 12.19” ventilated disc with a bolt on aluminum hat (bottom of left stack). These brakes are huge compared to the 10” ventilated rotor (middle of stack) on our previous SRT which already worked very well. Compare that to the solid 9.25” rotor of the old Sports Renault brake package (top of stack) that our version 1 car replaced. The fact that the brake, suspension and chassis systems of this car are way over built lends itself to the possibility of future drivetrain options that double or triple the current power and still easily fit into the large engine bay..

Front suspension geometry and layout is shown in the above diagram. I have been using Bill Mitchell’s Win-Geo3 software to develop this aspect of the car on paper before moving on to the real thing. The rear is shown below.

You can see here that we are moving forward with welding the primary tubes on the next seven frames and have the eighth in the fixture table on the right. We are very pleased with how flat and square the frames are coming out of the fixture after welding. We are trying to move forward with production of components for the first eight cars as much as possible in the areas we know will not be changed by decisions of our first rounds of testing.

We are currently accepting reservations with deposits for the second batch of 10 car kits. The current kit price is $39,500.00 (less battery, body paint, assembly & fluids). We have already taken deopsits for the first 10 and production is well underway. I am also open to inquiries from qualified shops wishing to be re-sellers of this car and it's associated service components. My most keen interest in dealers would be from shops that are already operating at or near member owned country club style tracks.

If you have any questions about this project feel free to contact Steve Fenske on his cell phone (785) 230-0857 or e-mail msr.steve@sbcglobal.net