robzracing

This was not me obviously!

Now sold I'm afraid. Thanks guys.

Now £350! Need these gone to make space for an engine rebuild.

This is a complete kit for the main rear suspension components which we never got around to fitting to our track car. Supplied by Abbey Motorsport when they did the suspension and front poly bushes. Looking for £500 inc p&p (as long as you're in the UK)

Both very different cars to be honest (obviously!) the 350z is such a beautifully balanced car it's great to drive on track, but you are always aware of the weight of the car, especially under braking! The Clios are huge fun but a handful to drive quickly. Miles faster than the Nissan around the bends and probably a good 2 or 3 seconds a lap faster as a consequence. ( depending on the track) The clios are also much cheaper to run and repair too.

Looks good Mark. Is that the same brake upgrade as ours? Looking forward to watching your progress on this. Let us know when your testing at Brands.

Off to Newcastle (4.5 hours away!) to pick up another Clio on Thursday. We will now have a matching pair Not nearly as tidy or well specced as the other one but it comes with a trailer and was half the price, so a good starting point. Also a bonus that it's the same colour so body panels can be shared too. And this is the Nissan at the moment Sadly Alfies bumper didn't travel well...... Very disapointing and the courier is not making any claim easy unsurprisingly. Does anyone know whether with some gentle heat I might be able to ease that dent out? Any advice appreciated

A little overdue an update I think!! Our season went very well last year with a total of 12 track days and no mechanical issues. Our last visit to Brands last year at the end of October was the one and only time one of our guests put the 350Z backwards into the tyres and to be honest I think we got off lightly as the track was just about the most slippery I've seen it. Even I spun it once! Thanks to Alfie on here we have a new bumper on its way to us ready for our first event of 2014 So, since my last post we also aquired another car which we hope to race this season if the sponsors come on board. It's a championship winning sprint car but we'll be entering an endurance series with it. New livery just been done and this was it before It's far from standard mechanically, running ITBs, close ratio box and LSD putting out about 215bhp at 970kg laiden. So it's pretty quick and corners like nothing else, especially on slicks! Lots of plans for 2014 and the Nissan is due a trip to Abbey in the next few weeks for some routine maintenance. Hopefully it will be working even harder for its money this year. More updates as the preseason work begins.

If you still have it could you PM me a price for the rear bumper?

All sounds good. I did the brake upgrade last year, it makes a massive difference on track.

Another great write-up for Steve and Mark

Great write-up Steve. Hopefully we'll be there with you next season!

Time for a small update... The track days have been continuing and in the last 3 weeks the car's been to Brands, Bedford and Snetterton so it's seeing plenty of action. But now we've had a couple of dry days it has become clear that the standard brakes just aren't up to the job of constant heavy braking even with our ducting running from the front. At Bedford we could only get in 10-15 minute stints before the brakes gave up so our upgrade became a priority. Our bargain buy from Palmersport turned out not to be quite the bargain as the calipers were deemed to be scrap! At least we had the discs, carriers and hoses so still not a bad deal I guess. Brake Caliper Refurbs offered us a brand new set of Brembo F50s for £400 so we snapped them up and they finally arrived last week quite a bit bigger! but surprisingly not much heavier. Although the carrier is a separate component with these but ours are machined from Aluminium and are also pretty light . (forgot to weigh them though ) The swap took about 3 hours......... before ...and after and back on its wheels Need to get the pads bedded in before Brands on Friday and possibly another quick bleed through as the pedal travel feels a bit long. Lets hope they work!

Good day today Took a trip to Bedford Autodrome to see the chaps at Palmersport engineering division. 6 or 7 years ago they were running 350Zs in their driver experience days and for driver instruction, so we managed to buy an instructor pedal off them that they had lying around and Steve Page the manager up there had invited me up there if I wanted to discuss how it was installed. Well, he didn't need to ask twice and I shot up the A1 this morning. Kid in a sweet shop doesn't begin to describe it! Steve spent pretty much the whole morning with me. Guided tour of the facilities, a look at the brand new Formula 4 cars that they are just finishing ready for a new race series for 16-21 year olds. Awesome cars that are likely to kill off Formula Ford but takes a much closer line to F1 which will hopefully see some more British drivers in a few years time. And the zed lapping it up! So I had a couple of engineers going through the details of the pedal. Then they called the designer over who had developed the pedal and we had a good chat about how great the 350Z is. They all recon it was by far the best car they had there for instructing. And also the most reliable. Then Steve mentioned that he had a set of Nismo Brembo calipers and 2 piece discs lying around. So he fished them out. 355mm AP discs on custom bells. The calipers need a refurb but they are monsters!! And at £200 I couldn't say no. For another £100 he threw in some brand new Carbon composite pads for the front and rear! plus all the hoses and some spare bleed screws. If that's not the deal of the century I don't know what is. Just need to get some prices for the refurb now.

A few more modifications and improvements. Before we went to Brands last week I fitted a quick release boss to the steering wheel. We also have a larger steering wheel on the way as this one is so small (300mm). So we're going up to a 330mm. The boss brings the wheel forward by about 60mm too which feels better. Fortunately we all seem to prefer the wheel quite close and having it QR should help should any of our sponsors need a little more space to climb in and out. You might also notice in the photos a new gearknob. It's a bit flash for a race car but the old one was so scruffy. This Richbrook one feels great (notice I'm avoiding inuendos ) We've also purchased an intercom system to make it easier to instruct when our sponsors drive the car Very easy to wire in, the only tricky bit is fitting the mics to the helmets which need to be glued to the outside on the open face helmets. (The full face ones are easy as it all fits inside) The mics have a hollow plastic base meaning that the double sided sticky pads that they supply to fix them have very little plastic to stick to. I could see them getting pulled off very easily so I've been attempting to improve them masked up and filled the voids with expanding foam made a template of the contour of the helmet transfered onto the mic all trimmed and filed and PVAd ready to take the double sided pads. We'll see if this works. Intercom installed. Just need to route the headphone leads up to a point where they can be easily plugged in to the helmets once people are sitting in the car. Finally, MSV have sold us an instructor brake pedal from one of their old 350Zs that they used to use at Bedford Autodrome. Seems like a nice bit of kit, with it's own slave cylinder and a modified cylinder for the main brake cylinder with a tee piece fitted. I'm going up to see Steve Page at Bedford on Wednesday who is in charge of their fleet of instructor cars to get some tips on installing it. These tips will likely get passed to Mark at Abbey as I don't think I'm going to have time to fit it myself before the car goes back to Abbey next week.

So, another wet test session at Brands But the car is a completely different animal now! Suspension (Thanks Mark@Abbey) and traction control have transformed it. Both of my partners joined me this time one of whom hadn't even driven the car yet! We also brought a Guinea Pig to test how our sponsor days will run. We managed to get loads of laps in with only two spins (not me) (video to follow) It was a very busy day on track, and thankfully we had a reserved garage because all the garages were booked and a good 50% were race teams. The car works very well now with lots of feedback and far less edgy. On a dry track I think it's going to be awesome. We might find out eventually By lunch it looked like this. Plenty more to do though including a trip back to Abbey for a little bit more suspension fettling in the next few days. Back at Brands on 9th April

This weekend managed to get the traction control installed. Very straightforward as Dan promised and a great bit of kit. Unless you really try to overcome it you can hardly tell it's doing anything. The good thing about ordering it from Advanced ME is that they do all the setup ready for the 350Z which has probably saved me hours of trial and error. The Racelogic unit is very tunable and there's plenty of scope to fine tune it as we learn more about it and how it effects the car. it will be interesting to see how it helps at Brands next week. Tomorrow I'm taking the car down to Abbey to have all the suspension fitted. MArk will then do all the geometry for us including corner weighting. Really looking forward to seeing how this changes the car. ECU unplugged plugged in to new harness and ready to fit back into car a quick test to make sure it all starts up wiring all run and controller mounted All working

On its way to us from Advanced ME. We'll see if the 2 minute install time is accurate

So, thanks to Mitz at Cougar Store for these..... Fantastic service,as I have often read on these pages and a great price too! Mark at Abbey is supplying everything else for the suspension and hopefully the car will be paying them a visit next week. We've also just ordered Racelogic Traction control from Advanced Motorsport Engineering at Silverstone. So that should be with me ready for when the car returns and we can get it fitted before our next shakedown on 18th March at Brands. So, fingers crossed all goes well. The car's taking some big steps now towards being ready. Not much more to do

In my experience the Yellow Stuff pads last longer than the DS2500s and produce less dust. But the DS2500 work better. We run DS2500s on our 350Z track car although they haven't had a full outing in anger yet but I'm on my 3rd set of Yellowstuff pads on my Leon Cupra R which is also a track car after running DS2500s on that too. Years ago I ran RedStuff pads on it (before the car was tuned) and they ate the discs! I have to say though, with the 350Z being such a heavy car I imagine the DS3000 should do well and last ok..... As long as you don't mind the noise

Good thinking!

Some decisions have finally been made over the last couple of days and it looks like Mark at Abbey is going to get his hands on it for the suspension work. So we're going with the KW Clubsports, a rear camber kit, Poly bushes front and rear although we're only going to have the fronts fitted initially to keep the costs within our budget. I may tackle the rear myself in a few months time. ARBs and drop links complete the package plus full alignment and corner weighting by Mark ready for our next track day mid March. However, apparently Eibach ARBs aren't in stock anywhere at the moment so it looks like H&Rs or Whiteline will have to do, although I'm not sure how much difference there is between them all. I need to do a bit of research. If anyone knows where I might acquire a set (i.e. in stock) and if anyone has an opinion on the best ARBs I'd be happy to hear. More pics soon.

So, it finally went here..... and connection into the return side of the oil cooler with a non return valve. And switch mounted leaving room for our traction control module coming soon. Suspension next. Had a good conversation with Mark at Abbey last night which threw up some more options, so final spec is still up in the air but I think we're getting closer. Thanks to Steve at Lizard for putting me onto Mark. I'm sure he's helping me more than he should considering we might be competing against him one day! Or maybe he's cunningly leading me in completely the wrong direction

Finally routed hose from Accusump in the boot through to the oil cooler at the front today. Still no hose fittings so that was as far as I could go today. After enlarging an existing but blanked off hole in the bulkhead, I used a cable gland to make a watertight seal through to the wheel arch. and the other side.... This is all protected by the wheelarch liner. The rest of the route was straight forward although I may put a heat sheild over it where it comes close to the exhaust manifold.

Currently looking at suspension options. If budget permits this is the favourite at the moment If budget doesn't permit then a set of KW clubsports will do the job. I run these on my LCR and have found them to be excellent but I think the KWs for the 350Z convert the rears to coilovers instead of the separate spring and damper set up which is my only reservation. The Ohlins kit keeps them separate like the standard set up. Any opinions on this are welcome. Along with the coilovers we will also be doing ARBs adjustable arms and some degree of poly bushing although not sure how much yet. In other news the Accusump is almost done. Mounted in the boot as there was no possible way it would go behind the bumper in the end. No big deal according to the manufacturers as long as the hose running from it is a large enough bore so I've upped it to AN10 and now just waiting for new hose connectors to arrive. More pictures soon.