20 Days to 200 MPH – Our Story

Crossing the line at 195.7mph in Oct 2009 was not good enough. As our first time competing at the famous Texas Mile, we were happy, but not satisfied. With the next event on March 26, this is our story of how in 20 days we will prep our car to break 200 mph. This brief intro has what some of our changes will be and starting March 6th, we will chronicle our updates with pictures, video, and more including live coverage of the event. Make sure to follow our Twitter Account too for updates we will only post there.

So the Story Starts…
With about 800hp to the crank, we were sure we could be 200mph and would be coming home superstars. We fell short of that mark by 4mph due to a couple of reasons that we will remedy shortly. The first major change will be aerodynamics. There is an obvious reason Porsche spends millions on designing their cars the way they do. Just cause it looks cool, does not mean it is functional. For most of us, that does not matter as we almost never get over 100mph or at most 150mph for fun. But when you are chugging down the strip trying to break records, aerodynamics means everything. Although the Vorsteiner carbon fiber front and rear bumpers are aethetically pleasing, they are not doing the trick. The front bumper has large side radiator pockets that catch air slowing it down. When running these blocked off, improvements were seen, but cooling abilities lessen. As well, the rear bumper with the straight pipes acted like a parachute catching air. The rear bumper could be modified, but for the sake of our goals, we are going back to stock. The front bumper will have the Agency Power OEM like front lip spoiler on it and the rear bumper will get a complete custom aluminum rear diffuser from the plastic undertray back. This will help eliminate any air flow issues we might have had before. Like our previous attempts, we will remove the carbon wing blade and leave trunk lid with GT2 style inlets to help force air into the engine bay for cooling.

Once the car is 90% back to aerodynamic spec (less decklid and side skirts), we will then make a couple of changes to the suspension, ride height, and alignment. We feel that obviously the lower the car, the less lift it will produce and the more stability it will obtain. Not only change the ride height, we will change the alignment to be at a 0 degree camber to reduce any tire drag/scrubbing caused from an aggressive street alignment. We will lower the car about another 1/4inch and swap the coilovers out to the KW Variant 3 system. The KW V3 will give us the ability to adjust compression and rebound seperately to help the ride at higher speeds. The ability to fine tune the adjustments over 1 single dampening setup can really affect how the car comes off the line as well. The KW shock absorber will also perform much better with our height adjustment because of how the shock is valved. Both Agency Power sway bars will be set to the stiffest position to reduce any floating affect which can happen with wide tire cars tracking.

A couple of the biggest changes to the car will be tuning and power related. After filming our Greddy EBC, we noticed that it would spike to 1.5bar and trim down holding constant at around 1.33bar. This was completely because of user error with the warning feature. From recent posts, it seems that the stock engine on full race gas can handle 1.6-1.7 bar of boost. This is putting some strain on the stock motor and head gasket most likely. But with the addition of the AEM water/meth system, this will reduce detonation. We will spend a good solid couple of days datalogging the car on our Mustang Dyno to see the affects of these boost levels with and without the AEM and NX NTercooler sprayer. When we ran in Oct 2009, the car had a mix of 100 and 109 because of fuel availability. This time around, pure VP MS109!

[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izwVVDvFH7Q&feature=player_embedded[/tube]

Another function of our testing will be with the NTercooler spray kit from NX. Its current setup was manual activation with a switch by the foot rest to spray and cool the intercoolers before launch. Obviously as the car is put to the test down the straight, the temps will climb. We will be rigging up the system with a Hobbs Switch to continually spray everytime the car hits a set boost level. Focusing on lower temps and efficiency, we will also be ceramic coating the headers which reach very high EGTs under these conditions.

With the power and stance setup and surely to push us those extra mph’s, we are going to go the extra step and reduce the rotational mass further from our Brembo rotor upgrade with a set of 19×8.5 and 19×11 HRE C93. The HRE Competition series wheel features titanium hardware, honed out spokes, and a 3pc design. This particular thin spoke style will have a step lip and weigh about 18lbs on the front and 20lbs on the rear saving us 20% of rotational weight over the HRE monoblock or ADV1 wheels. We opted for a more aggressive offset and deeper rear lip for that flush look.

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Once again we will be switching out the interior to lighten it up by removing the passenger seat and replacing the driver seat with a Recaro. We will also be removing the BOSE subwoofer and then working with our new friends at DCT Motorsports by adding a new custom made steering wheel. As pictured below, the steering wheel will feature a red 12 0’clock stripe, alcantara upper and lower with a flat bottom, perforated leather, and a carbon fiber trim piece under the airbag. This is all for style points 🙂

Before the car goes on the dyno for testing, we will also be updating the rear driveshafts because of the play in them from the horsepower. We will be using the DriftShaft Shop 800HP axles to deliver the power to the wheels.

Stay tuned for pics, video, and updates here at Project 997TT – Vivid Racing