Nathan

Well the International race debut for the new Z has come & gone
First the good news. The car preformed extremly well after a poor start. On lap 15 of the 6.2klm circuit a front right tire blew out taking out part of the front fender & headlamp. We lost 4 laps making repairs. on lap 80 we had another one go this time taking all the wiring & remaining part of fender. a decision was made to switch tire brands and the car slowly started to come through the feild, at dawn we were in 12th place outright, by 8am we were up to 10th. With 8 hours to we decided to maintain a slightly slower pace. At 22hr 20min our Guest driver from England moved over to let a Porche past but got caught out on the marbles & clipped the wall & spun to the otherside breaking the left front cast upright. So close & yet so far. The Z preformed extremly well with no other problems. With another 40 to 50 horsepower it will be a class winner. Images & results can be seen on www.bathurst24hr.com

John

iTrader: (17)

Any other race plans for the season?

Nathan

No more races for 2002 but the car will contest the 2003 Australian GT production championship, a 9 round series for Production cars with very few modificatoins allowed. Competition will come from WRX,s, Mitsubishi EVO,s, Nissan Sylvia, Holden HSV
Ford Falcon, BMW M3, Mazda RX7 & 8. It wont be easy.
The Car may also be Entered in next years endurance races at
Sepang Malaysia & China & possibly to Nurbergring in Germany
for the 24hr race.

jmark

iTrader: (1)

Nathan,

Sorry to see you guys DNF after all the hard work. Looks like the Z will be competitive next year. Good luck and keep us informed.

MEfreak

Just curious, is this the kind of damage that z'ers can expect when a tire blows out? Seems like a lot of damage from a blown tire...

Nathan

No you would not expect to see this mutch damage with a flat or
low speed blow out. This damage occurred at high speed aprox
260kph (155mph) & the tire just delaminated and flew apart.
not once but twice. About 16hrs into the race a RH front bearing
hub assembly also broke. How the wheel never came off i dont now, only the brake caliper was holding it on.

TCL

Nathan, first compliments on your first attempt to race the Z.

I remember a post of yours a while back about the stock 350Zs shocks being over damped for the springs based on some tests you were doing. Can you provide more info on this?

Nathan

Not overdamped but a very stiff standard shock setup. Most of you will not need aftermarket shocks for road use. The biggest gains for road use will come from tire & wheel selection.The front wheel bearing hub assembly that broke under race conditions may be a problem in hard usage. The drivers were all complaining
of long pedal travel after hard right turns, sugesting that ther was some pad knock off caused by the flange flexing & ulitimatly breaking. I still dont no how the wheel stayed on the car. The car was raced with very few modifications.We used a Cusco diff centre that has just been released. Because our car was a Jap spec car with a built in 180kph speed limit the ECU was sent to a Co in Osaka (Orient Works) to take this limit out also they raised the rev limit to 7000rpm but in the interest of longevity we changed at 6000. Bilstein built us some custom shocks & springs & we tried a few settings finally setling on a coilover on the rear & not using the original spring position.We could only get about 2 degree negitive on the front (not enough) useing the original top arm.