- At an event like World Time Attack, we are more used to seeing really high end builds
that have had potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars poured into them and while that is
great, it's certainly an end of the market that's not that achievable for most of us at the
enthusiast level.
So we're here with Andrew from SX Developments to talk about a more budget focused build.
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Now Andrew, while we're talking about a budget build here, you actually spend most of your
World Time Attacks helping out Under Suzuki's S15, the Scorch Racing S15 which is anything
but a budget build.
He's not here this year so has that given you the opportunity to stretch your legs in your
own car for a change?
- Yeah it was a bit of a thing, I'd run mostly track days at Wakefield Park and then World
Time Attack invited me to run as a bit of a late entry and I thought well it's a good
opportunity to do it.
It's more expensive than a normal track day but it's a cool thing to do, bit different.
- Talking about the car, it's a 180SX quite clearly but can you give us a bit of a history,
how did you come to own the car and what's sort of been the development of it?
- Yeah so I bought the car as a rolling shell, cheap, it had some of the bits on it, some
suspension bits, carbon doors, plastic windows and a roll cage so then I just put an engine that
I'd built for my daily driver into it and a NASCAR Jerico gearbox that I'd bought for
$500 in a box of pieces and rebuilt.
And then sort of spiralled out of control and ended up converting the engine to dry sump
using also old NASCAR parts and went a bit more fancy on the aero than I was planning to originally
but sort of ended up as a pretty good package.
- Alright let's come back and just unpack some of those elements you've just talked about.
We'll start with the SR20 and it's an engine that is very popular but particularly for racing
applications, it's not without its own set of issues so can you talk to us about the spec
of the engine and what you've done to it?
- So the engine's a pretty basic build.
It's got a set of Wiseco forged pistons, a set of second hand Eagle rods, the bore was a bit
oversize so it's a bit rattly and then the first shakedown I did on this, I threw a rocker arm
which is everyone says yep, told you so but I've never had that happen before.
So then I've ended up having to fix that and I upgraded the cams, new valve springs
and kind of beefed it up a little bit more to be a bit more reliable.
But it's not being pushed super hard, I don't rev it super high so I try to keep it a little bit
reliable.
- Definitely some of the, the 2 key problems around the rocker reliability come down to
the RPM ceiling you're using and also staying away from using ignition cuts.
Are you doing anything else to keep the rockers reliable?
- Yeah so the ignition cut was the thing that killed it the first time.
I never liked that and I didn't use it but I was told that time that it's all good and it wasn't.
So the other thing is reasonably high boost with, the valve springs need to be really stiff.
I also changed to a dual guide shim setup, so just a little bit less likely for the rockers
to come loose and basically just very carefully set all the clearances so I've
done, I did the clearances multiple times, made sure everything's within spec and
yeah I don't rev it super high and I use a fuel cut rev limit and just try and be a little
bit careful.
- Now I'll just sort of dive into that for those who are maybe watching and don't really
understand why an ignition cut would be a no no and what tends to happen there is that
when we use an ignition cut, we've got a cylinder full of unburned fuel and air makes
its way into the exhaust where it can explode, which is why we get the pops and bangs when
we're using an ignition cut.
The problem with the on the SR20 is that creates a pressure spike in the exhaust manifold and
that can be enough to pop the exhaust valve back off its seat, then the rocker loses control or
contact and the rest is often expensive history.
Just wanted to get that in there.
OK so in terms of power and boost pressure, what are you sort of at there?
- So it runs about 1.7, 1.8 bar, 25 psi ish.
And, what was the other bit?
- How much power are you getting at that sort of boost level?
- The important thing, 360 rear wheel kW so it's about 480 horsepower and the powerband is
quite wide so it's probably from 5000 to 7500, it makes that much power, it's kind of at the
limit of the turbo the whole time.
- And what is that turbocharger?
- It's a Kinugawa TD06 SL220G with a billet wheel and the sort of EFR style blow off valve
in the compressor cover.
- OK so I mean what I'm hearing here is that you've pieced together a combination without breaking
the bank in any one area but you've still got something that's producing good power,
albeit not stratospheric, you've got a wide powerband which obviously is going to help
with the drivability of the car, is that sort of a reasonable way of summing it up?
- Yeah so the idea was that, the turbo, I think it was $800 or something delivered so it was
a pretty cheap upgrade from basic old stuff that I'd been running and it ends up making enough
power that it's a fast car, especially when it's light but it's not crazy, we're not running into
the limits of conrods or bearing caps and that sort of thing.
- And hence you can stay away from needing some of those more expensive upgrades like
billet caps or better quality conrods.
- Yeah so just kind of stay within that limit and also the drivetrain so standard axles, standard
R200 diff setup and everything, it's kind of, it's reliable at that sort of power level,
especially on a light car.
- Now you mentioned that you've dry dumped it and when people watching this hear the term
dry sump, they're probably seeing dollar signs and it wouldn't be uncommon to spend $5000
or $6000 maybe even more doing a dry sump setup so you call this a budget build but it's
dry sumped.
What parts do you use, you mentioned NASCAR second hand parts but what parts
did you use and can you give us a rundown on sort of approximately what money went into
that dry sump setup?
- Yeah so the original setup was basically, it's a Weaver Brothers pump, 3 stage which
is the same as a stockcar products pump and they're reasonably cheap even new, like
$1300 USD.
I bought it, I think I bought the pump, the tank and a lot of lines and fittings and everything
for a few hundred dollars delivered from The States.
And then I bought an oil pan which was an older model like ex display, high octane pan for a few
hundred dollars and otherwise I was going to just modify the factory pan.
But this popped up and was nice and easy.
And I did end up spending probably $1000 or so on plumbing, not all for the dry sump but
also the fuel system.
And then I had a slight leak on the original pump and I pulled it apart and found that
it's sealed with silicon rather than having o rings and everything and I thought this is
going to give me trouble and I ended up buying a cheap but new pump and had all
new problems with that but eventually got it all sorted.
- Alright so it sounds like a bit of Aussie ingenuity and maybe scouring eBay and
being a little bit careful on what you're buying has given you what could have been
a really expensive setup for cents on the dollar?
- Yeah I've had auto searches on eBay for things that I want and some things I found pretty
quickly, some things took me 6 months or a year, one of those was the sequential shift
mechanism for the gearbox, extremely rare.
I found out about it, they were pretty expensive new and apparently still available at the time.
Put an auto search on eBay, I think it took about a year and then one popped up for $150,
fairly local and I clicked it as fast as I could click it.
And even the gearbox it was, I talked to a few people and they said oh maybe have a look for
a Jerico box or something in the USA.
And I searched on eBay for NASCAR gearbox or something and one popped up for $500
in a box of pieces but it was in Australia, I'd accidentally searched on Australian eBay
and not US eBay so clicked very fast on that one as well and then I eventually got a different
gear set for it to piece together on eBay, different gears and spare parts for it and
rebuilt it.
- I mean most people, just like the dry sump, when you're talking about upgraded gearboxes
and particularly dog engagement gearboxes for motorsport use, you're starting to talk usually
numbers north of about $10,000, maybe well over that if you're starting to go sequential.
So you're into this gearbox, albeit not in factory form a sequential but you've converted it
with that shifter mechanism so you've now got a sequential dog engagement gearbox for
under $1000.
- Yeah exactly and I mean it only has 4 gears and it won't shift as fast as a really proper
sequential gearbox but it's pretty fast, pretty strong, it's very light and compact so
it just kind of works well in the package.
- Alright let's talk about the electronics in the car because managing the engine is
obviously critical to getting the power out of it as well as ensuring some reliability so what
have you got in there in terms of engine management and driver displays etc?
- So I cheated a little bit on the budget with the ECU, I won it in a competition.
Not one of your competitions but a Haltech local competition.
I mean that sort of saved money, it sort of didn't because it meant that I had to upgrade
a bunch of other stuff.
So it cost a fair bit to do all the wiring and I needed to change the dash datalogger setup
to work with that because my old setup was not compatible.
But the, so it's a Haltech Elite 2500 ECU which is probably overkill for what I'm doing but yeah
it works, does the job, it's good.
And the datalogger I've had I think 5 different random old setups in there over the years,
most of which never even saw the track.
It currently has an older model MoTeC ADL3 which was lent to me.
- The ADL3, older but still a very capable logger and obviously you can still use the
same data analysis software that MoTeC currently use on their newer generation of dashes
correct?
- Yeah it's actually quite nice, it does everything you could want and it's customisable CAN
messaging so that you can get data from, you can get all of the ECU channels into it whereas
the previous dash I ran was an old AiM MXL Pro which was actually really nice, I really
liked it but the CAN bus in that is not customisable and it only supported an old Haltech protocol
so a lot of the channels that are available in the newer Haltech firmware, are not available in
that dash.
- Really limits what you can actually input into the dash and display.
- Yeah and I like, costs a lot to go to the track whereas it doesn't cost anything to look at
data and play with nerd stuff at home so I like to do that in between events and, having
more data, more sensors, that sort of thing is kind of cheap entertainment compared to
the actual racing.
- Talking about that nerd element, and I share that passion as well, looking at data, for me,
more data's always better, you can never have enough so I'm interested, what are your key
metrics that you're looking at in terms of developing the car, developing your driving
and knowing where you can actually go faster?
- So at the moment, it's good having as much engine data as you can get because you can really
keep an eye on things, make sure everything's behaving well.
For driving, I like having steering sensor, so basically I have brake pressure, steering,
I have damper pots which were another second hand random buy.
And of course the accelerometers in the dash so you can get a lot of information from that
and being able to compare different laps, you can really see where you should be able to
improve or you can at least see where the limits should be.
So it does take a while to find those limits, especially if the car's pretty fast.
- Alright look Andrew I think it sounds like we've got some cars starting up in the background
that's going to make it pretty hard for us to talk very soon so appreciate your time there,
it is an impressive build given that it hasn't been done with a massive budget.
As we finish off, could you give us sort of a rough idea of how much money in total
you think you've put into this car so far?
- So the car in general, basically built for less than $20,000 but there's a few extra
expenses for World Time Attack, some of the safety gear and things which may or may not
included in that depending on how you calculate it.
- Any way you look at that, the package you've put together for $20,000 is incredible value
for money so hopefully those watching this video will maybe understand that with a bit of creative
shopping on eBay, doesn't always need to break the bank in order to build a fast, fun and
competitive car.
Thanks for your time and good luck for the rest of the day.
- No worries, thanks a lot.
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