Random Thursday Jap car meet-up

I organized a small meeting of my close mates & their cars last night. Was a good little turn out. I really wanted to get some industrial-style shots of all the cars from the evening and I don’t think I did too badly at it. Our first “shoot area” was in Old Portsmouth.

Then we headed off for a nice drive to Chichester to a car park I knew would be open. Multistory car parks are great for this sort of thing – ambient light is irrelevant since the car park provides such good white lightning inside! And luckily no one bothered us in this particular car park for the 1-hour+ we where there for.

Nice random Thursday meet-up. Although not as normal or random as Violent Running‘s!

Latest photos of the s14a and the MX5!

Got my car back from Horsham Developments on Friday and had a nice weekend relaxing and cruising around now that my car handles much better and is lower thanks to the new coilovers by Driftworks / HSD. The HSD’s are a massive improvement in every sense over my old coilovers, the Apex Gen 2′s. And, at last, all knocking/clunking/horrible noises are gone too!

Oh yeh, and my girlfriend got her MX5 back after 5 weeks of being at the bodyshop! She crashed it within the first week of buying it because of an accidental “drift” incident. Its back on the road now though and lesson learnt by her – don’t floor it in the wet while going round a corner!

Rotorstock 6, Santa Pod, EDC Drifting photos

Rotorstock 6 was last Saturday at Santa Pod and although I own my gorgeous SR20DET powered 200sx which is, of course, not rotary-powered, I tagged along anyway. Mainly to see the EDC round 5. EDC being the European Drift Championship. It was a fantastic day out, and spectacular drifting from the EDC boys.

Naturally, I took a good amount of photos. Here’s some of my favorites.

Lightened flywheels for my Nissan 200sx s14a

On my continuing mission to find the perfect lightened flywheel and up-rated clutch for my Nissan 200sx s14a, I thought I best use this blog to talk about it.

So, my car – I own a year 2000 Green 200sx, s14a. It has (by previous owner) a Horsham Developments stage 1 kit, a Garrett GT28R turbo, a Driftworks Front-Mount intercooler among other things and she’s running at approx between 300-320bhp at 1.2 bar. Roughly.

Its my daily driver, and its begging for a new clutch. But, because I’ll be changing the clutch I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to uprate the flywheel at the same time – as a “while I’m there” job. So far, with my limited yet growing knowledge of my 200sx, my options are as follows (in order of weight)…

• Apex ACT Prolite flywheel – 4.65kg – £299.00
• Apex lightweight flywheel – 4.66kg – £265.00
• Driftworks chromoly flywheel – 5.2kg – £240.00
• Apex ACT Streetlite flywheel – 6.35kg – £279.00

And, as you can see, the order of weight is not necessary the same order of price. You’d expect the lighter it gets, the more money it’ll cost ya, but not quite in this case. There are of course many other options out there, but a quick look reveals this information.

I’ve also popped my question on the very knowledgeable SXOC (SX Owners Club) forum, and most people agree the ACT flywheels are indeed very good. So far then, my choice is the most expensive and, indeed, the lightest. The ACT Prolite from Apex Performance

I’ll keep this updated if my plans change, or what my thoughts are of the lightened flywheel when/if it gets fitted!

Christmas / New Years. A bit late!

Happy New Year everyone. Good 2009 greetings. A bit late I know!

Not much news to be honest, on anything that I usually write about at least. Not much going on with the Mini lately, lack of funds after Xmas, plus MOT & Insurance to pay for on my Nissan 200s this month!

On the plus side, a brake upgrade was due on my 200sx and I’ve opted for the superb (I hope) big brake upgrade from DB-Power. I went for the 345mm Brembo front disks (vented and grooved), although I’ve been told they are so popular they’re currently out of stock, and since my MOT is rapidly approaching, I instead went for the slightly smaller 330mm Brembo’s. On that note then, good stopping power on both my cars – always a bonus!

And a final note to tell the world about Grab A Mascot – the latest project to come out of work and the 3rd project entirely by me from the company. I’m really pleased with it and I’ve taken just about 3 weeks of development time to complete it, from scratch. Its based on Zend Framework with a little touch of jQuery. Check it out!

That is all for now – possible photos of my new Brembo stoppers soon…