Wow what a crazy month it has been, but this past week has easily been one of the longest and hardest weeks we have ever experienced trying to get two cars ready in time for an event. And this was no normal event, this was the 2012 Z Nationals hosted by Z1 Motorsports every year, and the one event we have circled on our calendar every season. The G and Z made it in time, but barely and with no sleep on our ends haha.
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| The new tubular NASCAR front end thanks to Bingz Customz! |
The G finally came back to us after Jason from Bingz, who busted his ass getting the new body finished with the new fenders and side skirts and also the tubular front and rear end. The moment we got the car off the trailer we immediately installed everything back in the car as much as we could and then it was off to the fab shop for the new turbo setup. Thanks to the handy work and long hours of Doug, the new turbo system was fabricated in a matter of days! The new setup is designed just like the new SOHO Motorsports turbo kit, for street cars, with the Garrett GTX 3582R turbo. The only exception is we had to route a few pipes differently on the race car due to the new tubular NASCAR style front end.
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| The new turbo setup being mocked up by Doug! |
The G's body work was finished on Saturday, the new forced induction system was finished on Tuesday, the car was started for the first time on Wednesday and then wrapped in Phenomenal Vinyl's Matte Metallic Blue Azul vinyl on a 24 hour stint Wednesday night with the help of Jason from 7pm-7am. Thanks to Brett and Matt from Phenomenal Vinyl but more importantly I cant thank Jason enough for spending a delirious night with me wrapping the G. With all of that craziness done and sleep non existent, we used Thursday to button up the last few things on the already built SOHO 350Z "Mule" car and the last few wiring and engine things on the G Thursday night in preparation for the dyno Friday morning and the 5 hour trek from our shop to the Z Nationals in GA.
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| The G stripped of the old logos and prepped for the new blue vinyl! |
Going to sleep for the 3 hours we all got Thursday night, the anticipation for the weekend and more importantly the morning dyno session loomed over all of us and made sleep near impossible. We hadn't run the G nearly at all yet and the dyno session the following morning would be the first test as too how the engine held up in the accident, outside of the few things we could do outside of the car of course.
Bright and early the next morning, Friday, we strapped it on the dyno and Nik went to town on the Dyno Jet doing gentle pulls and watching the data feverishly, while I sat next to the car putting the finishing vinyl and logo touches to the now very blue G35. It all came together visually with the new SOHO logo's and Global Time Attack number placards, it finally looked like what I had envisioned it would looked like, and it was a long time coming.
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| The G all finished and about to be loaded on the trailer! |
Back to reality though, just as I finished placing the last #44 placard Nik shut the car off and explained we had a problem with the timing not adjusting. At this point we scrambled to swap out all of the sensors that could have been going bad and after swapping and testing everything we could the ems still wouldn't allow timing adjustments and was stuck at running a high timing number so we shut the car down and began to brainstorm. After trying to source one last sensor late in the evening, way past our scheduled departure we finally gave up and decided that we would load the car on the trailer since it was visually done but leave the tracking up to the SOHO Mule Z. It was 11pm and we were finally off on our 5 hour journey in the middle of the night to the 2012 Z Nationals. Check the next post for the next installment.
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