The idea is a mid engine rwd street legal tube frame car weighing under 1500lb with a single driver, that has a very low center of gravity positioned for optimum drift fun.
So far a Mazda 13B from an RX7 and an eclipse FWD 5 speed is the proposed powerplant/tranny combo, chosen for power to weight ratio and cheapness respectivly.
I forget the wheelbase and length(and am too lazy to measure the cad model right now), but as you can see it's going to be small and compact, sub miata sized, but bigger than a gocart by a few inches. Iirc width is at 50" right now or thereabouts.
Plans are to keep the total price under 3K for the frame, engine, tranny, seats, etc needed to get it driveable until we get the bug to do more to it.
The roll cage isn't complete in cad yet, but it will be fully caged in.
Body will either be stretched black tonaue cover material, aluminum sheet, or fiberglass.
That's the current model, which has some issues that need to be addressed, mainly engine/tranny mounting and where the wheels/hubs/etc go.
Plan is to use mitsubishi hubs for the rear so that custom axle shafts aren't needed, and whatever is small and easily aligned up front.
Axle shafts will be 2 of the shorter (I want to hazard passanger side) shafts, since the plans are for the diff being in the absolute middle to eliminate torque steer as much as possible.
Fun part will be doing suspension. The ideas we were kicking around were to use a modified 4wheeler suspension design or a modified motorcycle suspension, but after looking at the wide availability of air bag suspension products out there, that might be a better idea.
The other idea is to nab the adjustable suspension setup out of a high-end luxery vehicle/sports car and use that, but space constraints might kill that.
Another option would be torsion bar, but that might cause rigidity issues in the frame and could penalize adjustability.
The suspension layout of the Rover P6 would be quite nice, since there wouldn't be as much vertical height. Couple that with some small bags instead of springs/struts, and it might just work.
Steering rack would likely be out of a miata, since that's the smallest width rack I can think of.
It's going to be 4 wheel disc brake with a steering assist mode, that will allow for independent control of which side gets brake force (some cars already do it with trac control) An abs solenoid block will be wired in for that.
It looks like hydroboost will be the way to go for brake booster, since there's no way a conventional vac booster would ever fit. Would a brake booster even be needed?
Radiator will likely be mounted in the front with an aux fill in the back, MR2 style. That's what the large section on the front nose is for. If that isn't feasable, it will be flat mounted above the engine compartment with some huge fans.
Gas tank will either be up front, or in the passanger side rear of the engine compartment. Up front would be better for safety and weight distribution I'd think, but I could be wrong.
Headlights will be flip-ups, directinals/tails will be frame mounted along the rear and front roll cage bars, with a high mount tail at the top of the cage.
Seats will be racing 5 point, sparco or similar. Dash will be a hybrid digital/analog using a small lcd display and a section of 2 way mirror to superimpose the information.
The Megasquirt 3 is going to be used as the ecu, with some firmware tweaks to allow for some fun features like automatic exhaust cutout actuation (with override switch on the dash), the "batt outa hell" button (richen up mixture, remove rev limit, open cutout, increase boost pressure, pump full oil via the metering pump to the rotor housings).
The speedo signal and 4 wheel speed sensors will be used in conjunction with a 6 axis inertial measurement unit to log the fun and tune the suspension on the fly if bags or variable suspension is used.
It's something that's eating me up, I know it can be done, I just don't have time or parts...
Feel free to ask away, give sugjestion, and criticisims. I thrive off bouncing ideas off of people.
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) , so that and a 170lb 13B, about 50 pounds of alternator, manifolds, exhaust, and other general crap to get it going gets me to ~ 300 pounds total, minus fluids. I know it'll be more than that, but I'm pinching ounces at the design phase to hopefully keep it under 1500lb with me in it.
