leif

ok, so i have been getting ideas on how to get the lightest car possible, and i was thinking..."hey, these cars dont have the power of a V6 or a V8 (for the most part your average RX-7 has under 200bhp) so how would you make them go faster?" and the answer always comes back with 2 replies:

"more power"
"lighter car"

now im a big fan of road racing, and in my experence it is not always the more powerful car that wins, making your car lighter has so many mor advantages than just giving it a mad amount of horse power...and the best thing about it is noone ever charged you for taking things off of your car...

so to make a long story short, I would like this thread to be a place where all my compatriots (the less is more people) to tell everyone how they would go about making their cars as light as possible!

peejay

My first choice would be to sell it and get an early Capri or 240Z.

SERIES 1 XLR8

strip out the whole interior and fully CF it out is the obvious way. But Heaps of CF would be expencive $$$$$$$$$ especially with custom parts.

Second2none

the common and obviouse would be remove the sound deadning crap.

next would be a lighter hood maybe ?
custom fiberglass fenders...
as Series said, interior.

and i was thinking about how to lighten the door, but retain strength... i want to make a frame and just fiberglass a custom set of doors... this would be long excrusiating work, and might not be worth it. but i might try.

something else would be get ride of the spare tire and cary a can of fix a flat. if you can pull out all your emmisions controll it weights alot surprisngly i ripped all mine off i should weigh it haha.

another would be light weight seats. or seat, and no passenger seat. haha tell your buddy or girlfriend to find there own ride lol

sall i got.

Rob

Pele

iTrader: (28)

I wonder what's worse... The areodynamic sacrifice of removing the Hood, fenders, and all glass... Or the weight of keeping them?

85rotarypower

The aerodynamic loss would be a lot. There would be more drag on a car like that than an 18 wheeler, so to speak. If its just for the track, remove interior, sound deadening, spare tire, and jack. Also you could remove A/C if you have it, emmissions, headlight motors (just keep them up), use an aftermarket air cleaner (stock one weighs more than 10lbs, and other unessesary guards.

peejay

The stock air cleaner does NOT weigh more than 10lb. Maybe two or three. And it does a nice job of directing the airflow into the carb, too...

Illswyn

Uh...headlights up probably has more drag loss on the car than the weight savings would be worth. The preferred method I'm sure is to install aftermarket driving lights, and just gut the pop-ups.

Replacing heavy parts has a high cost. Just removing them of course, does not.

I guess it depends on how much $$$ you are willing to spend to go faster.

leif

as for the doors. i know a guy who removes his doors and bends a piece of tin to fit and rivots it in place, you could do that with 1 door...hum, dilly of a pickle this weight thing is...i have an article about a 550 spyder that was a hill climb car, the entire thing under the body looks like swiss cheese...its wild, i want to try that...

has anyone here every heard of drilling your own break disks?

Illswyn

I think you'd be taking things way too far by drilling. The safety tradeoff makes it sound bad.

Drilling brake rotors...doesn't that reduce the effective surface area of the brakes? Doesn't sound like a very good thing.

peejay

The problem isn't so much the loss of surface area so much as it is the loss of mass. Rotors "work" by absorbing heat when braking and then rejecting it when you're not braking. Less mass = less heat that can be absorbed by the rotors. Then they tend to run hotter, and combine that with all the nice stress risers produced by the holes and you get cracking.

MIKE-P-28

iTrader: (1)

How bout we just remove those pesky round things the car sits on, them are heavy Ooops better yet, maybe we need them.

We could always remove the seats, you could just sit on a card board box Oops maybe we need them too ...

Oh well so much for my ideas.

YapaKanichi

dude you sit on a plastic crate man get it right lol You could always just get ride of the body and make another out of plastic. lol. would be humurous to see though.

seanrot

iTrader: (2)

Take out the seat but leave the seat belt let them figure it out

hotty

like pele said above.. scrap the fenders, hood but not the glass. the fiberglass a lighter set in its place. cheap.. you can do it yourself.