factory early S1
as tim says, the aluminum uprights are factory early s1, but strangely there doesnt always seem to be consistency on who got them, I know 1998 cars with steel rear and mine is a 1999 111s that got fitted with ali, dan who has my car at the moment was also a 1999 111s in silver and he got steel.
The hubs are at factory height…what im actually going to do is fit a ali spacer between the lower ball joint plinth and the upright, this is lower the wishbone angle down to improve roll centre for when running really low, it does mean I will get more camber under bump so I will need to run a little less static camber and because of how stiff the springs are im not expecting much roll anyway.
The track rods are part of the elise parts steering arm kit, but you could get the rods cheap from anywhere really
I’m changing my steering arms to the elise parts lightweight ones to get the camber I want. I have split a track rod end rubber so needto replace them and was wondering if the rose jointed ones would work or indeed be of any advantage? running heights are low road (115) so not in your league
I went for the rose jointed version so that i could adjust bump steer, thats mainly the reason you would have them, since my upper wishbones will run at a fairly extreme angle i wanted full control over the bump so that it could be dialled in correctly
Use Pete at Badger Anodising Birmingham, he’s a genuinely top bloke.
what do you think he would want for anodising the bells?
£50 maybe not really sure.
ok, im thinking to save any more corrosion to my ali uprights I might get them anodised at the same time, basically take a pile of stuff to save some money, also take my new wing uprights when i make them properly.
Little update, its finally back on the ground, will run it on elise wheels while im sorting the rest of the bits out as I will need to buy some posh rubber for my bigger wheels.
Again short term we have cleaned the arb drop links up, ill buy some new bits and make a new set but these should get me about, you can see a before and after, I swear the car lived in a swamp before I got it.
The chargecooler placement is coming along well, about as short a piping as it could realistically be to help with response, still high up which isnt great for centre of gravity but the plan is to drop the engine/gearbox 25mm for lower centre of gravity which should offset that.
Also the vain part of me is going to paint the upper inlet manifold green to match
exhaust back on
Few bits to finish off, took most of the aero off before getting it home, so it kind of looks like its got a big german handle bar mustache with just the canards on.
Look how tiny the 15/16 setup looks on it!
Need to get an MOT and get it mapped, then aero, brakes and tyres, though I have been thinking about slicks recently as it doesnt matter what class i enter this year as its only a couple of OHW and it might actually be cheaper to buy slicks rather than road tyres
Brace made to hold the chargecooler in place
Pretty short pipe work should help with throttle response
Passed its MOT at the weekend so its now legal on the road so no massive panic when I take it for mapping.
In the mean time Im now completely skint, but I have loads of parts so decided to make a start on those.
First up was the lightweight ali fuel tank, changing that on my own on the driveway after work was a bit of fun! It was nearly midnight when I finished.
I have never seen so much dirt in my life on the shear panel, it was literally 10mm thick of sludge, must have been a kilo of the stuff, so that took alot of WD40 and 4 rags to clean up.
Next was getting the old tank out, my hands were to big to get the fuel connectors off from the interior side so I had to drop the tank and slide my hands in from below to get them off, alot of fun when it had 15litres of fuel in it aswell.
Finally out, took me 2hrs to get to this point including cleaning the panel
Next i pulled the fuel pump out to put in the new tank
The big concern I have is that I had an invoice for a ‘motorsport’ pump before I bought it and since im going to be aiming for 350bhp eventually I didnt want a pump that wasnt good enough, so I was expecting to have to buy a walbro 255LPH pump…well the good news is thats exactly whats in there so thats one thing off my list 
Dropped it back in my new tank and then bolted it all up, replaced all the bolts as I went with new stainless ones to hopefully make sure I dont have any crusty bolts in the future aswell.
Next thing to move onto is the brakes and side sills, but im going to try and get it weighed over the weekend first to see how light the car is.
Ok bit of an update today,
Decided to make a start on my side sills,
Cutting the shape out, the skinny section is on the inside of the front wheel.
made the passenger side first, carbon panel with aluminum angle underneath to help keep the high pressure air from getting underneath, once Ive got the car to the correct race height I will bolt on rubber skirts to the ali to maximise the low pressure zone.
Added a couple tie bars for strength and there isnt any flex anymore so should be fine at speed.
Only thing I need to do is take it all back off, the ali angle to paint black, I will use black resin to seal all the edges then glue on some knock on edging.
Im also going to attach some ali angle along to the back face on top to create a higher pressure above.
Put my wider wheels back on now I have some legal 255s on the back compared to the 235s I used to testing things out.
Finished off building the other side so just need to bolt that on when it stops raining
Sat at maximum ride height this is the first time I have seen the lower wishbones actually pointing the way you would imagine it should be, must be interesting to know how many people run there cars with the roll centre buried underground!
Also took the ali angle off to paint them black, including a little gurney flap that will hopefully do a few jobs, help keep the low pressure area after the skirt to allow it to extract better, create a high pressure area ontop of the skirt and maybe push some of the air away from getting into the rear wheel well.
Here you can see how tiny my garage is, means not alot gets done when the weathers bad
Since it was raining really bad today I decided to refit my wing as it was the only thing I could do without getting wet
Gotta love that wing 
You need a wider garage just for that !
yep, ill be happy when all the aero is on and I can drive it onto the street so we can see what it will finally look like, its a bit harder now to reverse past the side of the house with my little mirrors aswell now, the good thing is the wing is the same width as the car, so I would have hit my rear clam on the house if I was going to hit my wing anyway
I’m very impressed with your attention to detail,specially when it comes to aero. I take it you are self-taught, cos I know nothing about it but it all seems to make sense in layman’s language.
Thanks man, that means alot, im fully self taught, most of it came from reading articles and information online, also looking at what is common place on race cars across the different championships.
Then later after I made the decisions on 90% of the things that are on the car I read Simon Mcbeath Aero book which gave me a bit more info and confirmed some of the things I had read and what made sense to me.
I dont know how effective the downforce will be but everything I have read up to yet agrees with what im doing.
Little bit of an update, fitted my 308mm front discs today, added the spacers, overall really nice and quick to do just needed to file away about 1.5mm of material from the upper inside edge of the caliper because of the larger radius
Got a brand new set of calipers to fit on the front and the old ones will be going on the back, but I will do that when i fit the rear discs as then it saves having to bleed the lines twice.
Shows the difference between the discs
Looking at it, it tooks like 330mm discs maybe possible but there wouldnt really be much point with 2 pots
Also took this picture as I thought it looks likes hes smiling
I should fit both my skirts tomorrow and maybe the splitter if i have time
Bit more work today on the car as the weather was pretty decent, even if it did rain, hail and have sunshine.
Fitted the front splitter
Then fitted the rear diffuser
You can see how wide the rear tyres are and it seems I was correct running et-10 which is the widest you can go on a stock exige body
Installed the undertray aswell, you can see how much different is than the factory one and how much of the underneath ive tried to close of, the only area I couldnt was the suspension mount on the lower wishbone as when jacked up it would bend the undertray
Took it for a run up the road to a friends and took a couple of pics outside his house, looks funky
Just need to fit my skirts and canards im 90% done on aero.
You could probably check the aero just by channelling the draft from the neighbours twitching curtains mate 
Is all of that stuff close enough to the ground to actually make a difference?