We used the Mele Design Firm rivnuts to mount their battery box to the chassis of the car.
We then mounted the battery box to the car.
We made a panel to cleanly mount the 200A circuit breaker. The circuit breaker serves two important roles. One, it will protect the battery and electronics if there is a short in the long battery cable. Secondly, it makes it very quick and easy to disconnect the battery from the car when working on it, simply by pushing on the yellow button on top of the circuit breaker.
The BatteryCablesUSA FD RX-7 Relocation Wiring Kit includes the 20” of “0” AWG ground cable with the ring terminals pre-installed as well as the 12” of “00” AWG cable if you too decide to use a circuit breaker, which is highly recommended.
We ground the paint off the area around the OEM rear seatbelt anchor hole and used it as our battery cable ground. We also drilled a hole for the bracket of our circuit breaker panel mount.
We dropped the AntiGravity ATX-30-HD into the Mele Design Firm battery mount.
10 comments
Great article. JP3 Motorsports makes a nice mount for the fuse block so it’s not zip tied or flopping around in the engine bay.
https://jp3motorsports.com/collections/mazda-fd3s/products/mazda-rx7-fd3s-battery-fuse-block-bracket-relocated-batteries
Awesome update. You always do such quality work. I can’t wait for the next one.
Didn’t see a fuse for the fuel pump at first glance (page 5, 1st pic ) Then I looked again.
FYI Lots of motorsports guys complain about those circuit breakers… they say they have had them vibrate open during operation. I’m running 2 on my car and haven’t had an issue yet.
I know that this is going to sound crazy, but recently I had a family member’s car serpentine belt fail and it ended up damaging the pulley. I was not able to source a new pulley in the location it was in, so we decided to try and run the car as long as possible without the serpentine belt (thus sans alternator, power steering, and AC). Fortunately, the battery was almost brand new and fully charged.
Interestingly enough, the car started and ran well for the 10 mile trip home! No issues whatsoever.
This makes me think that you could conceivably run a time attack car with the alternator removed!
Yes, this is totally crazy, but ‘racecar’, right?
Not only would you save a significant amount of weight, but you would reduce parasitic losses on the drivetrain. With a powerful enough lithium-ion battery, I am sure that you would have no issues running like this for one-lap.
Anyway, food for thought.
That is very common in SCCA sprint racing, especially in the smaller bore Prod and GT classes.
I don’t know about a modern racecar with all the electrical load. Our time attack car draws over 140 amps when everything is going full ti;t.
Was your classic to engine 2awg black ground wire able to reach north bolt holes with slack? Mine is very very tight and will not even bolt up
I think we relocated it to the 13mm bolt just below the brake master cylinder.
I have the same problem. The cable that comes with the kit is NOT long enough. Mine even came in a little bit longer at 16in. Pretty disappointing, gonna have to order another cable.
What do you do if you don’t want to remove the Electrical harness and take out the old power and ground cables? Would like to leave them in there so it can be put back to original. Thank you