Last week I flew to Austin Texas to support Evasive Motorsports in their efforts to turn a fast lap at Super Lap Battle at the Circuit of the Americas or COTA. COTA is one of America’s premier race tracks, currently being one of two tracks built to FIA’s grade1 spec which F1 cars are allowed on. Evasive was doing an exhibition run for Eneos Oil and the goal was to be the fastest electric car at the event and to get a lot of testing done for this year’s Pikes Peak hill climb.
I flew in the day before the event to visit some of my local friends and went to go see Boost Logic. Boost Logic is supplying a lot of the parts for Project R35 GT-R and I dropped in to take a quick look at their facilities. The first thing I noticed was this GT-R as it looked very familiar. It was the same car I had worked on with SP Engineering, Greddy, and KW Suspension that we broke the record for the fastest street-driven R35 GT-R, a record we had held for just a few hours before AMS took it back. It held the record the for fastest DOT tire 60-foot time for a long time though. Well, here the car was with a different owner many years later!
I am pretty familiar with Boost Logic’s GT-R stuff and you will be seeing it in future articles so I spent my time drooling over their Audi R8 stuff. Here is a 2000 hp customer R8 that they were buttoning up while I was there.
Custom intake manifolds plenums with water to air intercoolers are custom painted to match the car. Everything there looks pretty OEM as far as fit and finish.
Huge turbos and super cleanly finished exhaust plumbing. Color-matched of course. Everything is so cleanly finished.
5 comments
I saw you there on Saturday, Mike. Like you said in one of the pics, you didn’t look happy, though, so I left you alone. Congrats on finding the time on the Tesla. I was so confused on why I never saw the Tesla out on track more, but now I know!
It’s hard doing 4 cars!
Not sure about that splitter on the Tesla. AFAIK, the Tesla has a completely flat bottom, which is perfect for ground effect. The middle section of the splitter should be turned up and radiused to enhance airflow to the underbody. As it is now, it’s effectively reducing airflow to the underbody, especially on corner entry (when all that weight transfers forward) and you are losing downforce when you need it most.
Also, by adding side skirts you can move the CoP rearward and make a ton more downforce with very little drag penalty (the most efficient solution.) These are super low buck modifications, so they should be simple to do. It won’t look great, but you can use fiberglass lawn edging from Home Depot to make very effective side skirts. Don’t ask me how I know. 😉
I helped design the aero and it works just fine. There is more to it than meets the eye including suspension tricks. Also a lot depends on what the owner is willing to do the car cosmetically and spend and how sophisticated of a shape that we can create with our homemade molds and bucks. We are actually trying to reduce drag as we have more than enough downforce. Our aero is currently pretty slippery. With 440 hp we are only a few mph slower than the stock car at this slightly uphill straight.
Great article! Thanks for all your hard work.