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You may remember the floor was cut for exhaust tube clearance in Part 7. Gary had to finish something else so he had Peter finish this up.
Peter cut the floor up and ground everything flush. Then he welded it all up after filling all the gaps with smaller pieces of steel. Peter used to work for me at XS so he was one of the original builders of this car when it was RB powered. It's almost like he was reunited with the car.
After welding up the floor, Peter fabricated the 3.5″ exhaust and the 2.25″ dump using aluminum tubes and bends we got from Vibrant Performance. We decided to run a separate wastegate dump for flow purposes since the wastegates would be wide open for the majority of a hot lap. With the aluminum the entire assembly still weighed only 1/3 of what it would have weighed in steel.
Vibrant had the aluminum 3.5″ V-band flanges on the shelf, but they don't stock 2.25″ V-bands so Gary made one up on his lathe. The aluminum exhaust will not be as durable with the material at the bends fatiguing first, but that's the cost of having a lightweight exhaust. Aluminum has a much lower temperature range than steel and its strength is exponentially reduced with higher temperatures. With the duty cycle this car will see as a Time Attack car, we aren't too concerned.
The rear suspension was still pretty much factory Nissan with all spherical bearings and arms from Nagisa Auto in Japan. Way back when XS first built the car, Mike Kojima helped us to redesign the rear suspension geometry and we got it to work really good. But due to the giant Veilside widebody, we had to run a giant 70mm wheel spacer which will have a negative effect on the wheel rate. There was definitely no time to redesign and fabricate a whole near rear suspension so it was a compromise we would have to deal with. Notice that KW S2000 rear coilovers. They were used in the rear for transport because they were dimensionally similar to what we needed. Chris still needed some parts from Germany to finish up the actual KW motorsport dampers.
