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| Near the engine, the dry sump system is plumbed with Earl’s preformed O Flex steel braided hose and Swivel Seal AN fittings. NGK spark plugs and wires are used. You can just see the remote mount K&N oil filter here. |
Cooling is key in drifting because the cars are travelling sideways at full throttle and not much air is travelling to the front of the car. We had to correlate all the components together in a box to help channel what air was available. Luckily everything worked out and looks dope. To assist further in cooling we also implemented a water sprayer system to cool temperatures even further. We used a Honda Civic windshield tank and pump combo mated to spray mister I jacked from my backyard misters. The combination works great and cools temperatures an additional 10 degrees.
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| A surge tank and overflow reservoir are found here to purge air from the low mounted CSF radiator. A Meziere electric water pump circulates the coolant around. It is super hard to keep a drift car cool and although the car looks to be over cooled, it is not. |
In addition, we had to channel air out of the intercooler and out from under the hood. Considering everything was custom (This makes it a pain in the ass.), we had to modify a hood as well. We used the factory lightweight aluminum hood and started hacking away. We didn’t want to just simply cut a square out of the hood. If we did it that way it would look really stupid so we decided to implement the factory rotary indentation on the hood with the design (believe it or not, when I first met Ron about 20 years ago he was into show cars).
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| An Earl’s power steering cooler is found between the V mounted custom CSF radiator and HKS intercooler. |
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| A big Earl’s oil cooler helps keep the 20B cool. Earl’s Pro-Lite hose and swivel seal fittings are used here. |
The overall fabrication creates what was once a two-dimensional rotor on the hood to a three-dimensional rotor on the hood. In fact, the Apex of the rotor overlaps right over the intercooler. The split in the middle of the hood looks aesthetically pleasing as well. At first glance, it looks like a thin sheet of aluminum that splits the opening of the intercooler. We simply put a small diameter aluminum tube underneath it that is hard to see to strengthen it up. The results look really cool and help promote the theme of the rotary. Really cool!
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| An AEM dryflow air fliter keeps the air going to the Tial GT40XSPL turbo clean. The turbo is based on a ball bearing Garrett GT40 but has tweaks done by Mazda’s Tod Kaneko. |
Engineering underneath the hood was just the start. To add more anarchy to the buildup, a custom front suspension had to be engineered. The Mazda RX8 comes stock with a great double wishbone set-up. The handling of the stock double wishbone is second to none and the typical design is even being used in Formula 1. Unfortunately, a double wishbone setup is not very good for drifting. A lot of drift cars who have the most angle run a MacPherson setup. There is one less wishbone for the suspension to hit when turning. We wanted to give the Joon a very large window for turning to avoid the chances of spinning out.
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| The intercooler breathes out through this custom duct through the aluminum hood. Check out the rotor shaped duct splitter. This is a nice aesthetic touch from the car show guy within Ron. A water sprayer provides additional cooling. |
