“I’m going through old film photos and well, there’s a lot of goodness in there. This one’s from the BBQ we had at Adam and Joel’s place for the NZPC article that was published…”

Makes me miss NZ summer, Osaka is starting to get a decent chill on.

Check Chris’s site for a few more photos from that day !

Damian and I invested in a bunch of Kei car magazines to see the kind of sizes and offsets that everyone else was using. After a bunch of measuring we managed to pick up this dirt cheap set of wheels.

We wanted the wheels to be big, so we went for 16′s.

For tyres we went as small as we could find, 165/40/16′s.

After a bunch of banging the guards and test fitting we were both pretty happy with it.

Heres the stock ride height. The body needed to come down arouuund maybe 7 meters or so.

First I needed to roll the gaurds, the lip on the rear gaurds of these things is giant.

Again, more yahoo gambles. This time some old short and thick american shocks out of a Toyota Hilux Surf. Short is the keyword here.

For the springs, our mate Shane had some old Honda Step Wagon lowering springs lying round that he was kind enough to gift too us.

Again, too long !

All finished, nice and short.

So first up, the plan for the Honda ‘Life’ that we had recently picked up was to leave it alone, and use it for all our day to day and long distance driving.

But why would we do something as smart as leaving our daily driver stock?

So:

This is the standard front suspension setup. I did some research and decently short coil overs for these things cost about 5 times as much as we paid for the car, so I decided to see if I could get anything cheaper to work first.

Standard strut

I had a search on yahoo, and saw the majority of honda’s use the same strut style, where the hub carrier ‘clamps’ onto the strut (I’ve never looked at honda suspension in my life).

After going to upgrage and comparing measurements with a bunch of other honda stuff there, I came to the conclusion that the point on the Life strut that is clamped, has a bigger diameter than all the other honda stuff. Which means other models will have too small a diameter to suit the Life hub carrier.

Thats ok, I guess I can try sort something when it comes to that. So We took a gamble and picked up these old tien struts out of a Honda Oddysey for a whopping 1000yen off yahoo.

You can see they are still a bit long, but the shock luckly had plenty of travel, so chopping a few coils out of the spring worked like a charm. The next challenge was that yes, the Oddysey ran a narrower clamping point than the life…

Nothing a few coffee cans can’t fix.

I used the strut tops from the factory suspension and it all bolted up like a dream.

Onto the rear suspension next..

Its from the first meihan day that I got 3rd in the middle class. The girl that came first drives alot better than me.

Here’s a few photos and a video of me clutch kicking my way round the track.

My car has been really lacking in power, struggling to spin third, and just feeling really sluggish. I had a feeling it was something to do with the tune, so  I cracked open the ECU and found it was stock. T28 and 1bar boost on the standard ecu doesn’t really compute, and pretty glad I decided to check before getting to much driving in with the setup like this.  So since this day I’ve had a friend of a friend do a quick ROM tune, and it feels like a completely different engine now. More on engine stuff later.

Suzuka’s just over 2 hours from where we stay in Osaka, and I hope to get out there alot more. Plus I’ve got a score to settle with the reverse direction after stacking Adam’s s14 there last year.

I was driving, but didn’t manage to get any video of it. Maybe next time.

Since this was a Kansai Allstar qualifying day, a bunch of the top level guys were around. This always makes the downtime between sessions entertaining. I tend to take too many photos, so I’ll just pick a few.

First up: Looking

SR, TD06 and 17′s are things you’d normally associate with a Silvia, and definitely not an AE86. The car does get driven in a very ‘Silvia’ kind of style however.

This is the Tinker WRX, and apparently the driver has been around since the start. JZX100 headlights look so good, wrx wizard.

I remember seeing the D2 motorworks 180sx in a drift tengoku a few years back. The fab work is amazing, probably the best I have seen on a drift car over here so far. The driver is super aggressive too, which makes it awesome to watch.

Someones haggard yellow car..

..and some satin black.

I’ve got some video of the qualifying here on my phone, I’ll chuck it together and get it up soon.