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As a few of you will know, this was my winter hack. I drove it over winter, then ripped the LPG/propane conversion off for my Limo.

The plan was to then sell the car, but in all honesty it's only worth about £500 ($750 USD), so I decided I'd track-day it, then strip it for parts. I know it's a sad state of affairs to take apart a perfectly good car, but needs must, and it's worth *loads* more as parts.

Anyway, it is time to strip and prepare it for trackday use.
It originally weighed in at 1880kg (according to Wikipedia), let's see how much we lose! ;D

First thing out was the bulky front seats. 77lb each. That's 70kg in the front seats alone! Yeah, I need front seats - going to throw some light buckets from my MX5 (Miata/Eunos) ones in for now.

Possibly a little anal, but I weighed everything as it came off.

Here are the results so far:

Front seats - 70kg
Rear seat - 30kg
Carpets & mats - 26kg
Trim* - 40.9kg
Front doors trim (cards, air bags, speakers) - 14kg
Central locking pump 1.5kg
Parcel shelf - 7.3
Boot (trunk) stuff inc spare wheel - 35.8kg
Engine bay and internals - 4.7kg
Back door cards and trim - 14.1kg
Wire - 7.1kg!

* All the plastics, rubbers, covers, brackets etc.

That's 253.6kg (about 560lb)! Still got loads to take out, but have to add a little for the MX5 seats.

Marham track day is about 3 weeks time, so still plenty to do!

I spent most of the second day removing wire! 7.1kg of it has come out so far. Looks a little better inside now, as you'll see below. Central locking, speakers (12 of them!), airbag stuff, seat electrics etc etc... I've left the front electric windows in though, cause it may get a bit warm in there and the a/c will be removed.

Beginning of the day

All this came out

A few hours later

Better!

 

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Didn't get quite as much as I planned this afternoon. Seems making a seat base/frame takes some thought...

Anyway, got something mocked up now, so will weld it all together tomorrow:

Dash stripped as far as I can for now:

And I can't find anything else in the engine bay to come off without removing bit's needed. Just got to find some drain pipe or something to move the air filter forward:

Need to do a tip run!

So, running total this evening:

Dash: 13.5kg
Engine Bay: 4.3kg
Sunroof mechanism: 13.8kg

Total today: 31.6kg
Total: 285.2kg

Obviously weight to go back in tomorrow with new seats But they are kind of important

 

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Final weight reduction figure was 282kg after adding the Mazda seats and finding a few other bits to delete.

I managed to do this:

but without dropping he car into limp mode. Brilliant for sideways drifting action!

Anyway, what an absolute hoot this car is on the track. Reasonably quick, but such fun in the corners. It was keeping up with the best of them, and several people were amazed such a big car could corner so well. But break the traction on the rear, and it would stay out there and drift all the way around the bend!

In the pits:

A serious lap with no drifting:

A bit sideways:

Chasing Rob in his 318is:

Hopefully someone will have taken some photos of the car on full opposite lock, as that seemed to be state of play most of the day which resulted in several of these:

The car was faultless for 179 track miles. I collected about 6 cones and two black flags for excessive drifting Actually, not something I'm proud of, but the damn thing is just such fun with the back end hanging right out.

I am now going to try and develop this car further. I'll obviously make up some covers where the headlights used to be, and remove a whole load more stuff; heater, air-con, doubled glazing, catalysts and that heavy old backbox, etc. I am currently at 135bhp/tonne, up from the original 117bhp/tonne. If I can lose another 200 kg which I think is obtainable, the car will be at around 170bhp/tonne, which should allow it to keep with Porsche Boxters and Subaru Imprezas.

Massive thanks to all the guys at RAF Marham for giving up their free time to run such an amazing event. I can't wait to get it out there again soon...

 

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Hi
Behind the Front & Rear Bumperbars there you will find more Stuff to take out it may not b much but it could b 5 or 10 Kilos,its a very heavy Rubber foam ,its inside the Bumpers ,easily taken out.

Cheers s500. The bumper ballast and chrome trim was removed

You better be careful you will end up like me with a real race car
and its so addictive

Oh wow! Now that is beautiful! Where do I find out more about your car?! I've had three w126 coupes - my 560SEC was a scream in standard form - I would LOVE to have a play in that race prepped one!

You should look at putting a turbo or supercharger in it too.

Yeah, I've already been having perverse thoughts about throwing a blower on it, although I need to get the weight down first... I want to run my "MX323" with a megasquirt engine management system, and it would be interesting to learn all about it with this car first. Once installed, it should be easy enough to build a map for a supercharger.