STx Notes, February Fastrack

[Mrsideways]

there's a huge can of expensive worms that'd be opened that way.

stock turbos are not optimized for racing. turbos, and their optimization, are an added cost. add to that the full ST(U) engine build allowance and you have a seriously costly playground - and for what purpose? if the sequential gearbox cat weren't already out of the bag, I would think that should be illegal, too, and for the same reason.

I can see you issue with the S2000 - you don't think it will shed enough weight to make the 2.0L min (2200#). out of curiosity - how much power do you think it can make, full build? becasue I figure that to be one of the best 2.0L motors available, period. yeah, it's a shame the car is heavy, but you could change the lump or the car to make it work. eventually, if you go 10/10ths, Id ask for that combo to get some sort of help. not sure how that would work (can't loose weight) but it's a possible option.

The K motors are much better then the F(S2000). The K's get Varible cam timing (via Ivtec) among other things. There have been a lot of people trying to make real hp out of them. The fact is you see fancy engine builds over and over with little results. Without adding stroke or Bore or A LOT of compression just nothing yields you any real net hp. It depends on a Dyno but I'm yet to see one that would be close to STU legal make more then about 240whp on a realistic dyno. The .5pt in compression you can do in STU and the cams will yeild little to nothing. I've seen some extremely high compression cars pop the 300 mark but they were stroker drag motors with 13 and 14:1 compression.
I'm pretty well gutted but haven't done lexan or Carbon Fiber and the car is right at 2600lbs before driver. From what I see the hood is pretty light and you can only get about 10lbs, the trunk can get 15lbs but the dry carbon trunk is $2000. A regular carbon trunk only gets you about 8lbs weight out. The lexan rear window is 8lbs. I figure if I really went nuts and bought all the carbon bits I could see 2500lbs, maybe less if I started over and put a different cage in it. But that's 2500 before driver. Add 180lbs and realistically it'll never get under 2650lbs. The lightest caged S2000 I've seen was 2460lbs + driver and the C-west full carbon fiber car was 2200+driver. So a Full Dry carbon car with EVERYTHING removed would just barely be under weight for the 2.2L motor.