SUPER HOK

The Two Month "Race" against time....

 

Awhile back i spoke about some R30's my friend Rich had purchased.. As happens from a simple cheap practice car, he looked again and had two of them.... So what happens next?... well give me one so i can race too...  hahahaha

 

"and so it shall come to pass" and so it was done.... I drove the Hok to my house and parked it at the back ready to get going on it...  Deadline... two months later was the next race event in PE which i had to be at.... I knew given my experience in taking cars apart i couldnt strip the car entirely... get the front and inside done and after that get going with the rear and underneath..... The car wasnt in great condition with lots of rust up front... also it had been in a front end at some point of its life so it needed some real TLC...

 

With this project i already knew where it was headed...  I had some s13 hubs and stub axles lying around... my coilovers out of my 86 in the garage in a box... TIme to start making a plan and seeing if i could make this frankenstein suspension set up work.....With the R31's i know whats up but being the frist R30 i had worked on there were some unknowns....  First was the lower control arms...  Normally we replace them on the 31's as they are longer than stock...  get some more camber up front...  Not on the 30"s..  they about 15mm longer than the s13 ones.... Didnt matter...  all the arms are based on similair principles so they literally just bolt up to the stub axles.... Excitement.....  I knew now at least this was going to work up front which ment handling issues would become something of the past....  Brakes you ask?... bolt on anything from any nissan..... weapon of choice?...  R32 GTR 296mm 4 pot Brembos....  Nice....  Coilovers... all i had to do really was machine the stub axles down slightly to fit into the coils....  easy....  One concern was the length of the coilovers...  seeing as there were for the 86 they were much shorter... With the ride height settings it would work but i decided to offset it slightly...  Had a friend of mine make up a set of camber tops 40mm think.... Looks cool, gives us some more height adjustment, and also slightly more camber....  yes...

 

With this all on track... I now had to sort out the rust and so on.... As always happens... you start small...  anyway....  i took out the motor and started cutting.... welded up all the areas of concern with some 0.8mm plate,and there you go... In the process i decided to stitch the chassis up completely... With this car being 31 years old i thougth it best to get it as rigid as possible and get all the plates back and better than its former glory, and ready for the race track.....

 

Interior.....  Strip... The key on this build for me was power to weight... Dont need to spend money on the motor, just get the car light and playful, enough to have fun with the guys on the track.... Carpets and so on all out.... Rubberising was 80kg worth of weight so i guestamate the total weight out at around 150kg...

Paint - Sonora Brown by BMW.... went with a slightly darker brown than the car with the intentions of getting it painted up at some point.... That was the plan, but the car looks good to me at the moment...  neat where it needs to be and all business everywhere else....

 

The idea here was a full self build... I even decided to try my hand at building a cage for it which with the help from fastfit and there mandrel bending machine i did just that.....  So happy about how it turned out... and cost me next to nothing to do...  just some time.....

 

Wiring.... here i know next to nothing....  With the help from Bassons Auto and my friend Wesley, got it sorted in no time... such a nice feeling to hear it fire up.... The new tiny exhaust note really giving the L28 an awesome sound.....

 

As always happens we finished the car 11.30pm the night before race day....  DJ Wes helped out big time with the last water leak and rear brake lights....and we were good to go... Got some Macs that night and chilled out.....

 

Race Day

 

What a day....  not gonna get into the whole story of what went down but yes.........  we had reached to goal and the car was track side..... I was hoping on doing 1.20's to start off with as we hadent ever driven the car, but ended up on a 1.19.4 for the end of the day....  really happy about that, and excited about the potential of the chassis of this car....  loads of potential still.....

 

The dissapointing side of it is that a faulty radiator cap caused the car to over heat which didnt allow us to finish all the races....  but yea, these things happen.... The cool part for me was that all the fiddling we did caused no issues and the car otherwise really ran well.....

 

Next race 20th September....  Some more in the making Motor wise...  but we shall chat then...........