So plan with my car is to prep it for the 24 hours of lemons. Official rules are max vehicle cost is $500 with unlimited budget for safety (cage, seat, brakes, wheels, tires, ect.) while I’m gutting the interior and selling all the parts my overall cost for the car should be in the negatives. So I’m curious what would be the best mod for track use. I’m already planning on doing the valve cover mod. Would a bigger radiator be best since I plan on this car going a straight 24 hours? Is there something else I should be looking at for endurance reliability?

 

If you're showing up to a Lemons race with an S2000, you're already going to get pummelled with penalty laps so you might as well go to town with it. Even if you don't exceed the $500 vehicle cost, they'll still call it a cheater unless you bribe the hell out of them.

A fuel cell as close to 24 gallons will give you nearly double the "miles per pitstop" and save a ton of time. Stock S2000 tank will go quick at full pace. Fuel cell is covered under safety. You can also go to town with wheels/tires. Stock brakes suck and you've got free reign there so improve them. Have backup sets of pads/rotors....you'll go through them. Have someone inspect pad wear at each stop...you don't want to drop a pad and caliper going into a heavy braking zone off a front straight.
Sell what you can to be able to afford a cheap/used set of shocks and springs. Have the shocks rebuilt. You want them to look rough...like I said, you're going to get labeled a cheater anyway. A used performance radiator isn't a bad idea (judges look down on shiney bits under the hood) especially if ambient temps are high. A baffled oil pan will help with oil starvation in high G sweepers. You could also eliminate the differential as a potential failure point by replacing it with something stronger without being visible to the judges.

Short shift...the additional strain isn't worth the tenths in a long race. You can't do well if you can't finish.

 

I wanna do that race too but I would never show in a S2000 unless it looked really clapped out. I thought about getting an old Honda or Toyota for that race.

 

you will never convince someone the car is worth $500.00 or less ? I can't help but think that I am missing something on this, this idea seems odd unless you use a rusty patina all over the car, almost blasphemous , lol. Maybe a 1990's Honda Civic might be more appropriate.

 

Yah I’ve already come to terms with the fact judges won’t believe me, even though I would be 100% honest with them. But I want to try to keep in the spirit of the race for the first one. The car is also not completely clapped out but it was not taken care of. The car also oddly looks cleaner being completely gutted and soft top removed.

 

The goal isn’t necessarily to build a dedicated lemons car. But more of a way to get tons of track time for not much money to eventually build it into a nicer track car. Which is one reason I’m taking on 100% of the build costs. So I don’t have to worry about my team wanting to keep the car lemons. None of us care about bringing home the trophy, for now, we all just want track time. If we all fall in love I have access to a lot of cheap inappropriate cars. S2000 will remain stock but obviously want to do reliability mods to keep the car running 24 hours straight.

 

There was a recall on early ap1 cars, Europe only, for replacing oil squirters w revised ones (squirt oil to back sides of pistons). It seems at sustained high rpm load, like autobahn speeds, they did not supply enough cooling oil. Engines were failing.

But even the revised ones can wear out. Spring inside weakens, etc. For something being used for 24 hour race, I'd plan to replace those, even if they're already the revised ones.

Its a pita, only bc oil dripping on you entire time. Also, its easy to cross thread the retaining bolt going back in, so gotta be super careful engaging threads. This is especially true for the rearmost one, as there isn't as much room, and tendency for socket to make bolt canted in its hole even as you try to hand start it.

Thread engagement trick learned from Dad 50 years ago, turn bolt wrong direction by hand while applying light pressure. When you feel it drop off the step of the thread it was climbing, it sorta drops in a bit, the threads are now right at their mutual engagement point. Now the moment you begin to turn it in tighten direction, threads immediately engaging.

This avoids that situation where you're carefully rotating bolt while trying to keep it perfectly aligned to its bore, only to still fail to reach point of thread engagement. Sometimes you only have room to turn so far while maintaining bore alignment, and this maximizes that effort.