Wanted a little help. I already removed the passenger seat from my car but I was also thinking about gutting out the trunk and competing with less than a 1/4 tank of gas.

Would that be bad for weight distribution for the Auto-X or will it be ok? I'm afraid that the handling will be affected too much to where the car is way unbalanced.

Andre

 

Whatever effect the change in weight distribution will have on your handling can be offset by setup and/or driving style changes. Having said that, two things that setup and driving style changes won't help are (1) your car will be in Prepared because of the modifications, and (2) it'll fuel starve since you're running too little gas. So I'd reconsider...

 

The car will be fine for balance with the trunk gutted. You'll only be removing ~ 50 lb and that isn't enough to disturb the handling in any way.

However, you will likely have a problem if you run that little fuel in the tank. Under hard cornering you will get a lot of fuel slosh and may end up getting fuel starvation during sweepers. The stickier your tires get, the more this becomes an issue. Probably want to keep at least a half tank in there

 

Cool... thank you. I'll just keep the passenger seat out then and leave the trunk and make sure I have a good amount of fuel... lol.

Thanks for your help,
Andre

 

You probably should keep the pasenger seat in there too so more expereinced drivers can ride with you and aid you in your development. Learning to drive well will reduce your time A LOT more than removing your seat will.

Basically, remove the spare and the spare tools and run 1/2 tank of gas. Then drive.

 

I already have a good amount of seat time... that's not the problem. It's just that this is the first time that I actually thought about gutting out some stuff and wasn't sure if it would affect anything. So having the instructor in the car is not needed.

Andre

 

You can save a fair amount of weight by gutting the car and grinding off all the sound/vibration gunk that coats the inside down to bare metal and then reinstalling the interior or at least most of it. There is actually a great deal of weight you could remove without anyone actually noticing. You could probably get 150 pounds out which is not insignificant, it's a whole averaged sized person.

There are probably 10 pounds of bolts holding the interior together, you could replace those with titanium and only use half as many. Passenger airbag and SRS unit could be removed, nobody would ever notice. You could remove the radio and speakers and all the wires and harnesses. You could chop the front and rear bumper impact beams off, nobody would know unless they took the bumper covers off.

I just don't understand why anyone would want to.

 

I gut my trunk everytime I race. I can notice a slight difference but I actually prefer the slight oversteer. Also I have run with quarter tank of gas before and haven't gotten any starvation issues. That being said it is possible and I wouldn't run lower than that.

 

tar paper comes off with dry ice.... its fun. it is impermeable to all other means of removal

technique; plop a clump of dry ice on the desired section of material. wait few minutes, you should hear some cracking noises. brush off dry ice. whack frozen tar paper with hard object....blammo, it splinters into numerous cracked peices literally falling off car.

 

Fuel starvation is rare. I've done both hard right and left hander sweepers with less than 1/2 gallon of fuel in. It depends on the corners. I only get starvation on really tight left handers. Which I suppose is what you get on Auto-X. But it's self regulating. The weight transfer of the starvation stutter tends to move enough fuel around to keep going