The Seibon fiberglass doors and lexan windows that I talked about some time ago have finally been installed on the Evo. There was a significant weight savings, the parts look very close to stock now that they’re installed, and I am very happy with the overall results.

The total weight savings appears to have been ~150lbs (that includes a couple of other small changes we made in the interior). The car is coming in now at just about 3200lbs without driver/navigator (weight includes spare wheel, jack, tools, and other required equipment). The car is still a porker — my old M3 weighed 2975 with me in it, and that car had power windows!

Unless you look very, very closely at the doors themselves (paying particular attention to the panel gaps) you really can’t even tell that they’re not the factory doors. The doors function the same as stock, shut well, and accommodated most of the factory parts with little to no modification.

We re-attached the aluminum door panels that we created when the cage went in. The insides of the doors were not painted as well as I was hoping for (a mistake made by the painters that I did not correct due to time), but they still loo acceptable on a race car.

The only real fitment issue we ran into with the stock door parts were the rear window scrapers. The front doors are molded to accept the factory rubber gaskets on the outside of the window opening, but for some reason the rear doors had that part molded into the door itself. That required cutting and riveting the window scraper to the outside of the door skin, which is pretty ugly when you look closely.

The new lexan windows are a perfect fit and don’t look like plastic AT ALL. You have to go up to the windows and touch them to realize that they’re not the factory glass. Beautiful fit and finish along with a tremendous weight savings. Well worth the big money I spent to bring in custom cut coated lexan from Japan.

While the car was at the race show getting the doors installed, I made a few other changes to try to improve the car.

The first thing we did was relocate the navigator’s seat to be much lower and further back in the car. Rather than mount the seat on sliders and sparco seat bases, the seat is now bolted to the floor of the car as far back as we could place it. Anything to shift the weight rearward in the front-heavy Evo.

You can see just how much further back the seat is in this picture.

We also rearranged things in the dash to move the data acquisition display to the instrument cluster (it functions as a precise MPH/RPM display with shift lights). This made room for us to mount a new electronic boost controller in it’s old location.

The HKS EVC boost controller we installed has three boost modes that we’ll use at Targa; a high boost setting (22lbs peak) for harder stages, a medium boost setting (20lbs peak) for when we want to conserve the motor and fuel, and boost off (at the factory wastegate limit of ~12lbs) so that we can easily conserve fuel on the transits.

The new interior still looks a little bit “Starship Enterprise” but I like where everything is placed and I know how to use it.

Our next steps are to make some changes to gearing and the Active Center Differential, change wheels/tires, re-align the suspension, and make a few more engine mods and re-tune the ECU for maximum power. Follow the blog for more details.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Installs & How-to's. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.