My Track Toy

[Cossie1]

Ok only had the car since the end of October, I bought it with the intension of using it as a daily runabout for the time being, but it's main use would be as a track toy once I get around to finding something else to use as a daily runabout.

Anyhow a few members have asked for pics of the car, but tbh I haven't even washed the car since I bought it, as i've either been busy working on it, or the weather has been too bad, so pics are few and far between.

So here are some pics of how it was when I bought it:

Now the first thing I did when I bought the car, was to replace the thermostat and the temp sensor as I noticed on my way home with the car, on the motorway the temp gauge was only around 70°c but in traffic around town it sat firmly at 90°c.

This cured the problem with the temp gauge.

I then fitted a boost gauge, and did the N249 bypass at the same time.

I ordered some Plasti Dip for the front grille, I was a bit apprehensive of doing this myself as I am not good at painting, and tbh although it doesn't look too bad from a distance the grille isn't great close up and needs redoing.

Then I ordered some cheap arse coilovers, now I could have just gone all out and bought a set of KW v3's and tbh I was REALLY tempted to do this, but I didn't want to spend more on coilovers than I paid for the car, without atleast using the car on track first to make sure I would be happy with it, and also I wanted this to be a cheap and fun project, that I wouldn't be afraid of using, when you put alot of money into a car, you end up loving it too much and not wanting to risk damaging it and loosing alot of cash at the sametime.

So in the end I went with a set of Pro Sport's (same weight rating as the Weitec's for the cupra R 1020kg front and 1020kg rear), I went with these as a mate bought some JOM's for his cupra track car, and said they were good enough, and they were less than half the price of the Weitecs.

So with the coilovers on order, I had to track down a passenger side wing, as you can see in the last picture above, it wasn't in the best condition, I found a couple on here, but understandably nobody wanted to post it to me, incase it got damaged, and I didn't fancy 200+ mile round trip for a front wing. In the end I got 1 from ebay for £30 delivered, which was straight enough and in the right colour

So I fitted the coilovers with new top mounts, bearings and at the same time I fitted the replacement front wing.

As some of you will have read, the Pro Sports are shorter shocks than standard, and therefore needed shorter drop links, which was a bit of a nightmare as there was no info to suggest this would be needed, and everyone on here said they wouldn't be needed, but as it turns out, they are needed.

Over the next week or so, I kept messing with the ride height, as I fitted the coilovers as they came out of the box, the front end was on the floor and the rear just above it, the car looked great, but.... it was soooo soft and bouncy I felt like a nodding dog.

[Cossie1]

Next I was looking for some track wheels, as I wanted to keep the spiders to drive to the track and have another set of wheels to put some R888's on.

As it turned out the father in law had a set of 3 audi TT rims in his garage, (because he got fedup of his tyres going flat all the time on his old TT, he just bought another set of wheels, but for some reason left 1 at kwik fit when he had the tyres swapped over) which he let me have.

So I was on the lookout for 1 wheel but as luck would have it, there was a set of 4 forsale on here, but Devonutopia had already snapped them up. Anyhow long storey short, he only wanted 2 of the rims to use for the drag strip and was happy to let the other 2 go. So I met up with him to get the 2 wheels he didn't want.

Now I had a set of 5, they were all in a pretty bad way, especially the 3 from the father in law, they were badly corroded on the insides and kerbed badly too, so I went to halfords and got some paint, and got a mate of mine to refurb them for me.

Whilst that was being done, I managed to grab a pair of very good condition hardly used R888's on ebay for a bargain price, and then a couple of days later picked up another 2 brand new ones for about £50 less than I had found them anywhere else

Whilst I was looking for tyres I also had in my mind that I would need brakes, i'm the sort of person that likes to brake late and hard, but I want a pedal that I know will be there when I get to the corner (even on the road), nothing worse than a brake pedal that you have no confidence in.

A set of Brembo's came up forsale on here, so I sent the seller a Pm and offered him what I thought was a fair price, he rejected it though :(, so I kept on looking, and as luck would have it, the same Brembo's turned up on ebay. I put in my max bid (£3 higher than I offered on here) and won them they came with some pretty shot discs but some almost new Carbon Lorraine RC8 pads .

Whilst on ebay I picked up a Whiteline adjustable rear ARB.

I then read about the Recall on the Coilpacks on here, so got my car booked in, for them to be replaced. I just nipped into my local dealer, and they booked me in a few days later.

I already had a bucket seat (Corbeau) that was part of the gaming rig I bought a couple of years back to play Gran Turismo with (sad I know, but it seemed like a good idea at the time). Anyway as i've only ever used the rig about 3 times, I figured I may aswell use the seat from it, and I didn't want to hack up the standard drivers seat to mount it on, so I bought a cobra seat mount from Demon Tweaks for a mk4 golf. It fit the car perfectly, but would need alot of modification for my Corbeau seat to mount to it.

By now it's near the end of November and Apex Trackdays had just announced they had booked Castle Combe for the 8th December, so I booked that quickly as the price was too good to miss.

With the trackday booked, it was time to get the car ready, I had all these bits (wheels, tyres, brakes, rear arb, seat & mounting frame) but hadn't fitted any of them.

Also I wanted to drop the sump and check the oil pickup pipe, as the car has done 102k although it has a good service history, I still wanted to check it for piece of mind.

So I ordered some Fuch's Titan Race 5w40 ready for when I did that.

[Cossie1]

So a week before the trackday, I figure it's time to get the car ready.

First of all I fitted the Whiteline Rear Anti-roll bar, this would have been very easy to fit, on a ramp or even if I had a trolley jack to hand, sadly I didn't (father in law had it in his garage), so I just had the normal sill jack. Never the less it was a bit fiddly but I had it fitted in about an hour. On just a quick trip around the block, I could already feel a difference, I set it in the middle as I didn't know what the weather would be like at castle combe, and if it was raining, I didn't want it set on full hard, and I wouldn't have been messing about adjusting it on the day either lol.

The next day I got the wheels back from my mate, freshly painted, and fitted the R888's thanks to another mate that let me use his tyre machine (last time I fitted tyres myself was about 13 years ago, and they were much easier due to some give in the sidewalls lol).

So with the tyres now fitted, I went to trial fit them to the car, this isn't something I had planned to do, until I got to the track, but something was telling me to fit them just to check everything would be ok.

I am very glad that I did, the car was too low for them to fit, although the R888's were 225/45/17's there wasn't enough arch clearence, and the TT rims being 0.5" wider and a slightly different offset (ET32 instead of ET35), so I had to raise the car a little on the front from 13 threads to 18 threads. This was plenty on the front, but the rears needed more work, I had to raise the rear from 8 threads to 13, and as the rear wheels were pretty much inline with the arch, even on the smallest of bumps the tyres would scrub, infact in a short 8 mile trip the tyre on the n/s/r rubbed the arch so much it burnt the paint and blistered it :(, so I ended up raising it to 16 threads on the rear. This ment that the tyres only scrubbed on larger bumps, which I could cope with, raising it also stiffened it up nicely.

The following day I got the grinder out and set about hacking up the Cobra seat frame, so that I could bolt my Corbeau bucket seat to it, this took a fair amount of work to do as I wanted to keep the sliders, so I could get the seat exactly as I wanted it, as the frame was for a 3dr golf, it had a tilt mechanism on it, I didn't really need this, so I cut it off which in turn let me lower the seat down a little (although tbh in the end the bucket seat was hardly any lower than standard) so I am glad that I did cut the tilt part off.

So now I had the seat mounted to the frame, I dug out my harness from the garage and bolted the seat and harness into the car, luckily the local scrap yard had an octavia tdi in the yard so I had the drivers seatbelt clip from that, which bolted straight onto the seat mount, so I didn't have to wear harness's on the road (as I feel there dangerous on the road).

Now it's 3 days before the trackday, and I still haven't got my Brembo's on, and i'm starting to worry about getting the sump off and checking the pickup pipe as the weather is pretty bad.

Also I noticed the rear pads were low and the discs were pretty shot on the rear too, so a quick trip to GSF, and I picked up a set of rear discs & pads and a couple of litres of ATE Super Blue brake fluid and an oil and air filter.

As luck would have it, I had the chance to use a 2 poster ramp to do the brakes, which saved alot of messing about. The Brembo's bolted straight on, I needed to modify the brackets that hold the flexi brake hoses a little as the originals are not round, but the braided lines that came with the Brembo's are. A couple of seconds with a die grinder sorted that. I then changed the rear discs and pads, and then spent about an hour with an airline bleeder to change the brake fluid to the new Super Blue stuff. Took a little while to get all the old fluid and air out, but got there in the end.

The next morning the weather wasn't great, but I wanted to check the oil pickup pipe still and I had to do an oil change anyway, as I didn't want to use the car on track with Quantum Platinum oil in it.

Anyway I just had to get on and do it, so I jacked the car up, and drained the oil out, removed all the bolts from the sump and then spent about 30 mins trying to break the seal on the sump, it REALLY didn't want to come off lol. Eventually I won

I unbolted the pickup pipe and had a good look, it wasn't in bad condition, there was some crud in there, but not anywhere near as bad as my mates Leon was when he bought it.

Instead of replacing it I ran it under the tap for 10 mins, the water flowed through it without issue, and then used a couple of tins of brake cleaner on it and in the sump to clean that out.

I then spent about 45 mins drying the sump and pickup pipe with a hair dryer, as I didn't want any water left in them, once happy I bolted the pickup pipe back onto the engine (making sure the o-ring was in place) and then put a nice thin layer of Dirko sump sealer around the sump and bolted it back into place. I managed to drop 1 of the 3 awkward bolts twice, but fished it out both times with a magnet luckily.

All done it took about 1.5 hours on my back in the cold lol, but would have been quicker if the sump had come off the engine to start with.

I quickly replaced the oil filter and then poored in the nice new Titan Race 5w40 fully synthetic oil (Sikolene Pro S).

With all that done, I removed the rear seats and parcel shelf, just to make the car feel a bit more like a track car lol, nice and simple job. I had also ordered a new standard recirc valve as I had noted that the P17075 fault code kept getting logged and i'd not found any obvious air leaks, but I hadn't had time to fit the new recirc or the air filter and it was now raining again and I was bloody cold.

Sadly I didn't get around to remapping the car before the trackday, which I was a bit annoyed about, and I also didn't manage to trackdown an exhaust system or front mount intercooler.

[Cossie1]

So at castle combe, it was cold but dry in the morning, after I had signed on, I fitted the new air filter and the new recirc valve.

I happened to be the first car on track (not sure how that happened tbh, as I was waiting and waiting for others to go out, but nobody seemed like they wanted to be first).

The first few laps were behind the pace car anyway so I didn't get a chance to get a feel for the car, but once he pulled off, I could put my foot down, the car felt a bit softer than I expected, and the rear tyres were scrubbing a little on the bumps going upto Avon Rise, and then it sounded like the tyres were getting shredded when cornering.

Still the brakes felt ok (if a little snatchy) with those Carbon Loraine RC8's.

Back in the pits, I jump out and feel the tyres, the fronts are warm, both rears are stone cold, and both rear tyres have very thin strips being peeled from the edge where they were scrubbing on the bumps, the front tyres are showing no signs of rubbing despite me being able to hear and feel it in the steering (it turned out it was the inner arch liner catching the tops of the front tyres).

So I went back out, and this time I pushed a bit harder, the brakes were pretty awesome to be honest, I found myself braking later and later, the car didn't feel too bad through the corners either, it was a bit softer than I would have liked, but on the whole not as bad as I was expecting considering the price of the coilovers.

I could certainly feel the weight of the car though, the vRS is definately the heaviest car i've ever tracked, but that made it great fun in itself.

Before the next trackday, I want to get a full turbo back exhaust, front mount intercooler and a remap done.

Hopefully I will have found something else as a daily runabout by then, which means I can strip the interior out, and remove anything I don't want to remove some weight.

Anyway this thread so far, has been a bit lacking with photo's, which I appologise for, but not alot I can do about that now.

Here are some pics that were taken at Castle Combe.

Edited 15 December, 2012 by Cossie1

[missingmyvrs]

nice car buddy

quick tip get rid of the r888 there are not a good match for the weight of the vrs and on a warm day you will cook them

you need the khumo track tyre in hard compound perfect match and cheaper ;-)

if your going to use it alot on track a diff is needed as the standard diff is crap and change the front end to the tt setup

p.s and remove the front left lower bumper grill to actually let more air into the airfilter ;-)

[Cossie1]

Thanks for the info mate.

As for the R888's I know you mentioned it before, but alot of the Evo guys use R888's without issue and there heavier than the vRS (ok they are 4wd) but even so and they hold up ok.

But I will keep it in mind for next summer, as I doubt i'll get another set of 888's as cheap as I got these.

I would obviously like to get the car to handle as good as possible, but I don't want to go silly with the money, the intension is to have some cheap fun, and the price of a diff (without fitting as it's not something I would attempt without a 2 poster), is nearly what the car cost to start with.

I have looked at the tt setup for the front as well (the guy I got the Brembo's from offered me the subframe, wishbones, hubs and steering rack from his LCR for sensible money), but it all add's up and then you get to that point of no return and you end up worrying too much about damaging it.

I think with an exhaust, front mount and a remap that will do (hopefully)

[Cossie1]

A rubbish quality video taken from my mates remapped cupra.

[missingmyvrs]

You was on it top work

But you can see the need for better handling setup lol

Evo is 4x4 and completely different in terms of tyres usage. Warm day you will cook them and once they go off you would be better off on road tyres as there pants,

[Cossie1]

What are the khumo's that you recommend ?

[missingmyvrs]

Will get exact spec when I get home you can try a couple if you wish got 2 good ones in the garage ;-)

[GeeVRSman]

i had the toyos on my a3 and done many track days and nights up lakeside (when i was a full on chav!) and they were spot on. liners evos scoobys, RS boys all use them! im pretty sure alot of the touring car teams use these as well.

not going against what cntunings saying as im sure his tyres are good too, but in my experience with 888s they are the best tyres used by the majority. If i c ould afford them now, i know what brand my money would go on.

[missingmyvrs]

No the r888 is to soft for large heavy fwd cars

Touring cars etc have never used r888

If you go on some of the track day and Motorsport forums there not that well liked

Very good on smaller cars but once you over heat them there crap

Got a set of r888 in the garage as well as The others and will have aload of slicks and wets ;-)

It's also crucial you get pressures right it funny people that think they know what there doing yet I don't see many people playing with pressures on track days ( huge difference )

The other ones loved and ment to be good are the silver stone track tyres and cheap ish

[Cossie1]

No the r888 is to soft for large heavy fwd cars

Touring cars etc have never used r888

If you go on some of the track day and Motorsport forums there not that well liked

Very good on smaller cars but once you over heat them there crap

Got a set of r888 in the garage as well as The others and will have aload of slicks and wets ;-)

It's also crucial you get pressures right it funny people that think they know what there doing yet I don't see many people playing with pressures on track days ( huge difference )

The other ones loved and ment to be good are the silver stone track tyres and cheap ish

I didn't touch the pressures on this track day, as the fronts didn't get that hot, the rears hardly got warm, but yeh on a warm day the pressures need checking and adjusting a fair bit.

I did consider the Federal RSR's as i've heard a few good things about them, but then i've heard from others they go off quicker than 888's.

Full slicks are obviously better, but iirc some tracks (or maybe the organisers), don't allow full slicks on track days.

[missingmyvrs]

Will have some race wets in 225 45 17 end of January you can try a set meant to be amazing getting them when there back from Dubai 24hr and slicks but most track days don't allow slicks

But your welcome to try z set

[Cossie1]

Will have some race wets in 225 45 17 end of January you can try a set meant to be amazing getting them when there back from Dubai 24hr and slicks but most track days don't allow slicks

But your welcome to try z set

Nice 1 thanks

[missingmyvrs]

Again Rsr are good on like lotus Elise and small track cars but suffer like the r888 on a front heavy fwd !!!

[Cossie1]

Yeh I ummed and arrred over them for a bit, and then figured if i'm that unsure, give them a miss lol.

[missingmyvrs]

Hard compound is key needs a bit of warming up but they don't go off as fast and last a few track days ;-)

Give me a shout in the new year will sort them tyres out ;-)

[Cossie1]

Hard compound is key needs a bit of warming up but they don't go off as fast and last a few track days ;-)

Give me a shout in the new year will sort them tyres out ;-)

Will do

Thanks

[Cossie1]

Ok today I did a 260 mile round trip to pickup a turbo back exhaust (3" ebay downpipe / decat and piper cat back) and a Pro Alloy front mount

Now I just need to decide if I fit it as is, or do I paint the intercooler black for the stealth look and change the twin tail pipe for something that looks more standard ??

[Guest BigJase88]

Twin tailpipes are cool

[Cossie1]

Twin tailpipes are cool

I still think the standard shape looks better tbh.

[Guest BigJase88]

Nah letter boxes are for posting letters through doors

[Cossie1]

Ok so i've been a bit busy lately and not done too much with the car.

I finally got around to buying a 2nd car, which means this 1 has now become the track only toy (but it will remain road legal for now as it's much less agro that way).

The exhaust and front mount were fitted about a month ago, both went on easy enough.

However due to the decat, the ecu threw a strop and the car started running like a bag of crap.

Luckily I managed to find a "stage1 map" that was uploaded on the net, that has the rear 02 sensor mapped out, and also has 17705 fault code mapped out too.

The front wishbone rear bushes are also split pretty badly, so I replaced the arms as they were cheap enough, but I had issue's with the captive nuts on the front bush bolts. On the passenger side the thread started to strip so on refitting the bolt wouldn't go tight, luckily this was an easy fix, as longer bolt sorted the problem, however on the drivers side, the captive came loose, so I had to get hold of a die grinder to make a hole large enough to get a welder in there, to take the captive nut back in place. Luckily it was a pretty simple fix.

Now the car drives much better and is behaving itself too

A few weeks ago, I also picked up a forge 006 dv, forge TIP, forge SAI blanking plate and an ebay CAI.

The 006 was fitted after I used the above stage 1 map, tbh I don't notice any difference between the 006 and the brand new stock dv that was fitted in december, but atleast I don't have to worry about the dv failing now.

I removed the SAI system a couple of days ago, it was pretty straight forward, I was worried that it would throw a cel due to it all being removed, but I remembered a post on here that said if the relay was removed from the bulkhead, then it would completely disable the system and no fault would be thrown.

This turned out to be rubbish, as the next morning the eml was on, and the fault was an open circuit for the SAI, so I put the relay back in, and cleared the fault and so far (2 days later) no EML has come back on

Yesterday I had a couple of hours spare, so I went and picked up a K&N filter to use with the ebay CAI kit, as I had no intension of fitting the "unbranded" filter that came with the kit.

I also decided as the weather was nice (first time this year I think, that it's been dry and reasonably warm), so I decided it was time to strip the interior out

I was pretty impressed with myself, I only broke 1 piece of trim, 2 clips and 1 sunvisor clip, the rest of it came apart nice and easy.

I had to cut the carpet in a few places and also the underlay (around the back of the centre console) but other than that, it all came apart nicely.

When I have some more free time I will get to work removing the sound proofing from the floorpan.

Now I just need to get my forge TIP fitted, then the cai kit (with k&n) and then get the car to R-tech to be mapped.

Also decided I need to find a pair of bucket seats before the next trackday in a months time.

[rob_e]

Nice car.