We head back to the tracks for 2024!
During the off-season, we had time to work on an overheating condition that would come up when we pushed Zsa Zsa very hard.
Track-focused 350Zs are not known for overheating woes – however, Zsa Zsa is still a street car with a ton of stuff sitting in front of the radiator. We had lots of stuff in the nose blocking the airflow to the radiator...lots of stuff: an oversized oil cooler, power steering cooler, two horns, two large air filters, AC condenser, and the OEM radiator's core support. The core support included a bulky hood latch and 3” wide brace right down the middle of the nose (argh!). It looked something like this (not our car):
All this meant that the radiator was fighting a losing battle for airflow. We needed to fix this. That meant:
Fabricating a dedicated air duct to feed the radiator clean air
Moving all other components out of the way (fabricating custom brackets)
Removing the OEM center 3” support strip from the center of the radiator face
Installing hood pins (to replace removed OEM latch)
Fabricating our own radiator core support
Fabricating our own front bumper beam
With the broad OEM aluminum bumper beam removed, our much thinner steel beam gave us room to build a proper duct. After many days of arts and crafts, and we had a workable duct design:
The original plan was to move the air filters to the top of the duct, but we found a way to quickly install them on the engine-bay side.
We have a few more details to sort, but overall, the new set up in the nose came out well and seems to keep temps in check. We have enjoyed tremendous support from Evanston Township High School and Autobarn Nissan to help us get ready for 2024.
Work was not done in time for NCM (we brought the Grey out for that event). We brought Zsa Zsa out to Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course for the last two events.
The good news is that our cooling woes seem resolved. The bad news is that we are still struggling with a persistent brake judder. Many things have been tried and we think we have it figured out, but were not there yet…
Come on out to our next event an help us get these brakes sorted!
Next up: Gingerman Raceway, June 15-16th
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