Got up early on Sunday morning to a rainy day, so my plans of riding the bike or RX-7 to Zama using Fuji's beautiful Skyline toll roads via Odawara were shelved and I took our workhorse & race support car instead.

In the meantime Russ (Rextreme) had taken a 2 hour ride on the train from Chiba and met me at Zama station on the way.
As we opened their front door we could smell Alex & Morgana was already making a big traditional American breakfast, right down to pancakes, syrup & fresh orange juice, so we sat down and enjoyed a proper start to the day with friends!

At the workshop whilst Alex got on with some work on his GT-R, Russ and I got stuck in. He'd already hand cut the smaller replacement stickers at home, but needed to make a template with tracing paper of the driver's side, to then cut a mirror image for the passenger side.


In the meantime, I got on with assembling the new fuel drums with fittings obtained elsewhere. Yoshi, a friend and competitor had done us proud - not only supplying details of where to buy the drums but also fittings and correctly sized hose.
Using some old hose clips I'd kept as spares - I assembled each.

The hose actually fits tightly into the filler cap, so I'm hoping the breather in the tank will do it's job, but I may try to find some copper fittings and add a small solid nozzle for each hose end, on race day.
I stamped numbers for each nozzle & can - that way we can easily tell which to assemble together - and have the plastic hose curling directly forwards when assembled.


Russ' job was going to take him about 4 hours, so I wanted to avoid working under the car till last. I fitted 3 small magnets on a new bracket side by side to hold the fuel cap shut instead of just one. Feels stronger now of course.

As Russ was finishing, I lifted the front, put it on stands and took off the front pipe off the bottom of the manifold.
The flexible section was sheared in two, with only the mesh holding it together.

I cut it out and ground away excess diameter, till I had a tight fit on each end& welded a new flexible section to one end. Checked the fit and marked where to weld next then finished on the other end. Removed the damaged heat proofing and ended up irritating the skin on my arms. I'd forgotten how nasty that stuff was!

The Ebay cat replacement pipe we'd bought for a Prelude BB6 has incorrectly sized flanges on, so I could fit it. Why do so many sellers there not even bother to sell goods fit for purpose! I want to see if we can find a better replacement in Japan.
The intake now sounds great, but the exhaust's still too quiet!

Checked the subframe bolts, all OK. Lowered the car and tidied up the interior. Found that 2 wheels can slide into the back from the boot's access hole - with fuel cans in the back too. So we only need to have one wheel on the passenger side.

Russ had to leave early to get back to Chiba, whilst we finishing off welding the front pipe.

Whilst waiting for Alex to finish on his car, I did a small bit of waxing. I'll probably take my porter cable to the track and give it a quick buff to remove all the rubber markings on race morning.

Here's the original driver's side:

Russ had slightly changed the design of the passenger side, to try and avoid using small stickers which may be damaged from fuel spillages. He also made up some white sheets for us to stick our race numbers on & even made a little TGR Keyring!


Big thanks to Russ (Rextreme) for coming out and helping us on a Sunday!

Now our race Prelude's all ready to go. Just needs fuel and someone to drive it to Ebisu & back.

Beautiful weather today. Hoping it'll stay like that for a week so we can have a dry race on Saturday!