One of things that I’ve always wanted to do in the Seven was go on a long road trip. However I’ve always been afraid of mechanical breakdowns which is why I took the Elise to LOG 31 in Vegas two years ago. Once the 2013 West Coast Lotus meet was announced for Seattle in July, I started toying with the idea of taking the Seven but kept prepping both cars so that I could make a last minute decision. As luck would have it I was changing the oil on the Elise a couple of days before the trip and found a transmission leak which meant that the Seven was now the only option for the 2000 mile trip.… Read the rest
Tag: WCM Ultralite S2k
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Back up and Running
Celebrating the fact that the Seven is up and running with an autocross video from Marina. The car still has an intermittent misfire that I am trying to iron out but it is running well so far.
… Read the rest
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Brake Bias Issues
The only major dynamics complaint I had about my Ultralite was the rear lockup issue under hard braking. The car comes with a very nice set of Wilwood brakes (front and rear) with separate master cylinders for the the front and rear so it definitely wasn’t a component quality problem.
The issue I was having is that under hard braking at autocross the rears would immediately lock up and cause a lot of oversteer. This was even worse at the track where braking at the end of straights would lock the rears well before the fronts leading to bad porpoising at the rear.… Read the rest
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“Diff”icult times
After 18 months of procrastinating about updating the blog about the Ultralite I figure its time to start putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). Regular followers of the blog may remember that my Buttonwillow adventure ended with the Ultralite being flatbedded home as it looked like on of the two bolts holding the diff in place had backed out and gas tank prevented me from doing a roadside fix. I was thus still quite happy on the truck ride home as I thought it would be an easy fix and I should be back on the road soon – little did I know that I was in for some “diff”icult times.… Read the rest
I have made a long list of modifications to the Seven since my last blog update which I still need to document on here. In the meantime I wanted to share this video from the GGLC autocross on Saturday (watch in fullscreen).
The Seven may be unreliable, impractical and difficult to live with but the few days like this when everything works are absolutely worth the hassle. Incidentally we found the reason for the surging idle it ended up that I couldn’t drive the car for the rest of the day 🙂… Read the rest