Taking The Bar

23 Feb Taking The Bar

No no no, there’s no quizzes or proctoring happening today. But there *is* a bar involved. Probably not the one you’re thinking of, though.

If you don’t remember, this yellow S2000 came to FMU in order to add a customized harness bar to his roadster for upcoming NASA HPDE track days. Some of the constraints (such as places to weld the bar to the body, and the maximum height of the bar) were fixed variables, but the rest was up to us to implement. We ended up adding a diagonal cross-brace and a horizontal bar to which the harnesses will attach. Finally, as the owner isn’t looking forward to driving everywhere in four-point harnesses, we created a bracket at each end of the bar, so he can continue to use his standard OEM seatbelts when the occasion calls for it. Not too bad. We finished it off with a gloss black paint job and our own little FMU script logo embossed into the top bar. Granted it’ll probably get covered up by the padding on the bar, but now we still have to weld the cage in (we’ve already prepped the body for the welding) and reinstall the entire interior.

Speaking of massive metal bars, the coolest X5 in the universe came through the shop today. Not only was it a follow-up to make sure the car is performing as intended (and it is), but there were also some quick maintenance-related parts we wanted to install, small bits like a window regulator. After all, we don’t want one of our most well-renowned project cars to be driving around at any less than 100%.

In other metal bar-related news, there’s one in Jay’s M3’s engine bay, which has the new Active Autowerke HKS blower attached to it that we received yesterday. The belt arrived from AA this afternoon, so we were able to slap everything back together and get it ready to hit the road. Everything else is tightened down and within spec, so we’re confident that it’ll be tackling more snow as soon as Mother Nature provides it.

In mysterious turbo build news, things are still turbocharged and overtly mysterious. Stay tuned for more cryptic and intentionally misleading updates.