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Upgrades

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First thing is rims and tires… get some old ratty ones you can use. You don’t want to scuff your mags now do you? try and use 15″ to start with. Especially if your car is a bit underpowered. Next will be a upgrade of seats and seatbelts. Just a precision if you want to drift, plus you get a better seating position with new seats. Now you can decide. More power? or better handling? Normally most guys go the power route first and then the handling… In my opinion I would rather go handling first. Because you can still drift with a 100kw car without much issue… but try drifting a 250kw car with stock brakes and suspension. Not nice. So first off…

HANDLING

Now… this will cover the basic mods… there are a lot of suspension goodies that can make your car handle better. But more on that later.

Suspension – Coilovers or Springs?

bilstein_coilovers sportline

Coilovers can be a expensive excersize, starting at about R5000 for a noname brand set, and for Names like Tein and the like, it can go up to R15k – R20k for a set.

But the advantages with coilovers is quite alot more than just springs. You can adjust basically all and any part of the setup with it. from ride height to toe and camber angles. And with that you can set the car up exactly like you want it. Springs on the other hand is much less expensive, you can get away with a set of eibachs for about R2000, which is not bad.

But then all that you get is a lowered ride( center of gravity ) and a bit better handling. But to the hardcore racer/drifter this won’t do. But its good for a start. In my opinion rather save a bit more and get coilovers. that way you can throw out your crappy shocks.

Brakes – disk, callipers, brakepads

small to big Well some cars still has drum brakes at the rear, which your hadbrake is attached to and you are going to use your handbrake alot.

So that might be the first thing on the brake side of things to look at. see if you can’t upgrade the hubs to a model to supperior to yours that has disks. If not get some disks and mounts made up to convert your rear brakes to disks. Ok for those of you that have disks all round…

Should you upgrade the disks or disks and callipers? Well depends on how good your brakes are from stock.

For example, take the S13 200sx. Its got good brakes but suffers from brakefade alot! so the obvious thing will be to upgrade the pads and disks right? wrong.

Yes the disks give the issue. but the biggest thing is the calliper. Its a single piston calliper. so its not very effective. Easiest upgrade is to the S14 callipers.Thus you get new 4pot callipers abd bigger disks, although you will need to redrill the disk from 5 hole to 4.

For cars like the BMW that has good brakes, just change the pads and disks. Or you can upgrade to the E36 M3 disks. You will need bigger wheels on your car though. That is also a very straight forward swap. and you don’t have to redrill the disks like with the SX.

For the Toyota, I’m not actually sure. you can try and get something like the RSi callipers and disks.

Seats and Harnesses

d2x_0477a

Well safety is always important when it comes to any type of sport, especially motor sport.  These are two of the most important things in your car. If you don’t have sufficient support to sit in you will be sliding around your car like a kitten on ice.  And the harness holds you nicely in place.

Most people opt for a racing bucket seat, non reclinable. with a 4point harness.

Some drift with their stock seats and a harness, others goes for a bucket seat and the stock seatbelt. So there are alot of different options.

But I recommend if you don’t have seats that will support you when going sideaways in a corner… then get some bucket seats and a nice harness. If your car already has some sort of race spec seat in go for just a harness…

Again the choice is yours. It all depends on the budget…

Soon to add more…

PERFORMANCE

Well… now this is where it gets interesting… There is alot… and I mean ALOT of stuff you can do to your car to go faster, perform better and get sideways easier…

Lets take the basic stage one items for the N/A and most turbo cars.

Exhaust

Depending on the car you can go from 55mm up to 100mm on some turbo car, obviously 100mm will be overkill if you are still running stock turbo etc.

Now with a bigger exhaust fitted to your car, the car will expel gasses much easier and more efficiently, thus you get more low down power and a few extra KW’s, also something non power related, the car will sound much better.

There are a few places you can look at for doing the full system:

Evolution Performance: www.evoperformance.co.za
Powerflow: www.powerflowexhausts.com

Branches / Downpipe

Now this is another nice cheapish upgrade. Again better flow of gasses thus bit more power and more torque. This is normally best coupled with the full exhaust system.

Filter

Now with this there are quite a few stories… some say cone, some say uprated stock. I say test it and see what works.

Try a drilled filterbox with a K&N filter, or get a nice K&N Cone filter… Like I said… you need to test and see what suites you.