| Honda S2000 Clutch Install - To The Ground
Our project S2000 has spent the better part of a year making somewhere around 315 wheel hp without being able to put it to the ground. Why? Because for whatever reason (most likely laziness), we never installed an aftermarket clutch. If you've ever boosted a car on a stock clutch, you understand what we're talking about. For those of you who haven't, just imagine that the motor would hold until about 5,000rpm, at which point it would dump black fuel smoke because the clutch would spin and the ECU still thinks there is load on the motor. This is one of the only problems with speed density; under boost, the ECU doesn't know the difference between heavy load and no load, especially when the TPS is reading 100 percent.
| First thing we do is stand around for a while and stare at the car hoping that some magical clutch fairy will show up so we can crack a beer and chill instead.
To fix the problem, and actually get to drive this awesome car we built almost a year ago, we put a call in to my friend Mike at LSDmotorsports.com. Mike has always been my clutch guy, even before he owned LSD. He's always had the disk/plate combo to suit any project I'm building. In this case, an AP2 clutch didn't exist yet, so we ended up building a custom one. The new clutch is an organic street disk with a pretty mean pressure plate to hold up to the power we're making. We got our flywheel from him as well.
With the clutch in hand, and a Rockstar for Eugene, I cruised on down to Pro Street Import in La Mirada, Calif. to get the car up on the rack. After a long night of work, friends, and fun, I finally got to drive that car to its full potential. Which, by the way, was a whole lot more fun than I thought it would be.
Big ThanksTo Happy Pants, Fabo, and Frankie for helping Eugene do the job and, to the guy in the blue sweater for starting a fire in his own engine bay by getting a rag stuck in his moving timing belt.
