As you might have seen, I’m taking my Silver Syncro off to play at Castle Combe this Saturday. I thought I should spend some time taking out the unnecessary stuff from inside the car – as Colin Chapman said – one of the best ways of getting more performance is to ‘add lightness’ The Syncro isn’t a light car, so I figured it might be possible to see some serious gains by getting busy removing weight.
So how much weight is it possible to lose?
I spent last night removing lots and lots of stuff from the inside of my Golf.
Currently residing outside the shell are as follows:
Rear seats, carpets, floor mats (bloody heavy things them!), rear speakers, rear seatbelts, all interior trim aft of the B-pillar, all floor sound-proofing, the lower dash, centre console and central locking compressor (bloody gurt lump). I’ve not attacked the headlining, or the front carpets yet, as I want to see what difference the changes so far make.
Pics of the interior are here: http://diamondhell.com/index.php?option=com_rsgallery2&Itemid=29&catid=6 If you click on the thumbnails they’ll get bigger.
As you’ll see from the pics, there’s a fair bit of weight to be saved by running the vacuum cleaner over things! I’ll take the spare out when I’m on the track to lose a bit more weight, too.
One rather unexpected consequence of removing all this is that the car rose on its springs by about 2″! Thankfully I had a look this morning and it appeared to have come back down a bit over night, which is a relief! The car currently only has about 10litres of fuel in it, too.
It’ll be really interesting to see what difference all this makes, both on the road and on the track. Sadly one of the key things that will be different will be the loss of refinement without the sound-deadening, but there’s no way it was staying given how much the damned stuff weighed!
It was really nice to see how good the floorpan of my car is, too – good sign for the future 
So, for reference, I’ll be going to Combe with the following mods: PB motor head, running a Weber 32/34 DTML, 280mm front brakes (and big master cylinder), Newish dampers, G3 Syncro VR6 springs (less a few coils), fresh suspension mounts and a Rallye rear ARB. I’ve also got a set of semi-slicks to try out on one of the sessions, which will be interesting [
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quote:
ucket seats now gone to skoobadude.
Dammit, I go away for a couple of days…..
Alloy cards might well work, even if they need a bit of trimming. I’ve got an offer of a set of out of date (for FIA use)4 point harnesses, too – nice wide ones []
Blimey, that’s a *little* keen!
This is supposed to be a relatively cheap, simple and fun project – I do understand where you’re coming from, but it’s unlikely I’m going to tear into too much of that, especially as I want to keep it driveable on the road as well as the track – it would be a shame to completely lose those B-road blasts