Getting Ready for the 2020 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb

For 2020, The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb has been pushed back a bit to the end of August, and with that extra time, we have started to work on making a couple more changes to our car than we originally planned.

Most of these are still in progress, but I wanted to take a moment to show you what we are working on.

The first, and main change that we had always planned to make was to improve our oiling system. In talking with Roger Clark Motorsport, we decided to make the big leap to their Dry-Sump Oiling system rather than to work on modifying the stock oiling system. In large part, this is because the long term plans for our race car is to not only make a bit more power, but to improve the aero and grip that the car has. All of those changes will put more stress on the oiling system, and we decided that it would be wise to install a Dry-Sump oiling system now so that we could become more familiar with it, and that way we will have figured out the installation, etc., by the time that we would absolutely need to make this change.

And it doesn't hurt to know that your engine is always going to be getting proper oil pressure, no matter what you throw at it.

Another part of the motivation to make this jump now is that putting on the RCM dry-sump requires a couple other notable changes. The main one is to move away from our current twin-scroll turbo set-up because the twin-scroll headers will not clear the dry-sump pan. So we are also installing the RCM Unequal Length headers (because they offer the best clearance for the pump ), and we are working with Turbo Dynamics to convert our LM450 turbo into an MDX-555 450 turbo.

One of the things that we decided to add with the extra time that we had are Lexan windows front and rear. We found a company that makes formed OE replacement lexan pieces and those are nearly done getting installed. Scotty may have also taken this opportunity to cut more weight out of our rear doors. This should save us about another 25 lbs out of the car, and when it comes to weight savings, every little bit helps.

The biggest change that we decided to add on this year is up front. We have been working out Stoptech ST40 brakes fairly hard all ready, and since we know that we want to go faster still, that also means that pretty soon, we are going to have to be able to stop faster too. So we decided to swap out the ST40 brakes, for the HUGE RCM-Alcon 365mm brake kit up front. This is a true motorsport brake kit, and it should be a big improvement for us.

But like the dry-sump, it also required some other changes to be made.

Basically to fit the larger brakes, we have to move to an 18" wheel instead of the 17" wheels we have been running to date. If we are going to run the 18" wheel, then we can finally install the Wisefab Front drop knuckles to correct our front suspension Geometry, which is something that we tried to do last year, but couldn't because of our 17" wheels.

Then, since we are installing those new knuckles up front, we can swap out all of our WRX hubs for STI hubs to go 5X114.3. The STI hubs and bearings are much larger up front, which is a great things for reliability, and that larger bolt pattern will also make it much easier to find 18" wheels that are wider. Currently the plan is to run 18" slicks that are either 275's or 295's. We'll have to see what fits best.

We just happened to have a set of Enkei RC-T5 wheels on hand that are 18 x 9.5 and they fit the bill for everything that we are looking for in a new set of wheels.

With all this done, we should have much better brakes, better front suspension geometry with better bearings, and we will also be able to run a much wider slick so we'll have a lot more grip too.

All of this is still in progress, but we'll keep you up to date as some of these projects wrap up. We're really looking forward to see what differences this makes on Pikes Peak!

- Jon Cooley