What's the most common or best thing to do around the rear wheels to help limit body damage? The area in the attached picture (not my car) is in rough shape already with relatively few hours.
Garrett, mine's a mess right there too!
I've been taping it up before each event, but I've got holes there now despite that.
My front diffuser has lost all the gel-coat from the front tires doing something similar. I'd love to hear if anybody's got a good solution...
That picture is showing the front wheel. I have seen this picture before and I understand that this was installed as a precaution. I never got very much wear in the area he is protecting, but I got a tremendous amount of wear on the black section below that in the picture. That is a rounded aerodynamic feature in the side pod and mine actually wore a hole all the way through the fiberglass in that area. To repair it I used several layers of fiberglass mat and then put Gel-coat over it. Once I figured out that it was a high wear area I would periodically sand it down (to ruff it up) and then put a thin layer of Gelcoat over it. The bottom / front edge of the side pod also got eaten up. Again, these were simple fiberglass repairs. Once they were fixed you really couldn't tell there was anything there. By the way, when I got the car it had ~50 hours on it and this damage had already happened and was covered by black tape. I didn't even notice it for a long time...
On the rear the area that got the most wear was the bottom edge of the side pod (in front of the wheel). After about five years of ownership I took off the side pods did a fiberglass repair from the inside. The other area that could use protecting is the area of the rear bodywork directly over the rear wheels. Debris flies off of the wheels and causes spider cracks in that area. I have seen some people have added some thin hard padding in that area to provide some more protection but I don't have any first hand knowledge of how well that works.
Are you having any issues yet with your car?
Charley
By the way, here is a picture of the rear side of my side pod after almost 100 hour of track time. You can see that there is some cracking along the bottom edge which is partially caused by the coolant radiator sitting inside resisting the flex of the bodywork. The wear in the upper left of the picture is caused by the alignment used with the Michelin slicks. It never rubbed with the Dunlops. When I took off the side pod to make the repair I was amazed to see how much tire clag was between the screen and the Radiator. 🙂 It is definitely worth removing the side pods screens every once in a while to clean them out.
Charley
I make it a point to clean out the tire clag (marbles) after each event. It's amazing how much rubber the car acquires over a weekend!
I'll be doing a bunch of 'glass repairs on my sidepods unless I'm swapping them out this summer. 🙂
I thought I was giving it a good cleaning after each event also. :). The second gen cars have a screen that blocks off this area. I didn’t realize how much was getting past the screen.
Charley
Right, I see that now. The RS sidepods are a lot harder to get in to than the Gen1 cars.
The screen is held in place with 4 tie wraps so it can be removed, but I just didn’t think that the flag would get past the screen. In one of the pictures you can see how much duct tape I use (1.5 steps) to reduce the airflow enough to keep enough heat in the engine.
Charley
