Vehicle Upgrades
It started life as a stock 2005 Chrome Orange Lotus Elise with a little over 18,000 miles. Had one previous owner who ran a art gallery and took really good care of it. Having missed two Elises by not pulling the trigger fast enough, I immediately called and put a deposit (after convincing the wife of course). I had a local friend go take a look at it and his report was that if I didn’t buy it he was going to. We flew out to Portland and picked it up the next week then started on the long drive back to Salt Lake City.
The first modifications was to protect the front of the car, it had these little caps that didn’t look great so I decided to go with a front splitter. But first I needed to get the caps removed and some body damage fixed. Then I picked a diffuser to match…
Step 2 is to improve track suitability so it consisted of beefier brakes, a rear diffuser because I really didn’t like the silver OEM part but also for added track down force in the rear since the splitter was up front.
For increased safety on the track and to conform to some track day requirements I decided to add a carbon fiber hardtop.
During a track day, luckily while my instructor was driving (or I would have thought I’d caused it), my engine decide to eat itself. Apparently it’s a known issue on the Elise that the valves, rockers and springs aren’t the most reliable and an upgrade is in order. I decided against going K20 for cost reasons and settled on the MonkeyWrench Racing "2ZZ Racer Express” which is available with overnight shipping! It’s a stock 2ZZ but with a few upgrades to make it more reliable. As usual, the guys at LYFE did the install and it’s never ran smoother.
My third batch of upgrades is more fine tuning…
