Shelle's car.

As you will come to know, lightening a car is nearly as important to me as adding power components to the engine. This Post is going to be about potential lightening that can be done to my ex-fiance, Shelle's car. She has a 2000 Honda Civic EX sedan (with a 5-speed (or course)). It is a great little car. However, I do have long-term ideas for it, the main one being an Edelbrock turbo kit (dyno-proven to make 203 horsepower and 157 lb-ft of torque). However, even with that power (a huge increase from the stock 127 hp), her car will "only" have a power to weight ratio of about 12.7 (down from 19.8 stock). I put the quotes around the word only, because at 12.7, that will put her Civic AHEAD (better power to weight) of the SRT-4 (see Post below), the G35 sedan, the last M3 sedan (1998 model year), the ITR, a Mini Cooper S Works (200 hp), the WRX, the R32 and the B5 Audi S4. Not bad for a little SOHC four cylinder. However, with some lightening we can improve that number even more. Here is what I have in mind (all the numbers are really guess-work, but I think they are reasonable estimations):

- Carbon fiber hood and trunk: ~25 lbs (this swap removed 31 pounds from a SRT-4, but Shelle's car does not have the giant, gawdy wing)
- Carbon fiber (front) fenders: ~10 lbs (I figure if 25 lbs for hood and trunk, then 5 lbs per front fender is reasonable)
- dry cell battery: ~15 lbs (the switch to an Optima battery in an RX-7 was good for 16 lbs)
- aluminum flywheel and underdrive pulleys (alternator and power steering): ~10 lbs (an aluminum flywheel alone cuts 14 lbs off a G35)
- seats: ~50 lbs (this is a guess; the seats I am looking at (Sparcos) weigh 16 lbs each, and I figure that probably cuts 25 lbs off the OEM seats per side)
- wheels: ~60 lbs (the wheels themselves (16" SSR Competitions) should cut at least 2 lbs off the OEM steel wheels (14"); in addition the unsprung weight would be the equivalent of taking 56 lbs off the car; I rounded 64 down to 60)
- aluminum radiator (probably a Fluidyne, but possibly a Koyo, C&R, or PWR): ~10 lbs (this is probably the biggest guess of all these; I really don't know what the difference between the factory steel radiator is and an aluminum radiator)
- plastic fan (FAL): ~5 lbs (this is another guess, but I think that replacing both the stock metal (steel) shroud and fan, and replacing them with a plastic shroud and fan would easily drop 5 lbs; plus another cool thing is that the depth on this fan is only 1/2 that of the OEM fan, leaving more room in the engine bay for whatever you might need to put in there)

The grand total reduction would be in the neighborhood of 185 lbs. That is a really big chunk of weight and would reduce the Civics weight to below 2400 lbs. This loss alone would drop the power to weight ratio to 11.8. If you add to the turbo kit a camshaft and cat-back exhaust, it should be good for close to 220 hp, which would decrease the power to weight ratio to 10.9. For reference sake, that would tie or better the ratios for the NSX, the STi, the Dodge Ram SRT-10 Quad Cab (with the Viper engine), the 1995 RX-7; 350Z, 2004 (B6) S4, Porsche Cayenne Turbo, Mitsubishi Evolution RS, etc. Pretty impressive company for a four-door economy car.

A really great side effect of taking most of that weight off is that it should improve the weight distribution dramatically. Particularly, the flywheel, radiator, battery, carbon fiber hood, carbon fiber front fenders, and fan would all reduce the weight solely on the front axle, which would get the distribution closer to the 50/50 ideal, which in turn would improve handling.

Obviously this is all pie in the sky right now, but it is something that I am very interested in doing in the future.