2020 Supra Drift Build - Body Kit Install and First Drift

Hi, I'm Stephan Papadakis, we're here at Willow Springs Raceway in Southern California and we're running our

2020

Drift Supra for the

first

time. It's really exciting because we spent many months working on this car and it's finally finished, so let's go. get to the track and do testing before we can get on the track, we had to finish the

body

of the car, the

body

panels basically come from three places, we have the Toyota factory component which is the front and rear bumpers , carbon fiber. Saipan hood and then Rocket Bunny makes the over fender kit which is made of fiberglass so these kits don't come with any kind of instructions you just hope they fit well and if they don't fit particularly perfect then you have to take care of massaging it to make it fit as best as possible after putting the hood on, we decided to keep the factory hood struts that keep the hood up once you open it which makes it much easier when working on the car which we then put together.

The front bumper and a lot of the front bumper mounting locations just disappeared because we removed a lot of them, so there were a lot of brackets that we had to attach to the front bumper and the fenders, but

first

what we wanted to do. It's seeing how the body kit fits on the car, so we put the body panels as close to where we thought they were going to live and then we started taping everything together and it doesn't hold it in position very well, but at least we know what we have to work on once we are confident we can make the body kit work we start trimming the components at the rear of the car we cut them so much we will have to replace the rear quarter panel the reason Why we do this is because these cars take a lot of hits in the front and also in the back, especially in the back of the car, especially there is a lot of unibody back there that if it takes a hit it is very difficult to fix in the track, so what we do is basically cut.

We remove all the areas that the rules allow us to cut and then we take another one piece quarter panel that we get from the Toyota dealer when your car gets sideswiped and they need to repair it, body shops can order them. full quarter panel rocker and pillar kits, that's what we ordered, essentially this entire side of a car, but just one sheet metal after we decided how much we needed to get Shaun Witten back and then we cut off just the part we were going to use and then We started

install

ing it on the car and the nice thing about it is that these parts can be replaced relatively easily in our shop and we don't have to desolder things and take them to the body shop and take them out, we can just drill the rivets.

And yet, we

install

ed this side panel on top of the car from the factory and can replace it with relative ease. We've built the last two cars this way and it worked great for us once Shawn cut just the part we wanted out of the car. side of the car we put it there and tried to figure out exactly how we were going to mount it, what we decided was to keep this top edge that wraps around the C pillar of the car that way, it positioned it relatively well and I had something to hold it up now, you can see the area Where it fills you can see how the entire rear corner is replaceable, we can replace the fiberglass over the fender and we can also relatively easily replace the rear quarter panel which worked well for us.

The body kit mockups and parts are these tools called clecos and they are essentially a temporary rivet so you drill an eighth of an inch hole and then the klique has to go into that hole and hold the panels together because that the car will be fully wrapped. after we're good putting some eight inch holes in the car and then once you wrap the car you'll never see those little holes but we've even done that on parts that were eventually going to be painted and what we're going to do we're going to weld those little holes together. holes, we'll sand them down and then once you paint over them, you never knew someone had drilled a hole in that panel, so Shawn uses a little technique there where he turns the drill upside down and creates a little bit. dimple, so when you turn it back clockwise, the bit doesn't want to walk after we install the body kit.

Alex starts wrapping, he just wraps all these multi-colored panels and sometimes the wraps are one big wrap that you put down. on the car, but this one, because we have a matte black finish and then the bright yellow, it actually has to be applied in several layers, so what Alex does is he looks at the image of our livery, our design, and then he starts to mask where the different ones are. The lines will be installed on the different wrap layers and then hand cut for all the lines in the design and again this is another way we can continue to repair the car in our shop and not need a body shop as well that once we had the car fully wrapped, put it on our unmarked trailer and then headed to Willow Springs to do some testing right when we got to the track, Shawn noticed that the brake pedal felt a little spongy coming off the trailer and we discovered that one of the banjo fittings, the brake line fittings on the caliper, was leaking a little bit, so we fixed that leak and then bled the front brakes again.

If you look closely you can see the front lip spoiler that wasn't there before when we were there. showing the body kit mockup, so now this is the complete body kit installed with all the decals. We also used these hood latches from a company called Arrow Catch. They're nice because they're low profile and they don't have pins or anything like that to lose it's all built into a system that lives in the hood. There's another thing we noticed while Shawn was pulling the car off the trailer and that was that he wanted to change the clutch setting a little.

There is a stop at the firewall. and we just adjusted that stop a little bit so that the clutch has a little more play in the first few lower turns. This new

build

, guys, we always have a fire extinguisher with us when the car is running, just in case. We made a list of what we wanted to accomplish on this first day of testing and it's just going around the track to make sure the car feels good, we bring it in, we make sure everything you know still works and sounds good and then We began to move forward slowly.

We improve performance every time we take the car out again for the first few test laps, just making sure the car stops spinning and everything feels right for the driver. Freddie will begin to accelerate harder and then brake harder. and then start spinning harder lap after lap until we do about three or four laps, then he'll bring it in, we'll talk to him, do a visual of the car and make sure everything still sounds. I really like how the look of the car turned out especially at the rear. I really like the look and it's going to look even more badass once we install the new wheels, so after the first few laps, Freddy and I went into the trailer to go over our list of what we wanted to accomplish for the day and have a little dump about how we thought the car felt, so I gave it a try.

I did a couple of slalom exercises to see if it came together or if it had some kind of flow or something, oh. Great, the AEM infiniti system we use to run the engine has a full data logger so I can download with the laptop all the data from the test session and look at it to make sure the temperatures are okay, the pressure of oil in all the different systems. The engine is running well before we go racing again, so over the next few laps Freddie was going to try harder and actually start to

drift

, so he'll start with some very gentle low angle

drift

s, not for long. , you will feel it and then.

He begins to go progressively harder and harder and with increasingly bigger, longer drifts. What you're going to test here is how the car feels at a big angle, so a couple of things you need the car to do is countersteer well and have good steering feedback to the driver, so we're very happy with the result of the car. We have a big list of things we want to update before the next time we go out. We want to change the driver's position. He wanted to move the driver's seat a little inward. and a little bit back the boost will eventually increase, we'll put nitrous on it, our new wheels will come back out and we'll test a bit more overall, a very successful test day, high five to everyone when the car runs, it stays running throughout the test session and all wheels remain on it, so thanks for watching.

I hope you enjoyed it if you hit the like button. If you want to see more, consider subscribing. Thanks to everyone who helped with the

build

of the car. Sean Maru, though that helped with the team. today and I'll be taking you to some of this year's drift events, so stay tuned for our drift videos and thanks for watching.