Evo has been holding up nicely to its relatively grueling schedule thus far, but I have done a little maintenance with it to make sure things continue smoothly:

The right front bumper/lip took a beating, presumably at the CCSCC school, and the lip actually cracked. Not only that, but the new undertray I installed had its clips broken off, and I had to ziptie the end at the event. Part of the problem was that the downpipe’s lower connection pushed downward on the undertray itself, putting a lot of strain on the piece to stay clipped onto the bumper. I remedied that on 5/3, readjusting the clamps that hold the downpipe’s ends to make it sit higher. Undertray is now a perfect fit, no contact between the downpipe and undertray at all. Unfortunately, I believe I created a boost leak by not tightening the clamps tight enough. Will have to fix at some point.

The second thing I did was to refill a little oil. What happened was, I started the car, realized I should have checked the oil, and it read a little low. This was my mistake – I should have let the oil drain back down first before taking the reading. I filled about 0.5 qts, and now the car reads a little too high, maybe 1/4th” up on the dipstick. I drained probably 0.4qts back out, and from the readings it looks like there is zero oil consumed – not bad for 15 or so tuning pulls on top of 26 autox runs, many of those runs including sitting on the limiter at the top of 2nd at 8k rpms. I’ll continue monitoring the oil over the next 25 runs or so.

Finally, I did manage to put some of that UHMW super-slick tape on the rear bar. I made a mistake the first time I tried this tape – in that I actually never tried it. Unfortunately, I thought the ribbon backing the UHMW tape was the tape itself, and that they sent me a non-adhesive version – oops. I only realized when they sent another roll (for free) that the translucent, adhesive backed portion was the tape itself. In my defense, the blue ribbon that backs the tape is super slippery as well, and the first picture I saw of this tape was on a rear sway bar of the same blue color, so I made some false assumptions. Anyway, I managed to get some on, and it doesn’t seem to impact the “tightness” of the bushing too terribly. That said, a lot of the bushing sits on a part of the bar that starts to curve, and it was near impossible getting the tape on that portion without wrinkling. I figure some is better than none though, and hopefully it does its job well. Not sure if I’d be able to notice or not, but we’ll find out soon.