Currently living in Melbourne is a little tough, we currently have some of the strictest COVID restrictions in the world, leaving the house is basically to go to work (if your work is still open) or to go food shopping, rather then dwelling on the cards we have been dealt I'm choosing to take this extra time we have at home and use it to make changes and improvements to the XF.
I had planned for the second half of this year to do as much testing and track days as possible but the likely hood of a racetrack in Victoria being opened this year is very slim, so now's a better time than ever to pull the race car apart and make improvements.
After the weekend at the Geelong Revival I realized that some of my wiring could be a future issue, we had a couple of very minor wiring related issues and it has been bugging me ever since if I should redo some of the wiring, after all this is the first time I had wired anything so I'm still pretty happy I was able to take a car with absolutely zero wiring in it and turn it into a complete running car.
So before this photo was taken under the dash there was kind of one massive mess of wires leading to the one spot, the first thing I did was label everything and pull it all apart in an attempt to group everything much neater.
Once I had the looms grouped I organized 3 main looms on my fuse panel and fitted up Deutsch connectors, what a brilliant product to work with, I might be biased but I think for my first wiring project my fuse panel looks pretty decent.
The goal for the new wiring setup was to do away with cheap wiring connectors, I was using the cheapest and most basic connectors and they really don't make life easy when needing to know what goes to what, now with the Deutsch connectors I can pull the wiring completely apart and put it back together again in a couple of minutes without having to worry if I'm placing the right wires back together correctly.
The next item on the agenda is to make a front splitter for the front bar and to try and squeeze some brake ducting in the front somewhere also.
The goal here is to stop the middle part of the bar from flexing at speed, secondly, it would be nice if we could create something that could also aid in a little front downforce while at the same time not looking like an eyesore.
While I had the front bar off I decided to shed as much weight from the front Rio bars without losing any strength and then giving them a bit of paint.
One of the others thing I want to change up a bit is the inside of the car, I need to give the floor a bit of a repaint and while I've got a lot of the car apart I'm thinking about wrapping the dash and door cards in suede and then adding some alloy to the lower half of the door cards to give them a bit of a race feeling.
There's lot more I have planned that you will all see soon enough, also don't forget to keep up to date on our YouTube videos as well.