The car everyone hates.

excels are great cars because they're like a rental car you only have to pay once for.

Haha exactly, very cheap even for a really nice one, no one should pay more than an absolute maximum of $3500 for a really nice GX made in the 98-00 period with all optional extras.

Anyway more stuff to add.

A few upgrades actaully happened some time ago including:

Wheels:

These wheels (featured above) are made by ASA for the excel as an optional extra on the later GX model, I got these with some suspension for a good deal. They're used for the dirt racing events I have (autocross's and motokhana's etc) as they're already a bit scuffed up and I'm not as fussed if they get abused as the silver hides the scuffs well, the wheels take the punishment and I have a nicer set for the road which will be shown soon... .



Next is the suspension, these where part of a deal I did with a former excel rally guy to include the wheels shown above as well





These sit a factory height, bit the springs are firmer and the shocks are gas sports ryder, so not a bad temporary upgrade until I get coilovers.

Next up is the racing seat. This is a cheap Ghepardo seat, some no name brand BUT it was cheap ($100 from ebay) and after seeing my good friend with some properly good metal fabrication skills he made up a really nice braket to mount the seat on the floor/chassis using the factory mounting points.







The seat is one of the most important upgrades I've done. It really does help on the track with holding you in when cornering hard as the factory seats are very bad for allowing movement, plus it's actaully super comfortable. The passenger seat is kept stock to allow people in the back as this seat as you can see has a fixed back. Eventually depending on how I feel I may get a matching reclinable Recaro's or something similar to what MOOG had in his S15, but for now it will do just fine.

To accompany the racing seat we have the OMP deep dish steering wheel in leather with some nice red stitching and a Monza 6 point racing harness with FIA approval until 2017. Cost me $200 on sale and the red ensures extra KW's are added .







Of course this then meant I needed a harness bar, so I made one up with the help of our neighbour coming over to weld up what needed welding





On the road I use the factory seat belt so the harness hides both in the boot and under a floor mat



The factory seat belt thingo was bolted to the seat from factory so I just bolted it to the side of the bucket seat.



Also the mandatory fire extinguisher



Next post I'll show the new street wheels I have, the speaker upgrade, rally tyres and some future plans

Ok next information post

So a recent mod I did was buy some street wheels

Don't be fooled by the Hyundai centre caps, these are Australian made ROH 13'' alloys made by ROH specifically for the excel for sale on GX Sportz models during the later years of production. They don't come with black painted centres, the previous owner did that themselves and because it suits my car really well I've left them





Next up is rally tyres







The tyres have little tread as shown but were free and could prove useful in the wet winter events I hope we have at the club





I do however have two good bridgestone rally tyres pictured on the spares car above, so the idea here is take the two good tyres off the spares car to use and put two of the four tyres pictured above in their place, then use the other two tyres on the rear with the good tyres from the spares car on the front.

So these are the bridgestones







So as you can see they have much more tread than my other rally tyres so these will go on the front wheels. The previous owner painted the wheels yellow for some reason....

So I went BLAAAAACK

Yes, god knows why these wheels are yellow but me, some masking tape, newspaper and 3/4 of a can of Black rattle can paint fixed that today

From this:





Progress:





To the finished product:










Comparison between newly painted rim (left) and aged stock rim with original black paint (bottom):



Not sure how well the paint will hold up, not to worried as they are just crappy stock wheels for the rally tyres.

test fitting









Repainted wheels look good for a pressure pack/rattle can job, nothing like free rally tyres

Also hoping to get a replacement panel soon as this one the very dented

Next post I'll show the speaker upgrade

I second that, the yellow looked badass.

I was.