For quite a few years now I have been tempted by the idea of ditching my 3S-GTE turbo 4-cylinder and swapping in one of Toyota's newer v6 motors, namely the 3.5L 2GR-FE.  But my 3S was still running great, and I had too much time, money, and effort invested in it over the years to drop it without a good reason.  That is, until a little over a year ago when the head gasket failed on the way home from the track, as described here: Tres Duro 2016 - My Lucky Streak is Broken.  That motor had also been burning a fair amount of oil, and since I had to tear it apart anyway to fix the head gasket I was tempted to rebuild the whole thing to fix the oil burning. I almost went down that road of rebuilding it.  Again.  Fortunately I remembered that I had been telling myself for years that I would go v6 before doing that, so here we go.

For a number of reasons, I have long resisted the idea of trailering my car to events.  But, that doesn't mean I have been content to run street tires on the track or at an out-of-town autocross.  The solution, of course, is a tire trailer!

For quite some time now I have been wanting to build my own control arms for my car, and I finally did.  I had three main goals here.  Add some adjustability, improve the suspension geometry by lengthening the control arms, and hopefully drop some weight.  Spoiler alert: two out of three isn't too bad!  It all started with a design in SolidWorks (well several designs actually), and extensive stress analysis. 

Those of you who have been following me for a while now have probably noticed that I like data.  I prefer to measure, analysis, and calculate, rather than just guessing at things.  What can I say, it's an engineer thing!