Carbon Fibre Porsche Drag Car

Jacey Grant is building a 1977 Porsche 924 pro import drag car with around 3000bhp. It needed to be light as well as withstand quite severe aerodynamic loads as similar cars to his specification accelerate in the quarter mile in 5.5 seconds at over 260mph! His aims are to make his car competitive within this field and thus removing as much weight from the car as possible was essential - hence the need to make composite body work.

Jacey was a complete novice at composites but his nature has never been to try things slow and he chose to jump in at the deep end and get moving on making the composite parts. He credits a lot of his success to watching the Easy Composites video tutorials as the way each step was explained in great detail has allowed him to be successful on some very complex parts straight out of the gate.

Jacey chose to use Easy Composites for the majority of his material needs due to the great tutorials and the ability to get everything he needed in one place with fast delivery.

The moulds were made using the Uni-Mould Tooling system throughout as this was ideal for the Infusion process being used and relatively easy to use. The first moulds made were for the doors and door cards, then progressing onto moulding the the whole front end of the car in one piece which gave a mould over 7 foot/2 metres in length!

The infusion process itself was relatively conventional using Easy Lease and Mould Wax for a reliable release combination. No gelcoats were used as the focus is on weight saving. ProFinish Twill cloth was used as the surface layer for most parts then backed up with our great Black Stuff budget carbon fibre to give strength and thickness to the parts. The large front end of the car used the V weave fabric to create a feature pattern on the front of the car.

The parts were infused using the IN2 Epoxy Infusion resin and a standard infusion bagging stack and cured at room temperature. The large front end also used the MTI hose to help with resin distribution, even wetting out of the large panel and for a bit of added reliability.

The successfully infused parts met their design brief of being light weight and strong, with each door only weighing 2.6kg and the entire front end weighing 12.7kg giving a very large saving over stock parts.