The "this is dumb" build, AKA my ;92 Corvette Track Car

FAUEE

FAUEE

Noob
So this is the build for my 1992 Corvette. It's a budget track car, focused mostly on being safe and reliable, but being decent on the long trips out to tracks is a nice thing too.

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A little about the car, it's an LT1 car with a 6 speed. It has Z51 springs and control arms, some big ass red sway bars, J55 brakes with stainless steel lines, will be running 275/40/17 Nitto NT05s, and is otherwise stock (no power adders here boys!) It's main purpose is to be reliable, safe, fun, and inexpensive to operate.

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I assure you, it is a Corvette, not a late 80s Trans Am.

It originally was a Bose car, but that's long been removed. It currently has a Pioneer F90BT or something along those lines running Pioneer 5.25 coaxs up front (these are corner boxes from the factory, and they totally drown out all high frequencies), and Pioneer 6.5" coaxs in the back (in stock Bose boxes again, which are on the sides of the car firing into the rear glass and are essentially the only speakers you hear). Needless to say, it sounds terrible. Like, absolutely terrible.

So the F90BT had one huge drawback, no built in Bluetooth A2DP. I rectified this using one of those cheapo a2dp receivers that plug in to a USB port. The USB Port is hooked to a 12V USB adapter, and powered off the switched power line, then plugged in to the aux input. Easy enough.

The next step was fixing the sound. The current plan is to run a pair of Kenwood 6.5" Dualmag components up front. I have them already, and they're light (neo magnets and composite frames for race cars!) The rear speakers aren't going to be speakers at all, they're going to be Pyle 8" subwoofers, because they were cheap. Like $18 each cheap. If you can't tell, this is being done on a nearly $0 budget. I'm going to be running some sort of cmall, and of course cheap, 4 channel amplifier. I'm watching the ebay for that still.

So the rear speakers are going to get MDF baffles made to replace the ABS baffles used for the fronts of the Bose boxes. I will likely try to take a similar approach for the front speakers if it's possible. The amp will go in the storage compartment in the back. Everything will hopefully look stock, and take up none of my precious cargo space, as the car will still have to haul a tent, chairs, tools, clothes, etc. with a roll bar taking up more room in the back hatch. The tweeters, I'm not sure about yet. The factory tweeters were installed in the kick panels, right next to the woofers. I'll probably try them out there and see if they work out, they sit closer to the driver so with some EQ adjusments they may work. I'd really like if it I didn't have to fiberglass them into the A pillars for them to sound decent.

So I'd wanted to do a stupid low budget build for a while, as everyone seems to be all about the insanely expensive boutique stuff. Think of this as sort of a revival of the spirit of "the old place" where we Did It Yourself in Mobile Audio. Basic breakdown is below.

HU: Pioneer AVIC-F90BT - $250 on ebay
Fronts: Kenwood Excelon XR71p - free (probably paid like $75 for them on ebay like 5 years ago)
Subs: 2x Pyle PLPW8D - $18 each on Amazon, so $36
Budget for the amp is to stay under $75, preferably more like $50.

So anyways... stay tuned.
 
So I got the last piece of the puzzle today. Snagged a PowerBass 400.4x for $47 shipped. It's rated at 50x4 @ 4, and 100 @ 2. Since the subs are DVC 4s, this works out superb. Not a ton of power, and probably not super clean, but it should work.

So with the wood and Jigsaw to make my baffles, I think I'm in to this stereo system for about $450 total. Sweet.
 
Well, this was lame. Turns out the seller for my amp fell off the face of the planet. I paid, they never shipped or responded to anything. eBay/Paypal obviously decided in my favor and gave me my money back, however I have no amp, so it's a slight step back. Back to watching ebay.
 
So, I haven't had any updates on the audio lately. The car has seen some updates though. It now has most of the race car interior in! Ended up with an OMP WRC for the driver's side, and an OMP TRS on the passenger side (install is nearly done on that). It's not got an Arizona Speed Harness/Roll bar, and G-Force 6 point harnesses. The seats are mounted directly to the floor using the 2 rear factory posts, and the fronts are mounted with some big ass class 8 bolts through the floor, with 4"x4" reinforcement plates on the bottom. The stock when has been swapped out for a Sparco leather and suede wheel, and the horn is now non functional. It's getting new tires too, Falken RT-615k in 275/40/17 all around, these will be replacing the rather old Bridgestone RE760s on it now... at some point. I haven't decided if I want to buy a set of new wheels to mount the Falkens on or not. 2 of the existing tires have good tread left on them, and 2 are shot. The Falkens are "highly aggressive" and so might not be the greatest street tires.

So, that was a lot of non audio stuff. In any case, some progress has been made on the audio. I've borrowed a jigsaw from a friend of mine, and will cut out the MDF baffles in the near future. I haven't bought the amp yet, but I'm leaning towards a Soundstream Tarantula TA4.400, at $75 it's basically the price of the used stuff on ebay, is new, and provides more power. I've got one more amp I'm watching this week, but after that ends, I'll likely order the Soundstream so I'll have it for next week when I'm back in NC.

Looks like mid April will be the first event this car gets to run at. Still a handful of little things I'd like to do to it upkeep wise, coolant flush and rear diff fluid being the two main ones, as well as getting a nice test run on it up in the mountains to make sure all is good before the event, which I think is Roebling Road, which is a new track to me.
 
So I finally got around to doing some more work on this. Today I finally cut the new front plates to mount the 8s into the factory boxes, little 1/2" MDF and everything lined up great from the get go. So now it looks like this on both sides in the back
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They're running off the deck right now (rear channel that switches to sub out ftw!), and the car sounds a lot better already. Truthfully, I could probably be satisfied with the sound long term this way. But, I already bought the amp, and I already have speakers, so it's gonna get moar power! Now 'm trying to decide how I want to try to cover these bad boys up, I'm not totally sure that he factory grilles will go back on over top of these now, so I may end up having to make something to make it work.

Outside of that... the new seats are in and looking nice, the targa top is wrapped in carbon fiber vinyl, and once the tires are put on, it's totally ready for track use. So here's a shameless picture of it getting gas.

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So, it's all finished now.

Ended up getting a Power Acoustik Razor 4 channel. Supposed to be the same as a PPI Ion, and at $100 and tiny, it fit the bill. My impressions of that amp are something along the lines of "HOLY CRAP WHAT BLACK MAGIC IS THIS". Seriously, I don't get how they put that much power (or really, any power at all) in this tiny little amp, and have it cost so little, and have it actually sound pretty damn good. Obviously, this is not an audiophile build. It runs Bluetooth audio all the time, and has approximately no sound proofing, so it's not an ideal listening environment. In any case, it gets loud and sounds "good enough". If I were to upgrade the stereo in my other Corvette, I would have no issues at all using these little Razor amps.

I wanted to see what a budget setup could do, and honestly I am blown away. I'm not gonna win any competitions, but for less than one set of boutique speakers I can blow away most factory stereos, and get loud enough to hear it over massive road noise.
 
And an update after many years.

The reality of the car never quite matched the vision. It was intended as a track car, but time never allowed that, and it turned out I enjoy driving it a lot. So it became more like a daily beater car. Over time, that meant fixing the heater, ac, and recovering and swapping back in the factory seats. Eventually, that meant an upgrade to the muddy but acceptable stereo built earlier was needed.

Many options were weighed, focal, image dynamics, and all sorts of stuff. However, I happened into a great deal on Volvo dynaudio speakers, and figured I'd give that a shot.

So the new setup is mw162s paided with the 4" domes (not sure what they are model wise), with md100 tweeters. For subs, I have mw182s, which I'm probably going to swap out, as they're just not giving that deep punchy bass I was hoping for, those they deliver great midbass and are very transparent.... Kinda too transparent for my use.

May snag some inexpensive nvx subs, as they are pretty non deacriot, and are half the price of a Dayton hf or ho, and will likely be good enough.
 
You caught my attention with "budget track car audio install", since (of course) in a track car, weight is the enemy.

I used to autocross with my '95 Civic (at least until I supercharged it and that landed me in the "super modified" class with all the mini-F1 cars and all that :lol: ), and was equally interested in car audio, so I stumbled upon an interesting discovery... take it with a grain of salt since I believe your Corvette has the front wheels forward of the engine center of gravity, and so your weight distribution is going to be closer to 50/50 than mine (Google both cars to see), but your Corvette will be heavier. Also, it's interesting to note that the older Honda Civic was a popular car for racing BECAUSE it had a dual-wishbone suspension - in combination with the light weight, that is an ideal platform for a track car - in fact you couldn't (and still can't) get a dual-wishbone chassis until you reached the Corvette.

So that "center of gravity" concern...
I had a fiberglass trunk tub for my sub, and had the subs pushed up to be in-line with the rear suspension - it was as far forward as I could push it, because the rear seats were right there... and even with fiberglass, and my making a fiberglass tub on TOP to hold the spare tire (so I could remove that weight, for autocrossing, once I got there), three 10W6 (V1's) were heavy, and the whole install added weight to the trunk - significantly enough that I had to set my front and rear Koni shock spring perches at different heights to compensate for the weight to level the car, front vs. rear.

What I found was this actually brought my center of balance to a point where I could more easily rotate the car using just throttle, on the autocross course. It turned out to be a good thing - again you have to factor in that I have a front-wheel drive car, and with a front-weight-bias only allows "understeer" and "more understeer".
With the weight in the back, I could have throttle-on understeer - but with a sharp turn of the wheel coordinated with a late-off sudden removal of throttle, could get a pretty even rotation that I can't say could invoke oversteer, but with a downshift definitely could get all wheels to bite and rotate through a sharp autocross turn, right to the ideal point where I could floor the throttle and get back into it without front wheel spin.

In a Corvette, you have the benefit of RWD, you have throttle-on oversteer if you want - but you mentioned you aren't doing power-adders, and you likely are going to add some really sticky meats - so just food for thought here. It was an unusual outcome from what I thought was simply going to be a disadvantage in autocrossing.

I also had (and still have) absolute minimal sound damping in that car - if I applied 2 square feet of damping material that's a lot. I only addressed buzzes and rattles, directly, and often by dissection and alternative means - foam, zip-ties, etc. So I'm familiar with "road noise".

Back then I was a 20-something with his first new car... so I could just crank the volume. Sounds like that's what your strategy is here too - I totally get it.

One of the fun things about driving a car is - you are driving a car. Especially a performance car, you WANT that feedback. You want to hear slight tire squeals so you know you are reaching the limits before going over them.

One thing I never got into - loud exhausts. I had a JDM exhaust on my car (noise regs in Japan are tight), which was a stainless RS*R exhaust with not only a larger, freer-flowing muffler, but a sound-insulated long mid-pipe that also muffles the exhaust. Bottom line - it was quiet, but freer-flowing. Something to think about for that 'Vette, too - even though I know (just like the Civic) most companies make LOUD exhausts for those things.

I love budget installs. I wouldn't ever give anything Pyle a shot, but if you aren't at 99 and 9/10ths of a percent of SQ, and can't get there because of road noise - why not do more with less?
I keep hearing about those junkyard Dyn's from the Volvos, what a cool option. :cool:
 
Honestly, I didn't hate the Pyle subs. When I put the monoblock in and had that powering them, they actually did pretty damn good. But by that point I had already decided to go forward with speakers, and figured I may as well complete the deal.

Still haven't decided on subs yet to replace the mw182s.
 
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