I haven’t posted anything in a bit so I thought I would check in and give a general update on the latest happenings/experiences with the GTM.

A crack appears

A few weeks ago (at around the 200 mile mark) I noticed a crack forming on the underside of the driver-side wheel well. It didn’t show through on the exterior, but it was obviously bothersome to me. There are rubbing issues with the tire and wheel well edge when I hit nasty bumps. I had a friend’s shop shave the inside of the fender down a bit, fix the crack, and repaint the underside of the fender, but the crack reappeared after 50 miles. The crack is smaller, and does not seem to be getting worse, but it is something I’ll be tackling over the winter with some suspension tweaks, and reshaping of the interior fender edge.

500-mile milestone

The GTM has 545 miles on the odometer as of today. Driving this beast never gets old. Most of my drives are 20-50 mile jaunts through the country side so I can stretch it’s legs out a bit. Every drive yields a handful of thumbs-up and metal-horns from bikers and other passer-bys.  Any time I stop for gas the car gets swarmed. Every stop is different, but still the same. Someone will ask what it is. Another will ask how  much it costs. Another handful are taking pictures with their cell-phones. People will drive by real slow with big grins on their faces. Someone will be in the background repeating the phrase ‘super cool car, man’. I did have one guy come up really excited because he ‘just saw one of those on Supercars Exposed’. His opinion was ‘yours is way better, it sounds insane, and the color scheme is perfect’. Seeing the GTM ‘made his day’ and he could’t stop grinning and laughing over his ‘luck’. Another guy asked if it was a Veyron (ok, seriously now?). If I had a dollar for every time I saw someone I’m passing by on the sidewalk or in other cars do the ‘do a burnout’ gesture, or randomly start cheering…

Minor issues encountered

The GTM is running great, but it’s not faultless – yet. Aside from the fender crack above, I’ve only ran into small issues so far. The aforementioned sticky shifting issue was further addressed with a layer of Thermotec heat barrier over the Earl’s FlameGuard insulation sleeve. No reoccurrences  so far.

I had an electrical gremlin that caused my fog light switch and climate controls to dimly illuminate when pressing the brake. I realized that tonight, during my first night-time back-road drive, my left brake light was not working either. It was working fine with the lights off, though. Inspecting the brake light tonight, I discovered I had the connections backwards for the brake light bulb. I corrected that and that fixed the ‘broken brake light when lights are on’ issue, as well as the weird dash illumination gremlin. Love those 2 for 1 deals.

The thermostat-corrugated hosing connection seems to be slowly seeping out coolant when the thermostat opens while driving. I will replace the hose clamp with a smaller, better fitting clamp this winter.

When Carquip rebuilt my G50/52 transaxle for me they placed the breather valve right atop 5th gear (not a great place for it). As a result it is constantly spewing oil into my trans oil puke tank. Right now I have to empty the tank after every drive, otherwise it eventually overflows and sprays all over the inside of the engine bay where the tank is mounted. Not fun to clean up. This winter I will be relocating the puke tank to a higher location and connecting the overflow hose to the bottom of the tank so that anything that spews up into the tank immediately goes back down into the trans when it gets the chance.

I still haven’t had the AC leak tested yet to find where my AC leak is located at, but I will get that done before winter so I can fix it (or not). Working AC is very low on the list right now as I primarily use the Vintage Air unit for heat dispersion and defrost.

Aside from the above minor issues, things are going great. Looking forward to this winter so I can tackle everything and get the ‘Stealth GTM ver 2.0’ ready for spring.

For quite a while there has been concern in the GTM community over the rear shock mounts, as there have been a handful of incidents where the mounts have started to crack, both under racing and street conditions. FFR has been pretty quiet about this issue, but today I received shock mount support brackets from them in the mail. I would assume that all other customers will be receiving these as well, as I never contacted FFR about the shock mount issue, etc. Here are some pics. The brackets are designed to slip over the top of the shock mount and lend some support.