Raceseng, whose front and rear coilover top mounts we featured early on in the build this year, sent us a few more tasty CNC aluminum treats. We showed you some pics of our custom Speed Academy shift knob on Facebook, and now we’re showing it off here. Based on the black mirror finish Ashiko shift knob, Jarrett Seng and his team CNC milled our logo onto the top surface with a level of detailed we didn’t know was possible with a CNC machine. Apparently it took 2 hours for the machine to cut the logo, and Jarrett spent a bunch of hours beforehand cleaning up our artwork so there were no breaks in the pattern. Raceseng may make this knob commercially available to anyone who’d like a little Speed Academy style for their FR-S and we’ll be sure to post about it if they do.
Raceseng also sent us their reverse lockout, another one of their CNC crafted pieces that replaces the factory plastic lockout. This is really just a cosmetic upgrade, but when you install a shift knob this badass you really need a sexier reverse lockout to go with it, right? We opted for the Gunmetal finish, but it comes in a whole bunch of cool colours so you can dress up your interior with your preferred colour scheme. As you’ll see in the video, we didn’t have the necessary 2.5mm pin punch to remove the OE lockup, so we don’t have installed pics for you quite yet but will soon (ordered the punch on Amazon since we couldn’t find it any of the local hardware stores).
We also added some Raceseng goodies under the hood, starting with these gunmetal colour Stiff Arms. These replace the steel OE strut bars with aluminum structural tubing that has wall thickness twice that of the factory units (1/8” compared to 1/16” thick).
Despite doubling the thickness of the tubing and thus increasing stiffness, the Raceseng Stiff Arms are also lighter than the OE bars, plus the bar ends are designed to efficiently transfer the load from the bar into the strut tower. And as we’ve come to expect from Raceseng, fit and finish are absolutely perfect and the supplied fasteners both high grade and highly attractive.
Last but not least, we swapped out the yellow plastic oil cap for a Gunmetal billet oil cap from Raceseng. Milled from a solid chunk of 6061 T6 aluminum, a special thread milling technique has been used to allow the Apex R logo to be horizontal when tightened. And as you can see, the outside of the lid features a bump on either side so you can get a good grip on it.
I’ve had an OE plastic oil cap crack on me at the race track from the extreme heat, so an aluminum oil cap like this also provides some peace of mind.
That wraps up this last-minute update, though we may have one more quick update before we head off for a week straight of racing action with the rest of the teams at the Ontario1500. We’ll be posting updates during the week of racing to our Facebook page, so be sure to follow us there. We should also have one more video update before the racing starts, so watch for that on our YouTube channel, but in the meantime check out Episode 7 above for a closer look at the Takata harness install and the Beastronix box ‘o pedal dancing magic, while Episode 8 below covers the last of our aerodynamic upgrades along with all the CNC’d sexiness from Raceseng.
