RT Mechanics
New Member
I also decided to run the car with a dump valve for safety reasons as I did not want to risk damage to the turbo, ie blades bending etc. I would only ever recommend that a dump valve is run with the larger types of turbo, as I had found many years ago when I had brought an Escort Cosworth with one fitted and was advised to remove it to improve the throttle response! I did remove it and it was never refitted!
ENGINE MOUNTS
I had been having problems with the engine mounts - not really a surprise as they are working over time for me. I looked at what could be improved and thought it would be a good idea to send a bulkhead mount to Powerflex, a poly bush company to see if they could make me a stronger mount (in yellow of course) and also a new top engine mount (which only seemed to come in purple - they made it for me in yellow!).
I also had the lower gearbox torque mount made for me in poly as well which would help with the rearward movement of the engine under high load. I also had an idea one day while looking under the bonnet of some very high powered Evos –
I noticed that some of them run a engine damper on the offside strut. I thought this would help another problem area I was starting to get with the engine mount under the cambelt. It kept braking even after 100 miles !! I decided to borrow an idea I had seen while at MA Developments - on one of their many high hp Evos, there was an engine damper kit. I thought I may be able to get it to fit the Peril somehow -,if it didn’t work I could always use it on my own Evo 6, so had nothing to loose and bought one.
I got Andrew on the case as he loves making new parts where he can and he soon managed to re shape the small bracket and we thought we would fit to the Pas pump housing:
Early tests showed it had made a massive difference and looked like I had solved the problem
In tests so far it works a real treat so hopefully that’s another problem sorted
RACING SEATS, HARNESSES, INTERIOR & REAR STRUT BRACE
I started to focus my attention on the inside of the car - manly the seats and the seatbelts. I tried out a few different seat designs and had a ride in a friends Mitsubishi Evo 6 who races in the time attack series and was impressed at how well his seats fitted me. They were made by Japanese tuning company called D2. They made a very light and strong seat which is what I needed, so new suitable custom made seat frames were made for the new seats.
I now needed the correct harnesses to finish the job, so again went for a quality make. Willian’s harnesses are very well known and are well proven so I was happy to use them. Its amazing how many people that run harnesses in their cars for track days etc get the angle dangerously wrong with the rear belts!! A suitable anchor was made which would also make a good strut brace to help stiffen the rear of the car nicely. I had wanted to keep the standard carpets and interior at first but soon realised the carpets would have to go with the new seat frames etc and the stripped look slowly grew on me. I started to really think how the stripped look would look at its best so decided to remove any parts I did not need - any brackets and other fixings/roof lining etc had to go along with the sunroof cassette…..
This then gave me another problem - what to do about the sunroof hole?? I was trying to save weight but also wanted to give the car more strength as well….
THE ROOF
I looked into the costs involved in having a plate made and welded into the roof panel to fill the hole, but by the time the panel had been made and welded into place, the roof filled and re painted, we decided to see if another roof skin would be easier to fit as we could do the work ourselves.
My brother Andrew had already been brave enough to do this work on his own car (an Evo 2) so we decided this would be the way for us so I started to strip and remove all the sealant that was hiding the spot welds on the roof ready to drill them out.
We decided to start to drill out the spot welds of the second hand roof to see how the skin would come apart before we started any drilling on our car!! As we started to strip the metal back I was shocked to see how many layers of metal there are holding just the roof on. You can see why Volvos are such strong cars and are so well made.
We decided to do something a bit different - the risk of not being to remove the original roof skin was too high as it would right off the car in one fal swoop, so we decided to keep the original roof in place for maximum strength and weld/bond the new roof over the original. Andrew must have spent 10-15 hours grinding down the roof to just a skin ready to fit it.
We then prepared the roof ready for the swop over. The paint had to be cleaned off to bare metal as this was the best way for the bonding material to work. We then added the new roof to the car and welded it front and back - this was then left for 48 hours for the bond to make and suitable weight was put on the roof to be sure of a good contact. The hole from the sunroof was then sealed from the inside.
The Peril has many special visitors while all this work is done after hours……
At the same time all other items that were not needed (where possible) were removed and the wiring was hidden as much as possible. I stripped the rear doors of everything other than the door locks and locked the rear windows shut as I would not have any rear passengers to worry about any more.
ROLL CAGE
I had been thinking for a while about having a roll cage fitted to make the car as strong and safe inside as possible in case the worst ever happened, as I had planned to do a few top speed runs in the car
The cage would run over the roof line and down behind the dash area with a strengthening bar across the doors and a rear diagonal bar. In the rear support plates had to be made and fixed in the floor behind the front seats and plates for the front bars below the dash area.
I had to make sure that the screen view was not disrupted by the cage, so it had to be fitted as close as possible to the windscreen pillar. I had studied a few other designs of cages - quite a lot of them are in your line of vision when driving on the road - I’m going to be using the car mostly on the road so did not want to block a motorcyclist etc from my view etc.
The cage started off with this :
We made a bar across the top of the windscreen area for extra strength - the material used was CDS 2 (cold drawn steel). We also decided to place strengthening plates down the windscreen pillars. The metal was bought from a local company and we started to measure out the lengths and the bends needed (the roof being the worse with different angles at different points. I bought another dash board as I thought it was time I got rid of the wood effect that is a standard T5-R fitment! I then had to start to cut the dash board around the roll cage where it fitted which took a long time to get it exactly how I wanted it.
RE-WIRING / WIRING LOOM
By this time the final look I wanted to get from inside of the car was in full flow and so I decided to move all the wiring that would be seen down into the left side of the car. A very good friend who is rather handy at looms and has a very high attention to detail made me a new loom and gave me a full wiring diagram in case I ever have a problem, which is a really nice neat touch.
I decided to run one loom of 20 wires down the N/s of the car to keep the inside as neat as possible so the look inside went from this



ENGINE MOUNTS
I had been having problems with the engine mounts - not really a surprise as they are working over time for me. I looked at what could be improved and thought it would be a good idea to send a bulkhead mount to Powerflex, a poly bush company to see if they could make me a stronger mount (in yellow of course) and also a new top engine mount (which only seemed to come in purple - they made it for me in yellow!).
I also had the lower gearbox torque mount made for me in poly as well which would help with the rearward movement of the engine under high load. I also had an idea one day while looking under the bonnet of some very high powered Evos –
I noticed that some of them run a engine damper on the offside strut. I thought this would help another problem area I was starting to get with the engine mount under the cambelt. It kept braking even after 100 miles !! I decided to borrow an idea I had seen while at MA Developments - on one of their many high hp Evos, there was an engine damper kit. I thought I may be able to get it to fit the Peril somehow -,if it didn’t work I could always use it on my own Evo 6, so had nothing to loose and bought one.


I got Andrew on the case as he loves making new parts where he can and he soon managed to re shape the small bracket and we thought we would fit to the Pas pump housing:




Early tests showed it had made a massive difference and looked like I had solved the problem





In tests so far it works a real treat so hopefully that’s another problem sorted
RACING SEATS, HARNESSES, INTERIOR & REAR STRUT BRACE
I started to focus my attention on the inside of the car - manly the seats and the seatbelts. I tried out a few different seat designs and had a ride in a friends Mitsubishi Evo 6 who races in the time attack series and was impressed at how well his seats fitted me. They were made by Japanese tuning company called D2. They made a very light and strong seat which is what I needed, so new suitable custom made seat frames were made for the new seats.



I now needed the correct harnesses to finish the job, so again went for a quality make. Willian’s harnesses are very well known and are well proven so I was happy to use them. Its amazing how many people that run harnesses in their cars for track days etc get the angle dangerously wrong with the rear belts!! A suitable anchor was made which would also make a good strut brace to help stiffen the rear of the car nicely. I had wanted to keep the standard carpets and interior at first but soon realised the carpets would have to go with the new seat frames etc and the stripped look slowly grew on me. I started to really think how the stripped look would look at its best so decided to remove any parts I did not need - any brackets and other fixings/roof lining etc had to go along with the sunroof cassette…..

This then gave me another problem - what to do about the sunroof hole?? I was trying to save weight but also wanted to give the car more strength as well….

THE ROOF
I looked into the costs involved in having a plate made and welded into the roof panel to fill the hole, but by the time the panel had been made and welded into place, the roof filled and re painted, we decided to see if another roof skin would be easier to fit as we could do the work ourselves.
My brother Andrew had already been brave enough to do this work on his own car (an Evo 2) so we decided this would be the way for us so I started to strip and remove all the sealant that was hiding the spot welds on the roof ready to drill them out.

We decided to start to drill out the spot welds of the second hand roof to see how the skin would come apart before we started any drilling on our car!! As we started to strip the metal back I was shocked to see how many layers of metal there are holding just the roof on. You can see why Volvos are such strong cars and are so well made.
We decided to do something a bit different - the risk of not being to remove the original roof skin was too high as it would right off the car in one fal swoop, so we decided to keep the original roof in place for maximum strength and weld/bond the new roof over the original. Andrew must have spent 10-15 hours grinding down the roof to just a skin ready to fit it.



We then prepared the roof ready for the swop over. The paint had to be cleaned off to bare metal as this was the best way for the bonding material to work. We then added the new roof to the car and welded it front and back - this was then left for 48 hours for the bond to make and suitable weight was put on the roof to be sure of a good contact. The hole from the sunroof was then sealed from the inside.




The Peril has many special visitors while all this work is done after hours……

At the same time all other items that were not needed (where possible) were removed and the wiring was hidden as much as possible. I stripped the rear doors of everything other than the door locks and locked the rear windows shut as I would not have any rear passengers to worry about any more.


ROLL CAGE
I had been thinking for a while about having a roll cage fitted to make the car as strong and safe inside as possible in case the worst ever happened, as I had planned to do a few top speed runs in the car
The cage would run over the roof line and down behind the dash area with a strengthening bar across the doors and a rear diagonal bar. In the rear support plates had to be made and fixed in the floor behind the front seats and plates for the front bars below the dash area.
I had to make sure that the screen view was not disrupted by the cage, so it had to be fitted as close as possible to the windscreen pillar. I had studied a few other designs of cages - quite a lot of them are in your line of vision when driving on the road - I’m going to be using the car mostly on the road so did not want to block a motorcyclist etc from my view etc.
The cage started off with this :

We made a bar across the top of the windscreen area for extra strength - the material used was CDS 2 (cold drawn steel). We also decided to place strengthening plates down the windscreen pillars. The metal was bought from a local company and we started to measure out the lengths and the bends needed (the roof being the worse with different angles at different points. I bought another dash board as I thought it was time I got rid of the wood effect that is a standard T5-R fitment! I then had to start to cut the dash board around the roll cage where it fitted which took a long time to get it exactly how I wanted it.













RE-WIRING / WIRING LOOM
By this time the final look I wanted to get from inside of the car was in full flow and so I decided to move all the wiring that would be seen down into the left side of the car. A very good friend who is rather handy at looms and has a very high attention to detail made me a new loom and gave me a full wiring diagram in case I ever have a problem, which is a really nice neat touch.





I decided to run one loom of 20 wires down the N/s of the car to keep the inside as neat as possible so the look inside went from this
