A close friend of ours down south has a 350Z. For the last several years it served as faithful daily driver, and weekend track slut. Now that the stars have aligned, and a truck now handles daily driving duties (and doubles as the track-rig on the weekend), the Z has been relegated to primarily track use only. He runs the car all over the Southeast, and despite the fact that it (for now) is still a stock engine with some bolt on’s, it’s wildly competitive. The reason? Intelligently selected modifications. Everything on the car has a purpose. Nothing was selected by accident, and in several cases, it took some trial and error of different components in order to come up with the faster combination.
The car was recently in NASCAR country, North Carolina, for a recent round of upgrades, including a differential and ring and pinion change. While there, a former NASCAR tech got hold of it, and using some fabrication skills and NASCAR carbon splitters (the rear deal), this was the creation. Next set of shakedowns is a few weeks ago at Barber, stay tuned!
Kwame
Z1 Performance
Jonathan
Corner Balance 
I’m going to be putting a splitter and undertray on my car but I’m worried that if it fails, it will drop under my tires and render the brakes useless. What kind of things did your friend do to deal with this.
https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT3xTaGypO3GFAB6x8IMkp7txMpYIdSOSaXF1NX7KSMnS3mlLbliQ
Like this ^
If you examine the pictures you’ll see how heavily reinforced the mounting is for all of these pieces. The undertray is separate from the splitter. Not sure I understand your question about the brakes failing. If by some off chance the splitter were to fall I don’t see how it would affect the brakes at all. The 2 don’t interact. If anything the tires would crush the splitter. But all conjecture till it happens which is why these pieces are so sturdily mounted. At high speed they are under tremendous force
The brakes wouldn’t fail, that’s not the issue. What I mean is if the splitter falls down and you are on the brakes, when the tires run over the splitter they are going to lose traction.
I’ve seen this happen at the track. A guy ran into a gravel trap and his splitter dug up a ton of gravel but didn’t appear to be broken. However, when he got back on track and did a few laps, the damaged mounts let go and the splitter fell onto the asphalt in a braking zone. When he ran over the splitter with the front tires, the wheels locked up and trapped the splitter under said tires. He just hit another gravel trap, but I couldn’t help imagining how ugly that could have been. Granted, that’s kind of a freak accident, but the same thing could happen much more easily just by hitting debris or potholes, especially if the car is street driven.
I was wondering if I could avoid this by making the parts of the splitter that extent beyond the inside of the tires separate from the middle of the splitter. A big sheet of splitter, should it fail, is very likely to get stuck under the tires. Three smaller pieces are more likely to get spit out to the sides, I’d think.
I see what you’re saying now. But, that’s racing. It’s impossible to planfr very set of circumstances. So when a part is being fabricated or installed, ypi have to be as forward thinking as possible to minimize the likelihood of such circumstances.