bigger wheels on a 308 (continued)

Greetings. A couple of months ago I posted here with a question about bigger wheels and tires for a 308 and received a lot of very helpful information. I've been working on customer 308s since they were still being made but never had much request for non OEM stuff beyond a tubi exhaust or installing higher compression pistons so when I recently bought my 308GTB and decided to hop it up a bit I didn't have much of a "data base" for what I wanted to do. I'd like to thank everyone who responded. It was great not to have to "re-invent the wheel" (pardon the pun).



With the information I so kindly received I bought a set of custom made 17" Kinesis wheels and was put in touch with Tristram Buckley who supplied me with a set of externally adjustable Vari-shocks which are narrower than the stock Konis that allow more room in the wheel wells for meatier tires. The Vari-shocks also allow ride height adjustment so the car can be lowered without going to expensive racing shocks. I hope they work OK. He also sold me stiffer adjustable sway bars and I've installed urethane control arm bushings.



The other day I bought a set of used Brembo/Porsche 993 Turbo aluminum calipers and four 13" rotors with removable mounting hats. I'm trying to figure out right now if commercially available aluminum rotor hats can be re-machined to adapt the bigger Porsche rotors to the 308 hubs or if I have to machine them from billet. The front calipers are radial-mount style. Unfortunately the rears were not. They had the traditional mounting ears which make adapting to a different car more difficult so I sawed the ears off and re-machined the calipers to mount radial style. I'll have to make up some aluminum caliper mounts which will mount to the existing caliper mounting ears on the front suspension uprights and in the rear the uprights have an extra set of mounting ears on each up-right which just need to be machined square, drilled and threaded to mount caliper adaptor blocks. The original caliper mounting ears on the rear up-rights will hold the cut-down old calipers so I still have parking brakes, much like a Diablo which has separate parking brake calipers. If anyone out there knows of an other car which uses separate parking brake calipers that are made of aluminum I'd love to hear about it. The Diablo parts are not going to be cheap and the original 308 ATE rear calipers a quite heavy even though I've cut quite a bit of cast iron off of them.

For cooling I bought a NASCAR racing radiator with approximately the right dimensions which I'll have to modify to fit.

We're doing a valve job on the engine right now. It's a good thing I took the heads off because the rear head was cracked. Luckily I had an old head with a damaged combustion chamber lying around that pressure tested OK so I welded up the damage and will re-machine it and install a new pair of valve seats.

I sold the carburetors and distributors and will be installing a programable Electromotive engine management system to control ignition and fuel injection. The plan is to install a super-charger with a water/air intercooler. I haven't decided on which systems to use yet but I'm hoping to make about 400 HP which should liven that little car right up.

This car was originally built for the German market and was modified by Koenig which was what attracted me to the car but once I had the car in my possession I decided I didn't care for some of the Koenig ad-ons. I removed all of the Koenig fiberglass pieces and sold them. Of course I found the inevitable rust spots, rivet holes and paint damage so now we're in the process of prepping the car for a repaint. As purchased, the car was almost black, metallic charcoal, but we have since figured out that it was originally silver. I think we're just going to repaint it plain black.

The fiberglass front air dam was a joke. It had been repaired so many times it was filled solid with bondo along the bottom. We've had to be creative to fix it since large sections of fiberglass were just gone once the grinding and cutting was done.

Well, I hope to have this little beauty on the road in the spring but we'll see. Originally I was going to buy a late model wreck like a 355 and fix it up but my wife Sandy convinced me I needed another project like a hole in the head but look at me now!

Again, many thanks for all who responded with help and advice.

Regards to all,

Wil de Groot
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The front head comes off with the engine in the car with no problem. The main problem I had was that both heads were stuck like glue. I had to use a portapower to free them.

The wheels cost about $3000.00.

Wil de Groot