The International Motorsport Fair in Cologne and Birmingham was the ideal location for us to hunt for a suitable gearbox for the R-Box M3. All manufacturers under 1 roof within walking distance, from now on we know what the R-Box women mean by shopping center.
Selection by elimination is still the most efficient way for us to achieve a good result.
And the first one to lose weight was Quaife. This decision did not even have to do with the product itself. Those people were so disinterested and haughty that we didn’t even evaluate their products. Perhaps the easiest choice so far.
Remained over Drenth, Sadev, Elite and Samsonas. Unlike Quaife, we have had a mountain of meaningful information from these 4.
Of course we first had to make a choice manually or sequentially, if we chose the historians manually would have been the best choice but we have again been guided by technology and efficiency. We made our financial conscience believe that we were not building a historic car.
Due to the above arguments, the manual Samsonas bin fell off despite the fact that this could otherwise have been a very good choice.
Then there were 3 of them: Drenth, Sadev and Elite.
Drenth of course has a plug and play version for the S14 engine and has already sold a considerable number of these things. So we had no doubts about their product only the price tag is slightly higher than the 2 others but it is also a total package.
Elite could charm us the least because of the large dimensions. So there were still 2 left.
The first time I saw the Sadev bin I was like “this can’t stay whole”. We also gathered a lot of additional information from various sources that showed that they have a whole army of designers. They also do everything in-house (e.g. heat treathment) and established names such as Delage Sport also use the same box for their S14 engines.
Through the UK we came into contact with Simon Mauger who abused the same box for a year in an Escort MKii with 2.5 Millington engine. Those who follow the English rallies will know what I mean by mistreatment. That man almost always finishes on the podium between the WRC’s and has driven an untold number of races without the gearbox shrinking. Enough for us to have confidence in the Sadev solution. Mauger and the lower price have definitely put us on the Sadev path.
Since it was not a ready-made solution, we had to make conversion plates to make it fit on the S14 bellhousing. For our wizard mechanical design Nick it was a breeze to model this in 3D and make it fit perfectly.
So another step forward… gearbox… DONE