As SEMA nears, we're scrambling to meet our goals for Project Si. We have 2 more working days before we have to trailer the car out to the show, but things are looking good.

Today we installed our new Seibon carbon fiber hood and trunk lid. They look great and saved about 8 lbs each (they are structurally reinforced with non-carbon materials - heavier, but much more reasonable for everyday use). We also installed our AEM cold air intake, DC ceramic coated race header and DC 2.25" exhaust. All the pieces were of a high quality, and the new exhaust sounds great. We were a little surprised to find the race header has a smaller collector outlet than our stock catalytic converter did though. We'll talk to DC about the theory behind this, but maybe they'll have an even racier version in the future. The combined weight savings of our performance parts, wheels/tires and body parts has saved us 44 lbs of weight. Tomorrow we install our Progress suspension, which we expect to save a few more lbs as well. When we remove the spare tire, we'll be very close to our first target of 100 lbs of weight reduction with no loss of function.

Hondata is still working on programming our ECU - it's hard work and they've had very little time, so we don't know if anything will be done in time for SEMA (the car has run on a conversion harness and 04 RSX ECU). That said, we decided to see if the car was safe to run with all the parts (IPS K2 cams, I/H/E) and the stock ECU. We were pleasantly surprised to find that peak torque was up 18 lbs-ft and peak power up 21 hp. Max torque gains were nearly 30 lbs-ft at 5000 rpm. The mixture was a touch on the lean side in places, but not nearly as bad as we thought (you could safely use the car as a daily driver). But the power is still going up fast when we hit the rev limiter, and cam tuning will certainly be beneficial. We expect at least another 20 hp from tuning and raising the rev limiter.

Stay tuned and be sure to check out our SEMA coverage next week!!