My Mirage. Gas saving mods.
 

In my mini quest of making my Mirage get better fuel economy I went ahead and did a few more mods. Mainly grille block, front underbelly pan, and shaved off a good bit of weight from the car.

I finally went ahead and put an underbelly pan under the front bumper/engine and I also put a grille block and filled in the foglight ports with great stuff foam (not quite finished with it) These were very quick and easy mods to do but I'm sure it'll make a difference in gas mileage.

I did the front underbelly pan using the pan I had left over from my 1997 Mercedes S420 S class. With some slight modifications I was able to make it fit. I used some heavy duty 24" zip ties to secure it in place. It is secured very tightly. I honestly never planned on doing this particular mod but since I had this pan laying around I figured why not. I don't know what material Mercedes used for the pan but it is very resilient and featherweight. Best of all it's a free mod.

washed the pan.
http://img846.imageshack.us/img846/2...1207241949.jpg


Aerodynamically dirty before photo:
http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/2...1207251112.jpg

Another aerodynamically dirty photo:
http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/3...1207251112.jpg

Aerodynamically clean now: (oil drops you see are not from this car)
http://img831.imageshack.us/img831/2...1207251343.jpg

Another angle:
http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/2...1207251343.jpg

Last but not least I went ahead with a crude grille block using polystyrene lighting panel. If all goes well I plan on replacing it with a more permanent solution like coroplast. As you can see I used great foam for the foglight ports. I plan on spraying more and evening it out with the bumper in the near future.
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/475...1207251342.jpg


I also shaved off even more weight from the car by removing passenger seat, trunk carpeting and board, and the spare tire and hydraulic jack. Before this mod I replaced the heavy 13" steel wheels with 13" light weight alloys and a lighter weight exhaust. Stock CURB weight for the 97' DE coupe was 2171 lbs, now I estimate curb weight is 2,08X lbs.

I was able to achieve 41 mpg last fill up with tires at 35psi, a lot of highway driving with mixed stop and go, A/C on, couple friends in the car half of the time.

Now with these other mods I've done I'm hoping to get 45mpg with A/C on if I do mostly highway again with myself. If I turn A/C off and inflate my tires to max tire PSI I think I can get 50mpg. Maybe even more if I turn off my engine whenever I stop, install a boat tail/kamm back, rear wheel skirt etc... but I don't think I'll go that far.

nice find on the underbelly pan!
Try 42-45psi.

Thanks I'll try that. One question. If I do inflate the tires to 42-45 then do I have to worry about the tires exploding once the tires warm up? Max PSI is 45 on these cheapo douglas tires. lol

Oh BTW I really like your Q45. Those earlier infiniti Qs had really nice looking headlights straight from the factory.

well, since your below the max (42psi) you should be fine.
Thanks for the kind words.

It's a great car.

Replaced the polystyrene junk with coroplast and sprayed it black. I also put a black fender stripe on to cover an area of clear coat that was weak/failing. I also put coroplast on the foglight covers. Does anyone have a specific recommendation on what to use to seal the edges and smooth it out? I've heard you can use silicone but I don't have experience with silicone/wouldn't know what kind to use for this.

http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/861...1207261829.jpg


http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/3...1207261829.jpg