Adjustments to Gorilla Flaps

If you’ve read my recent autocross blog posts, you’ll know that one issue I’ve been having is that I’ve been contacting the pavement with the flaps during hard cornering. This doesn’t happen during daily driving, but with the added grip of the RE71Rs, and the violent direction changes on course, I was occasionally slamming them into the ground. I did occasionally scrape them on steep inclines, or other severely uneven pavement during daily driving, though that was uncommon.So today, I made two modifications. The first modification was to shorten the flap length by 3/4″. I wasn’t sure what the best method would be to cleanly cut the material, so I did what any self-respecting man would do, and decided to go way overkill and use my giant 10″ compound sliding miter saw that I just bought. This turned out NOT to be the ideal way to cut these flaps.

Unfortunately, while the saw-blade cut through the flap material like butter, the flap material had a tendency to snap off in small sections. This made cutting it a bit precarious, and made it difficult to get a perfectly clean cut. In the end, I put this massive tool away and opted for a more simplistic approach: a ruler, and an X-Acto Knife. I wasn’t sure how readily this material would snap, but it turns out it is very willing to snap cleanly with just a bit of scoring on one side. So I made a few passes with the razor, and the flap snapped off perfectly cleanly. Then I used a quarter to trace some rounded corners, and used the razor and some sandpaper to hand-trim them, and voila! They look perfect, if just slightly shorter, as you can see in the lead image for this post.

The second modification I made was to the front flaps. The 18×9 wheels have much less clearance inside of the fender. As we saw from one of my earlier posts, I had to add some spacers to the steering rack to keep them from rubbing at full lock. The other spot where I was rubbing was on the flaps themselves at about 3/4 lock. The flaps reduce the clearance even further inside of the wheel well, as you can see from the photo below:

The benefit to having had these on the car for a while was that there were pretty clear wear marks on the flaps from where the tires had been rubbing, which made it easy for me to know what to trim. As you can see below, I cut a slot out of the flaps where the tires were rubbing. Doesn’t affect the functionality at all, but between these and the steering rack spacers, I no longer have any rubbing of any sort on this car.