Of course, centerlock is too expensive (cool but good lord, the cost of whittling a piece of steel to shape) and isn't necessary especially for sprint races where I'm not really doing tire changes... ended up talking to Pancho Weaver at Road America's Trans Am weekend and saw how he did the Challenger Boris Said drove.
So had the thought to set up a 5x5 setup with a BBS styled 3-piece wheel to see if the geometry could get there.
Old design front wheel assumption was Wide 5 - these are cheap and cheerful.
The problem is they're not intended for low scrub applications - with the biggest backspacing wheels available the rotor is inboard of centerline.
I don't like that at all - it forces more scrub, more kingpin angle, and mostly, both. See, where the lower ball joint (or rod end, whatever) goes is determined by the inner face of the brake rotor. So I went and mocked up... well, I started with the idea of a BBS E50 style center but more concave, like so:
Which not only looks the business but helps move things outboard a lot.
Brake rotor is moved out a full 1.6" plus it looks snazzy! I don't think it will hold me back any compared to centerlock, really. And I think I could even just *gasp* buy some E50 centers and use them as is if I were to win the lotto or something... whatever, it may be cheaper to just clone them out of billet or something. The point is it should work. Also, new setup is with bigger rotors and bigger calipers which is also good. Designing around 13.06x1.25" rotors and Wilwood GN6R calipers to start, maybe better calipers later. Should be plenty of brake for a car with a 2300 pound minimum weight right? OK the horsepower target is 450 at the wheels so it's not like it'd be slow.
Then did some rejiggering of the chassis. Converted everything to round tube, threw a dummy in to make sure of positioning... well.
Left the rear chassis tubes off the redesign for the moment since I need to actually put steel in the right places. Chassis lost 130 pounds compared to the last version and should be a lot stiffer