• Rear wheel fenders have been flared ¾” per side to help allow the use of bigger tires (see frame changes).  With the new flared body customers can use monster 295/15 or 315/17 tires!  Dave Smith has 295/15’s on his 427FE powered-pin drive wheel roadster and with the older MkII body the tires are right at the body and suspension travel is limited.  With the new wider MkIII bodies, there is more clearance that allows more suspension travel.

The MkIII rear fender flares are more delicate than the previous MkII and 1.5” wider over-all.  The front is unchanged.

• The rear trunk inner lip was changed in shape to allow a cleaner look and better weather sealing. The combination of a tighter rear seal, robot trimmed panels and new hood liners make the FFR MkIII panels worthy of the body shell (Photo below shows new trunk inner flange with gasket and new battery box).

• A new hood and hood liner was designed.  The new hood has a re-shaped scoop and the liner adds a cleaner finished look to the engine bay.  The hood hinge was re-designed to accommodate this new hood construction, with the benefit of not needing rivets thru the hood to mount.  The hood hinge no longer needs bonding to the hood and is lighter, cleaner looking, stronger, and more adjustable.

• We built a new mold plug and seven (!) new Mark 3 molds.  These molds have even tighter parting lines and are built to move less and last longer.

• The composite doors, hood, and body shells are all trimmed on our new $230,000 automated Fanuc Robot from RPT (see “What’s New” Robot Wars).  This ensures every panel fits and fits right.

• New Gel Coat type and color.  We selected a new gel coat material that makes bodywork easier for our customers.  The black color also aids in the hand-layup process, making it easier to avoid air bubbles and small blemishes (early MkIII’s were white and MkII’s are grey).

• Optional carbon hybrid body is back.  The original carbon fiber bodies that we sold to Mk1 and Mk2 customers were difficult to make and even more difficult to prep and paint.  We wanted to develop a laminate schedule that would give all the weight savings of the carbon bodies without the carbon print-thru problems of the first generation skins.  The result is called the “Riha” body since it was FFR engineer Dave Riha whose car was the prototype of this carbon composite laminate schedule (featured in Car & Driver magazine 05/04 and pictured below at right).  The body is a 1/8^th” laminate that weighs 80 lbs (vs. approximately 110 lbs for the fiberglass body shell).  The optional body costs $3800 and comes with carbon lined doors, hood, trunk and complete carbon composite body shell.  This is still a limited production part, so please call and ask for an engineer if you have any questions or want to order.

Although not officially part of the Mark 3 project, the FFR engineering team has begun a process of changing our molded parts over from hand-laid to a new process of pre-preg.  Pre-preg stands for pre-impregnated cloth, a relatively new process used in only very expensive laminates.   We have worked extensively with the guys from the composites team at Dan Gurneys All-American Racers to begin changing our molding department over to all pre-preg materials.  Hopefully this process should be completed by years end, w/parts changing over to pre-preg process individually.