Over the past 6 or 8 months I’ve been preparing my car for the track. I looked around at various towhook/towstrap solutions that others have used, but none jumped out at me as being ideal. Most of the hooks available attach to the bottom of the car, which would concern me if I ended up in deep gravel – potentially difficult for the towtruck driver to find. Also, because my car’s a daily driver, I wanted something that was discreet. So, discreet, functional, and cheap.
This is the solution I ended up going with – I saw a similar setup on this forum, but I haven’t seen a step-by-step guide anywhere, so hopefully this will be useful to someone down the track.
This is what I did for the front:
And the step by step instructions on how I got there...
So, first I removed the rubber trim on the metal bumper itself – this is held in place by two screws (at the turn signal indicators) and a number of clips running behind the rubber. I took out the screws, and then pried the rubber off. From the looks of the plastic behind, the PO had this trim off at an earlier time, and it required replacement clips to put back on – but more about that when we start putting it back together.
Once the trim is off, you can see the four bolts that hold the bumper onto the impact shocks. But before you take these off, you need to separate the bumper from the body of the car. There’ s two ways of doing this – you can either unscrew the rubber ‘bellows’, or you can detach the lower plastic trim from between the fender and the valence. I ended up removing the bellows on the left side, and the trim on the right, because the bellows were blocked by the oil cooler on the right. First the left –
This was really easy – two nuts (8mm) at the back of the bellows, and two at the front. I’d advise taking the whole thing off if you can – I tried not to, and it ended up being more of a pain that way.
The right side was more tricky, because I’ve got an oil cooler in the way. I had to remove the trim instead. It was hard to get a picture of what I was doing here, but hopefully you get the idea; in this picture I’ve already removed the four screws holding the piece of trim in place. The mesh you can see on the left side is covering my oil cooler.
(This picture’s a bit out of sequence, but shows the space where the piece of trim that you need to remove usually is:
Once you have both sides freed up, the next step is to remove the four nuts holding the bumper to the shocks. I also found it helped to give the bumper a good pounding with a rubber mallet, to free it up from the shocks.
If everything’s gone to plan, you should be able to pull the bumper away from the shocks. I put a small floor jack under the bumper to hold it up while I did this. You shouldn’t need to unplug any wires for the turnsignals, foglights etc – there’s enough slack.
This is a good place to yank -
Once I started to pull the bumper away, I could see my target – the bracket holding the shock absorber in place.
to be continued...