In this third and last part about our ASM visit I’ll be talking just about carbon fiber.

See…I thought I knew a few things about carbon fiber up until my last trip to ASM. I’ve made parts from scratch with carbon fiber out of my garage, and I’ve sold thousands of carbon fiber parts over the years in all types (wet carbon, wet vacuum bagged, pre-preg dry carbon, carbon/frp and carbon-kevlar). Imagine my surprise when after 8 years of making, using and selling carbon fiber parts Kanayama-san makes me feel like a kid again and introduces a new type of carbon fiber construction to me. Normally at this point I’d tell you what its called…but it doesn’t have a name. For simplicities sake I’m going to call it Super Dry Carbon.

Its no secret that ASM uses the same factory to make their dry carbon that JGTC/Super GT teams use as their supplier. While I’ve had my fair share of experiences with ASM’s production dry carbon parts…I didnt realize that there’s another level of dry carbon that ASM keeps only for themselves! ASM’s production dry carbon parts are extremely light to begin with and regarded as some of the best dry carbon in the industry. Yet when Kanayama-san handed me the trunk off of his race car I just started smiling. It is indeed the same design trunk as the ASM dry carbon trunks I sell and I personally have had on my S2000…yet this one from the race car weighed about half of the weight as the production dry carbon trunk. After asking Kanayama-san a few different ways, I still have no idea how the hell they made it that light.

So it turns out that this super dry carbon is used on all of the panels of the ASM time attack car.

Around the same time as I was learning all of this I made a bit of an abrupt purchase and bought up a slew of his racing parts made out of super dry carbon. Namely, the entire widebody time attack kit (version 1) minus the rear fenders. That and the trunk and few couple of extra small bits. I’m not entirely sure what we’ll be doing with them yet, but I just had to buy them. This is stuff you just cant buy…the super dry carbon had me hooked!

Dont get fooled, its even stronger than the normal dry carbon parts. That bumper lip I was standing on in the earlier update is made out of the same super dry carbon and that bumper weighs less than 5lbs! So until we figure out what to do with all of these new parts I just snapped up, we at the least know it’ll make for a bad ass Gran Turismo rig (as Mike in the photo is demonstrating).

I put the pics up in hi-res as usual. You can actually see a different weave style on this super dry carbon than on the usual ASM dry carbon parts. The pictures are cool, but there really is nothing quite like feeling it, the absence of weight on such large parts is simply surreal.