Blind Mule Racing

Sunday December 6

2009-12-14T02:15:00.004-06:00

Frank lost his final bet with little brother. Bama won; but then again Hugh said they would this year. It was his turn.

We got to the track early and the body was there. Paint was still sticky but it was there, fresh from the shop. The painter was saying he was sorry it was still sticky but it needed a little more time to cure. It still looked better than Hugh’s paint jobs. Nice and clean with a bright shine. Black and white just like the old D-13 Frank used to have. Needs a little red trim to finish it but that can be handle later. The air intakes still need to be painted but that also can be handled later. The important thing now to do was get it put together and see if the body panel would fit. Believe it or not, they did close, not perfect but close. So goes the world of Vees. So now it is bodied and looks like a race car, Rusty (#1 son) and I have to get on corner stations so the rest of the guys can play. Tommy is going to drive it this afternoon to lead the formula car field for a couple of honor laps.

True to form the Grinch struck. It didn’t come around for the pace lap. We called in and were told there was a mechanical failure. Now worry sets in. What could be wrong this time? We will have to wait and see.

It wasn’t mechanical at all, turned out Tommy was not really tuned to the shift pattern and first gear to reverse doesn’t work to well. So it sat under the shed and waited to be loaded on the trailer for the trip home and the next set of repairs. I got in and made a quick trip around the paddock area. It worked fine; this car will go and be a real race car in the future. Rusty is going to have to learn how to drive so we can go play.

I would like to take a min and express both Rusty’s and my deepest thanks to all the guys from the local racing community that have made this happen. Without them this might have never been completed. They gave of their time and hearts to get this done and just saying thank you just doesn’t seem enough. I know that if Frank (blindmule one ) was watching , he was smiling . There is a picture frame in the living room. It holds ten one dollar bills, five from each of us that the Grinch would not make it to track by his birthday. It didn’t, but the bucks stop there. They will be a reminder that he loved these cars and wanted nothing more than to come roar past me somewhere on the track. I will always be watching over my shoulder for him. God bless you brother.

Saturday December 5

2009-12-14T02:07:00.005-06:00

The Grinch stayed true to its traditions. We worked all day yesterday to get things ready to go. Charge batteries; adjust throttle return cables and a number of other little things that need to be done. Then came the test; no body but we took the running shell around the track. Will it complete a lap or quit somewhere on the back side of the course?

They never quit close to the pit or work area. The shifter needs to be relocated was the first thing I learned. The side safety bar is in the way to shift effectively. That can be adjusted; other than that, not bad. It pulls strong in second and third gear. Lot more torque than in a 1200 cc engine. I got it going fast enough that the borrowed helmet kept trying to lift off my head, probably in the 70 to 80mph range on the straights. It tracked solid and ran thru the corners so easily it made the warrior feel stiff. Very smooth and plenty of pull left. But like I said, just a test lap so lets don’t get carried away; back in the pits to make a few adjustments.

Brother would have been smiling from ear to ear I am sure. It worked just like it was supposed to. Tomorrow the body will be here and we will be able to tell a little more then. Right now it is time to go home and see if the Gators can beat Bama.

You can see all the photos from the Frank Lamb project here

Team Work

2009-12-14T01:56:00.004-06:00

When word came out that Frank was seriously ill, his friends gathered round to help him get his latest project car "The Grinch" up and running.

Frank died before he got a chance to get the Grinch finished could drive it around No problem Raceway.

His friends continued "The Frank Lamb" project in his honor....

One Man's Junk.....

2009-04-02T15:11:00.005-05:00

It always amazes me how fast spare parts spawn. Our shop area is looking like a junk yard. Over the last three years we had accumulated a spare chassis, one old rear axle assembly, one reworked rear end, one king pin type front end and one ball joint type front end.

With the exception of the reworked rear end and the king pin front (which was almost ready to put in a car) all were covered with years of grime, built up road crud and corrosion.

Now was the time to do something about that. At least get them all stored in the same place and cleaned up. The problem is that with very limited space where do you put them. I think maybe out behind the tool shed. At least that will get them out of sight and out of the way. The good rear end and the front axle assembly will be kept under cover.

In the mean time the wizard is plugging away and has the exhaust system almost finished. The main assemblies are complete and he is doing the grinding on the welds. I offered to do the grinding but he said he’d rather because he keeps finding pinholes and little voids that need to be re welded as he does it. I don’t argue with an expert.

We have scheduled next weekend to get it installed on the car. With a little luck we will get to fire it up for the first time.

Cross your fingers.

A Clean Start

2009-03-17T19:42:00.001-05:00

I got an email from Gary saying that his “honey do list” had finally exceeded his ability to avoid it and we would not be able to work on the car this weekend while he caught up. Fortunately we were not pushing a race deadline so I could live with that.

It is sort of a surprise blessing that getting the new car has also rekindled my interest in the getting the Grinch’s work completed. I had lost heart in finishing it when I realized I couldn’t race it. I still loved the old beast but it was not as much fun to work on with that knowledge. Now it’s function was changing. Instead of being my personal steed it would either become a rental car so others could try the class, or I would sell it. With Gary sidelined and the Caldwell an hour away I would get back to work on it.

The first action would be to clean up the shop. I don’t know how it happens but in this household, any area not currently in use becomes a dump zone. Accumulations of junk seem to come out of the woodwork and pile in, under and around everything. The work benches, small to begin with, looked like someone had started world war three and then taken a break for lunch. It was bad enough that everything in the carport got dusty and dirty now it was super cluttered too.

Where is Mr. Clean when you need him?

Caveat Emptor

2009-03-17T19:32:00.006-05:00

Back in La Place, I stopped by my local usual muffler shop and handed the owner a sketch of what I wanted made up.

They have a neat little machine which slips into the end if an exhaust pipe and expands it just enough that another piece of pipe the same diameter as the original will slip right in. Then they can weld it in place and as a result can make pipes of all sorts of lengths and configurations.

What I was after was a five inch long pipe with one inch expansions on each end and three inches of regular pipe left between. I wanted four of them. I was assured that it would not be a problem, but they where busy right then and I would have to wait.

I had expected something like that to happen so I told them I would stop back on the following Friday, and to fit it in when they had slack time. I did stop by on Friday but they had already closed so I missed them.

I was on the way up to Hammond on Saturday morning and stopped by to pick up my “stretchers“. They had forgotten all about them. Not only that, it turned out that they had neither the expansion dyes to fit my sized pipe nor did they even have any one and one half inch diameter exhaust pipe in in stock.

I hate it when people waste my time. I could have gone somewhere else and gotten the job done, but now it was too late. I was due at the Wizard’s in forty five minutes.

The view didn’t improve from there.

After looking further at the configuration of the headers we began to realized that just stretching out the pipes wasn’t going to solve the whole problem. We still had to find a path around the starter and between the zero roll supports on the left side.

Gary started the process of bending, cutting, welding and patching bits of header pipe together.

I am very envious of people who know how to weld. I don’t and it is a great handicap. I am going to have to learn. One should expand ones education.

With Gary busy doing magic things with a torch, I had time to further study the car.

The first thing that I picked up was that the zero roll had been improperly assembled. All the parts were there, just put together in the wrong arrangement. Not a big mistake but one that would take some time to set right.

On the other end of the car I started looking at the connections to the master cylinders and got a surprise.

David had told me he just rebuilt the master cylinders for the clutch and brake lines. The connection to the clutch peddle was just hanging from the rubber dust cover and was not connected at all. I guess he forgot to reinstall the snap ring the holds the master cylinder assembly together. It was there, loose inside the rubber boot. There had been a small spring holding the clutch peddle in place. He could have used a rubber band and accomplished the same thing. All it did was keep the peddle from falling over. That given, my confidence in the master cylinder rebuild went down.

From that joyous revelation, I went on to the brake and clutch lines themselves. Guess what. That was going to have to be redone also. The lines which carry the hydraulic fluid from the master cylinders to the to the slave cylinder in the brake drum were half the diameter we usually use.

It was becoming very obvious that who ever had been working on this car was not a formula vee driver.

So where does that leave us?
1. The body needs to be sanded, primed, and painted.
2. I need to decided about whether I am going to shift to rack and pinion steering or not. If I do then that needs to be fabricated and installed. It might alter the bodywork.
3. I need to decide what I plan to do about ducting air to the oil cooler. If I am going to use a roof scoop, it needs to be done at the same time the bodywork is done.
4. I need to complete the installation of the head cooling ducts. The previous owner had them but obviously didn’t know what they were for.
5. Rework the brake master and clutch cylinders and connecting lines.
6. Disassemble and properly reassemble the zero roll set up.
7. Do the usual checks of front wheel bearings and brakes.
8. Check the camber, toe in and front end settings.
9. Check rear cambers settings. Make sure the car is square.
10. Replace the seat belts if needed.
11. Rebuild the dash. Make sure that all gages are correctly connected.
12. Relocated the fire bottle to a better location and re plumb the lines.
13. Install the transponder.
14. Go racing.

It’s looking like Hugh still has pulled off the best deal. His car was ready to race when he got it. Other than a non racing accident he has not had to do a damned thing to it but change the oil and drive it.

Who Dat Ya Gonna Call?

2009-03-17T19:27:00.002-05:00

Knowing that we were going to be using longer primary headers than usual in order to clear the zero roll bars, I started wondering what effect that was going to have on performance. Who do you call when the ghost busters can’t help? Jim Shring at SR Racing and Fred Clark at Caracal cars.

To each of them I posed the following question:

Guys,
Let me pick your brain a bit.
What effect does the length of the primary headers have on the performance of an engine? I am assuming they are of equal length of course.
Thanks for your input.

The same day I got back a response for Jim.

Frank,

Lengthening the primaries moves the peak HP and Torque points lower on the RPM curve. Inversely, shortening the primaries moves the peak torque and HP up on the RPM curve. This does not necessarily increase or reduce peak HP, it will simply move that point to occur at a higher RPM. That is the simplest way of explaining it. It gets a bit more complex, but that is it in principle.

Typically you want the Peak HP to occur somewhere around the point where you need it most. Most Vee's peak in the 5100 to 5400 range.

Jim

The same day I also got a response from Caracal.

“Mr. Lamb,
Fred went to the hospital early this am. He is doing ok now but will be there for some testing. He will write you back as soon as he can.
Mrs. C.”

The next day I heard from Fred.

Hi Frank,

OK, here goes, Using the same collector like the flat four, the shorter the primaries, to the point of 38“, which is the shortest we have ever fit on a current vee, the higher the useable power curve, with 40 to 38 in. pipes the engine works in the 4500 to 6500 to 6800 rpm range, that said the 4000 to 5500 range suffers.

Now along comes the 4 into 2 into 1 collector, when you use this collector you regain the use of the bottom end of the power band with out losing the top end.

There is still the requirement that you have the intake and heads to get this into this power band, but most of today's engine builders are there.
My best combination is 40 in primaries and the flat 4 into 2 into 1 collector, there are non flat ( firing order or square type) collectors that work as well as the flat ones.
When I built my first vintage car a few years ago I had only an old set of pipes from an original Lynx Vee, they were 47 in long primaries, the car was a real stump puller out of the corners but 5600 was it on top end, with a current engine.

Hope this helps.

Fred

It’s amazing what you can learn if you ask.

Swap Shop

2009-03-17T12:19:00.006-05:00

Never wasting a chance to stir up confusion, Hugh and I made a trip to Homa to arrange some labor swapping for a chance to do drive a different sort of car.

Hugh had talked our friend Donnie and his brother Jeff, into doing engine swaps on two of Rory White’s formula 500 cars.

I was quite familiar with this type of car as I had been around when they were first invented. They had started out as Formula 440. The reason they were called that was that they used a 440 cc liquid cooled, two cycle snow mobile engine with a centrifugal clutch, no transmission. They had no suspension, sort of like a giant go cart. With driver they had to weight a minimum of seven hundred and fifty pounds. But here’s the kicker, those little engines put out about seventy five horse power. That provides a weight to power ratio of about ten to one. Fantastic. Better than a ‘Vette. The ratio on a Vee is about eighteen to one.

Later the manufacturer of that engine moved up to a bigger model and stopped production on the 440. As a result the class just moved up with them and is now called Formula 500.

Rory had two of them. One was set up for Autocross and utilized a chain drive for faster acceleration from slower speeds. The other was set up for road racing and used a belt drive, since it was always at higher speed to start with and didn’t require the low speed torque.

The engine in the road racing car was used up. It needed to be replaced or rebuilt. The object of the exercise was to pull the engines from both cars, put the autocross engine in the road racing car and then, eventually, replace the engine in the a’cross car.

Dr. Rory, who stays very busy with his practice and his other activities, just didn’t have the time to do it himself. He’d offered some “seat time” for getting it done.

We went over to Rory’s shop. Both cars were stored in a container he keeps beside the shop.

The cars are small and light. It didn’t take long before we had the first one out, on the trailer and headed back to Donnie’s.

Two days later the car had had the engine pulled, the whole car had been degreased, pressure washed and had most of it’s nuts and bolts tightened up It had never been cleaner.

Now they were ready to go after the second car.

Exhaust(ing) Work

2009-03-17T12:11:00.005-05:00

Now that I have the car home, I have started the study process. That means you start stripping the body off and you walk around the car looking at all it’s naked bit and pieces. It is a voyage of discovery, and not always a good one. In this case it seems to be better than average.

A couple of major elements I knew about before I bought the car. It needed a new carburetor and it needed an exhaust system. That adds about another thousand dollars to the cost of the car. As simple as this sounds, these pieces are not as easy to get as going to the store and buying them off the shelf. Especially the exhaust system. .

The carb was actually that easy, thank goodness.

Before I left on the trip to Langley I had been on the phone with Jim Schings at SR Racing in Lexington, Ky. The guys at SR are around the top of the short list of “go to” people when it comes to Formula Vee and Formula First racing.

From them I ordered and new Bocar 34 PICT carb. It is the only one legal in he class. This had the advantage of not only being the legal carb but since I was getting it from them it would also have all of the required modifications done, and it would be flow tested and tuned to be at optimum performance. They would even set it up to run at its best in our very near sea level atmosphere.

It had not arrived before I left but I wasn‘t worried. They had told me that it would take a bit because they do their flow testing on actual engines on the dynometer and no dyno test were scheduled for the next few days.

From looking at the photos of the car supplied by David Rountree I knew that the intake manifold would also have to be replaced, so I added one to the order from SR. The manifold currently on the car was for a dual throat carb and would not work with the single throat Bocar. With these, I added the restrictor plate which is the equalizer for all the carbs in the class. The whole package arrived about a week after I got home.

That left the exhaust system. I had already been down the lane with exhaust systems, trying to get one fitted for the Grinch. It still amazes me that something so simple should be so complicated and expensive, but boy is it ever.

What was on the car now was a selection of short individual header pipes, no collector, and no attempt at tuning. That would not do. It was, among other things, dangerous, and likely to cause a fire if run that way for an extended period of time (like a twenty lap race). On top of that, the sound level would exceed the allowable limits (yes Virginnia, there are limits on how loud a race cars exhaust can be).

Even worse it was taking away potential horse power. Even with the larger engine we use in Formula First, we don’t have any spare power to give away.

I had hoped that the “Tri Mil “ mid engine system I had previously obtained would work, but as I studied the zero roll set up I began to realize that it was not going to fit. Sometimes it is a curse to be able to see things in three dimensions. I didn’t even have to try it on to know it wasn’t going to fly.

I was still hoping I would not have to shell another six to nine hundred bucks for a new header system. I knew that I could get a “Roxanne” system but that would be the price range, and it just didn’t fit my budget.

I remembered that Gary had a Roxanne type system that he had obtained in one of his trades ( he does a lot of swapping around with parts and pieces). I called him and found out that since it had not fit his car he was about to cut it up to use for something else.

I offered to trade him my Tri Mil set up for it. Since we had about the same amount of cash involved in each system it seemed like an equitable trade. There were was a race the following weekend and I took it over to the track with me for him to see. After he examined it he agreed to the swap and I was a happy camper. We set up a date for the next weekend to get together and see what would be required to fit it to the Caldwell.

Rusty and I towed the Caldwell up to the Wizard’s on the appointed day. With the car unloaded we stared removing the old header pipes and trying to fit the Roxanne look a likes. They didn’t fit exactly either, but there was a subtle difference. It looked all we had to do was to extend each primary pipe three inches and everything would clear the zero roll bars. The collector was a flat four into one similar to the one we used on the Grinch..

The schedule glitch was that Gary had to go to Houston for the next two weeks to attend some company required seminars. They were not being held in New Orleans because of the conflict with Mardi Gras. The stretching of the exhaust system would have to wait for his return.

A New Toy

2009-02-28T10:04:00.009-06:00

It took a while but David and I were finally able to get our planets aligned and I was off to Langley to pick up the car.

Before I left I did the usual checks on the trailer. I realized that while the ramps work well when clamped down on a tire they were not designed to ride well when there was no car there. In order to get rid of the problem of the ramps flapping around in the breeze and breaking the hinges I came up with a simple solution.

I took two pieces of scrap 1 X 12 I from my lumber pile and cut them to the same length. Then I drilled a small starter hole in the center of each end and screwed in a ¼” lag screw, leaving about an inch sticking out. When the heads of the lag screw were cut off that produced a small metal pin. Then I drilled four holes; two twenty six inches from the hinges in the center of wheel tracks and two twenty six inches from the hinge in the center of the ramps.

When the boards were placed so that the pins went through the holes and the tie down straps pulled tight, the boards formed a brace the kept the ramps from moving. Worked like a champ.

No matter how you cut it the trip from LaPlace to Langley is a bone crusher. I had tried to arrange it out so that Rusty could make the trip with me but work schedules nixed that idea. Instead we swapped cars and he drove the Mercedes wagon and I borrowed his truck. I got off to a late start but forged ahead.

I had used Map quest to select a route to Langley. It worked. The instructions were easy to follow and I had no problems with them. I did not realized however that there were that many two lane roads left in the entire country. I think it took me over all of the ones remaining in Mississippi and Arkansas.

I arrived at David’s late in the afternoon on the second day.

David was just great and helped get the car loaded and strapped down. By the time we had chatted a bit and got everything loaded up it was well after dark and the ice storm warnings were becoming bothersome. The temperature in Oklahoma was in the twenty’s. Way too cold for this hot house flower.

David suggested a different route going back which turned out to be wonderful. It was all multilane highway and much easier on the driver than the trip up. I might have been a few miles longer but the comfort made it well worth while.

So, three audio books and 1500 miles of driving and I was back home with a new project to work on.

2009-01-10T15:08:00.003-06:00

On the No Problem Raceway Chat board this month was the following announcement:

Posted December 26, 2008 12:34 PM
No Problem Raceway (NPR) has entered into a purchase agreement with U.S. Racing Club, Inc. (USRC) wherein which NPR will sell a portion of the road course and supporting acreage that will allow USRC to develop up to 100 acres for exclusive use by their road racing members.Under the terms and conditions as agreed upon, NPR will continue to own and operate the drag strip, but will make the existing road course available to USRC and other groups on selected weekends until the new development is complete.USRC intends to add a two-mile extension to the existing road course that will allow their members unrestricted access, even during drag racing events. USRC also plans to build a members-only clubhouse and construct condo units available to members.The land for the new construction and buildings is located on the northern side of the drag strip, which will not interfere with drag race activities. Exact details and drawings will be made public as they come available. This agreement will allow NPR to focus all of our efforts into drag racing operations. Construction for the expansion of the road course is expected to begin in 2009.

I understand That part of the deal is that the Grand Bayou series of races will continue for a period of at least seven years. If all plans go as expected we can also assume that we will start seeing some SCCA events and probably some NASA events as well. The new course will be designed to accommodate them.

This development of “Country Club” race parks is a fairly new trend that is going on around the country. In a way it is similar to building a subdivision around a golf course except that in this case the central feature is a Road Racing course. The condos are sold or leased to businesses that sponsor cars or sell racing related products, racers who want to stay at the track on race weekends, etc.

There a couple of new parks in Texas that are similar, including Houston Motor Sports Ranch and another near Dallas.

Now we are starting to have some fun.

A quick Update

2009-01-10T15:06:00.000-06:00

It took four work sessions up at Gary’s but Hugh’s car is now back on it’s wheels and back at home.

The are still the multiple alignments that have to be done as well as checking all the camber and toe in measurements. Then there is the body work that needs to be repaired.

About the body work; Hugh and I pretty much agreed that it is not terribly productive to try to get it all repaired this close to the end of the season. (Usually during the off season we tear everything down and make any changes we are going to make in the body and paint work on the car)

What we are planning to do is put a bandaide on the cut in the nose and just replace the tzus fasteners that were damaged. During the off season we can make the real repairs and repaint the car.

We will be doing about the same thing to mine except there will not be so many damage repairs to make.

A New Toy

2009-01-10T14:43:00.005-06:00

Ok. It’s official. I’ve given up on trying to wedge my fat ass into a car that is designed to fit a smaller guy. It just isn’t going to work.

It should be a fast car, it’s good looking, and it should handle like a dream…….but it just ain’t big enough for a full sized driver.

Sure, I could actually drive the car, but I would never be comfortable enough in it to really go fast. In this class that’s not enough. You have got to be able to put the car on the edge and hold it there.

I will eventually drive the Grinch but probably not in competition. After all this time I developed a real affection for it and really want to drive it and see if my changes worked. I’ll drive it on test days just to see what other changes need to be made.

So am I going to give up? No. Blind Mules still can’t see it can’t be done.

I found a Caldwell D13 on Ebay and bought it. I know I can fit in one of those because I used to race one. I LOVED THE CAR. It’s a good looking design and was the first commercially built car to include the zero roll stiffness rear suspension assembly. They handle well and are fun to drive. More importantly they fit fat guys. This shot is one taken at Texas World Speedway about twenty years ago That’s me in the car talking to Milton Kruger, a photographer, who occasionally crewed for me.

My car number then was forty five because I was forty five when I got back to racing again. The number on the Grinch is sixty nine because I was sixty nine when I first started trying to get it back on a track. (Besides I like the number) The number on the Caldwell will be seventy two because you have to follow tradition on something, even when it is something silly like your age.

So what are we going to be racing? It’s a standard D13 except that the previous owner had started converting it to run Autocross. It has a 1600 cc engine which I understand has virtually no time on it. I don’t know much about the stage of engine prep yet but I’ll learn more about that shortly. It has no carburetor but the intake manifold is set up for a Webber twin throat. I’ll have to change that, cause it ain’t legal. I have already ordered a legal carb that has been tested on a flow bench and set up for this altitude. I spoke to Gary this evening and he has the proper intake manifold to go with it. I’ll also have to come up with and exhaust system.

At the moment I am planning to drive up to Langley Oklahoma to pick up the car sometime next week. Unfortunately I couldn’t go this weekend because David, who has the car, is in South Carolina visiting family. The nerve of some people.

So what dose it look like? Check it out. It won’t look like this long. I’ll have to make it mine.

The Tale of the Phoenix - Part two

2009-01-10T14:35:00.006-06:00

There was a little break in the work while life happened.

Gary’s wife Susie was taken to the hospital with symptoms that look frightenly like a heart attack. Turned out that that was not the problem but all the same….

They did all the test and found something they could start to work on to get the problem fixed. It was work time lost, but we all felt better knowing that she was going to be OK.

Hugh and Gary got in one good day just before Christmas and two good days after.

With Gary providing guidance and Hugh providing most of the welding labor they got the trailing arm mounts back in place.

During the process of looking at stuff they discovered that one of the axle tubes was bent. Gary had a spare of course. It was soon cleaned up, painted and installed. Putting on the axle boot almost brought Hugh to his knees. He ain’t much on detail work.

When they were checking out the final arrangements they discovered that the throttle cable was crushed the cable was binding in the housing.
New cable coming up.

One more weekend and it should be ready to run.

- Except for the body work.
- And the chassis alignment.
- And the toe in settings.
- And checking the front and rear camber settings.
- And the brake adjustments.
- And, and, and………

The Tale of the Phoenix

2009-01-04T12:23:00.006-06:00

After getting the professional estimates for what it would cost to get the car racing again Hugh was pretty down and beginning to think his season was over. He had even borrowed my fresher tires to run the first race. We run on very limited budgets and it was looking pretty much out of sight for this year.

Knowing what needed to be done was not encouraging. We were beyond our personal skill level at fabrication and the cost of hiring it out was beyond his racing budget. The car could not be run as it was, so we were stumped.

When Hugh was feeling like maybe his season was over, we got a call from the Gary up in Hammond. Arrangements were quickly made to take the car to his shop the following weekend.

One of the things that I have always loved about racing Vees is what happens when you have a problem. It is your competitors who pitch in to help you get back on the track and back into action. Of course you do the same thing to help them when they are in your areas of expertise.

When we got there the first task was to separate the car from the trailer. This took a floor jack, a two by twelve, some fabricated supports, a step ladder, a roller skate, one small dog, two water barrels and three beers, but we got ‘er done.

With the body stripped off, we were able to find the parts of the right trailing arm supports that were damaged as well as the cracks in the frame welds.

Gary didn’t even blink. Within a few minuets he decided it was no big problem and was thinking that Hugh could maybe get back on the track and only miss two races. Gary would guide the metal fabrication and welding and we would do the fiberglass and body work.

Remember this is the same guy who had just won the first race of the season because Hugh had not been there to challenge him. If he did nothing he was a shoe in to take the class championship. Now he was about to fix the car that could beat him.

That’s one reason we call him the wizard.

Once the trailing arm connection was re-established we would still have some work to do. All of the standard set ups for the car would have to be redone to make sure it was going to run straight and true.

What the hell, that’s all part of racing. At least he would be racing.

Snow in Louisiana????

2009-01-04T12:18:00.002-06:00

Here's Proof....

Insurance wars……..

2008-11-07T17:50:00.001-06:00

The guy driving the Blazer had a Michigan plates on the vehicle and a permanent address in Florida. He was a construction worker in route to a project in Texas ( he had told Hugh Houston and me Galveston ) Since Galveston had just been hit hard by Hurricane Ike that sort of made sense to me.

On Monday Hugh started the usual round of calls to the various insurance agencies. Yes, we did get the information. Yes there is a police report on file. Yes, yes, yes…..

What was discovered by making a call to the other guys insurance carrier was that his policy had been dropped three months ago for lack of payment.

A call to his home address turned up his mother who had not heard from him since he left for Texas, and no she would not know how to get in touch with him until she heard from him. She promised to have him call as soon as she heard from him. Yeah, sure.

Over the next few days we would learn that the truck was covered by the uninsured motorist clause in Hugh’s policy but the trailer and it contents would not be.

Hugh’s insurance carrier, however, has a policy of going after uninsured motorist with a vengeance. They chase them down and file suit. When they do they file on behalf of the insured and they go after everything. Damage to the main vehicle, damage to the trailer, damage to the trailer contents, pain and suffering on behalf of both the insured driver and passenger, loss of wages for missed work, the whole shooting match. At the end of the litigation Hugh would expect to receive payment of the extra stuff. If the guy had the ability to pay.

That would be WHEN and IF.

Hugh’s back was bothering him by this time so he went to the Doctor who set up an appointment for an MRI session. That would reveal two bulging disc.

He also took the racer over to a local race car shop and got estimates as to what it would cost to make the required repairs on the racer. It turned out to be about the purchase value of the car. The majority of that cost being skilled labor to fabricate and replace the damaged parts and the re-welding of the cracks in the chassis connections caused by the impact.

The truck could not go into the shop for a couple of weeks because of the their current workload, but at least it would be covered. Except for the deductible…

Hugh was not a happy camper.….it got very quiet around the house.

The Wounded Warrior…..

2008-11-07T17:29:00.009-06:00

We had everyone home and in one piece and it was still not even noon. Mel was lying down feeling the results of the pain killers the Doctors had given her. Hugh was dancing around like a drop of water on a hot skillet.

We went out side to take a good look at the damage to the racer. It was not a pretty sight.

The front end had been rammed under the front rails on the trailer. The only thing that saved it was that it hit the winch. The winch had cut into the nose piece and I think got as far as the frame rail that protects the master cylinders before it stopped. Scratch one nose piece. Well, maybe it could be repaired.

It was difficult to tell if the front axle beam was bent or not. We would have to wait until we got the mess untangled to get a better look. Same with the steering arms.

The car was cocked sideways on the trailer. We were not sure whether the trailing arm was bent or not because the impact had sheared off the trailing arm support mounts. We would not know until we stripped the body work off and made a closer examination.

There was some body damage but that was all fiberglass and fairly easy to repair. It just takes time and patience. And money of course.

All in all, the most frightening thing was the trailing arm supports. That was going to take some fabrication and welding. That always cost money. A lot more than just replacing broken parts. We would have to strip the body off to see in there was any damage to the frame, but that must wait until the insurance guys had a look at it. It was going to take some doing to get that car and the trailer untangled.

In the mean time it looked like the Warrior had taken a beating but was determined to struggle on.

And just when everything is going so good…..

2008-11-07T17:20:00.005-06:00

The weekend before the season opening race the Captain of the Korner Krewe scheduled an advanced corner workers school. Hugh and Gary Attended.

Several of the drivers, when they are not competing, will go out and work corners for other events. The Porsche Club, the BMW club, Ferrari Boys and several others hold schooling sessions which require corner workers. We go watch them go around and sometimes learn things not to do.

When the session was over, Gary stopped by our place and showed Hugh how to adjust his valves properly. They were not far off, but every little bit helps.

The following weekends schedule called for a Tech and Practice day on Saturday and racing on Sunday.

Mel came over from Baton Rouge and she and Hugh left early Saturday morning to haul the car to the track. The plan was for them to get the car through its tech inspection and then to work corners for the practice session. Then Hugh would race on Sunday while Mel worked corners.

They had been gone about a half hour when I got a call from Hugh. They had been rear ended while traveling west on I-10. Rusty and I put on our shoes and headed out the door.

It did not take long to find them. By the time we got there the accident vehicles had been moved off the highway and were on the shoulder.

It seemed that Hugh and slowed down with traffic and the guy behind them in a Chevy Blazer didn’t and rammed into the back end of the trailer.

Since the trailer is low, his tires rode up onto the trailer which caused the front end of the trailer to lift, seesaw fashion, and lift the back end of Hugh’s truck enough to force it sideways.

This did several things all at once. He lowered part of the Blazer’s bumper hit the push par ( also known as a transaxle protection device ) and rammed the racer about four feet forward. That is not a good thing as the end of the trailer and its end rails were only about two feet in front of the car.

With the Blazer on the back end of the trailer pushing down and forward, the front end with the trailer hitch was popped loose from the truck and became a battering ram which it then proceeded to pummel the truck which was turned sideways in front of it. It put dents in the front bumper, the hood, the right front fender, the right side door, the right rear quarter panel, the rear bumper and the left rear quarter panel. It didn’t miss much. We’ll get to the race car later.

Mel got her neck twisted in the shake up and the EMT’s put her in an ambulance to go to the closest hospital for examination.

Since the truck was drivable, and there was nothing else we could do to help, Rusty and I followed Mel to the hospital and left Hugh to sort out the accident reports and the insurance paperwork.

After the usual waits and a good check over, Mel was released and we drove her back to the house. She would be stiff all weekend and so would Hugh. Sometimes when the adrenalin is flowing you don’t notice where it hurts. He would know it by Monday.

With Hugh sidelined by the wreck, Gary went on the following day to post the first win the in the class by someone other that Hugh. At least it was done by part of the Blind Mule Crew.

Now that we knew every one was OK, we could take a look at the racer.

The true meaning of Grass Roots Anything….

2008-11-07T16:56:00.010-06:00

The Golf club that Hugh and I belonged to before we started racing was a grass roots organization that succeeded.

Years ago a bunch of guys in LaPlace wanted to play golf and there was no place closer than the other side of New Orleans (50 miles away) to do so. That was a pain in the neck and being of good Cajun stock they decided to do something about it.

They scouted around and found some farmland, close in, that could be had for a good price since the old folks wanted out of the hard work and the kids had no desire to farm.

The group got together raised enough money to make a down payment and bought the farm. From there they began recruiting members and before long were able to assure that the mortgage payments would be met. Then they went to work.

Understand this about Cajuns. They are not lazy people. Relaxed, casual, fun loving… yes, but not lazy.

They laid out and built a golf course on that farm. Within a couple of years they were able to play on a regular basis. They hired a pro who was able to guide them even further and the course began to improve, The pro hired a grounds keeper and the course improved again. They made subtle changes in the course layout and the play was improved again.

They built a Clubhouse and a pro shop and expanded the operations to add more social functions so the rest of the family could enjoy what they were building. The built a swimming pool and added tennis courts an a driving range.

All of this within the framework of the basic membership. Every member of the club owns stock in it. It is still a requirement of becoming a member. And it is the members who support the club. Because they want to play golf and be able to partake in the functions of the club. It succeeds and supports it self and it’s members are happy.

Now of course, the city has grown up and has surrounded the once remote farmland. It is now nestled securely in the center of the community and has subdivisions all around it. It was not planned as an accessory to a land development scheme and perhaps that may be part of its charm and success. It is independent of the housing. That’s grass roots Golf.

Grass roots racing is similar.

When the guy who started No Problem Raceway wanted to play with his Drag Race Cars he need a place to do it. And he found or had the land.

Some friends who were also into racing convinced him that if he were to add a road racing track to the facility it could be made to pay for itself as well.

We make no bones about it. It is drag racing that is the backbone of No Problem Raceway. It brings in crowds of spectators in almost every weekend. The drag cars are fast and exciting to watch if you are into fifteen second races.

For those of us who are road racers, where dedicated racers go wheel to wheel against each other over a twisty difficult course, it is the grass roots thing again. We want to race. We want to race against each other and have a ball doing it. If it means we have to show up on “work days” to help make improvements to the track we do so.

After Gustav and Ike we got the call. The storm had blown away the flagging stands.

Since the flag stands are the only way the corner workers have of communicating with drivers during a race it was necessary that they be replaced.

The drivers attention is centered, as it should be, on what is going on around him on the track. He learns quickly however, that he must keep the corner of his eye on what is happening at the flag stand. It needs to be in the same location each lap so we know where to check. It is his first line of warning that something is amiss ahead of him. It is where he gets told that there are problems down stream or that some one faster is coming up behind him. It is also where he will find out that someone has seen that he is leaking fluid which might endanger others on the track or that he has a mechanical problem he might not be aware of. All of these signals come from the flag stand.

And ours were gone.

Grass roots means that you don’t wait for someone to do it for you. You jump in and get it done so you can continue to do what you love doing. It is for this passion that the guys show up when there is a call.

It helps that there are contractors in the group who have the portable tools available to make the job easier. It also helps that they are accustomed to planning projects like this and are willing to put in the effort to design the new stands, estimated the amount of material required to build them, have it on hand and then organize the workforce to get the job done. It helps that they are also among drivers who want to compete. That’s grass roots. The helpers are from jobs and professions as varied as you might imagine. From electricians to lawyers. That’s grass roots

The plan was to build all the stands in one place and the move them out to the needed locations with a fork lift. The roof would be installed once they were in place. In one good work day and it all got done.

That’s grass roots racing.

Once more into the breach dear friends.............

2008-10-16T21:30:00.000-05:00

We had a couple of days after the Gustav clean up before we had to start preparation for hurricane Ike. Most of the stores had reopened and life was back as close to normal as it gets here. Even Bull’s Corner, our usual watering hole, was back in business.

Ike had clobbered Cuba, made the turn into the Gulf of Mexico and started North. It was looking for a while like it was going to be a repeat of Gustav but the path began to slant a bit more west and head toward Texas. As it got closer to shore, I got in on the landfall pool down at Bull’s. I picked Freeport and missed by about fifteen miles. It hit Galveston.

Hurricanes, in this hemisphere, swirl with a counter clockwise rotation. ( In the southern hemisphere they turn clockwise and are called Typhoons. I wonder if a storm has ever gone from one hemisphere to the other and if it did, what happened when it crossed the equator. Somebody look it up and let me know.)

We were on the east side of the circulation. That meant that if the storm was traveling 15 miles per hour and had winds circulating at one hundred and fifty, the winds that blew over you would be at a hundred and sixty five mph.

Fortunately we were far enough to the east that we did not get extremely high winds. Ike however, was a very wide storm. It did get pretty gusty and we had another couple of days of very heavy rainfall, but that was about it. Leaves not already blown from the neighbors oaks had another chance and took full advantage of it.
Our race car shop is under an open carport, enclosed on two sides by a six foot fence and on one side by the house. As you might imagine it was like an open waste basket and all the leaves got trapped in there and could not get out. They we more than ankle deep all over the floor, in back of every item on the shelves, in every open container, and even under that tarps and in side the race cars.

So we had a lot of clean up to do and the season was fast approaching. The first race was scheduled for early October. My target was the second race in November, but we still had to get Hugh ready.

So here we go……….. Again.

The Aftermath

2008-09-10T18:13:00.002-05:00

Here's the last one, glad everybody made it through ok!
George
************************************

Monday 7:22 AM

This part of the cycle is over.

We lost water pressure at 7:00 AM on Monday morning. Hugh had just finished his shower and had plugged the bath tub to fill it up to use as a reserve water supply (for doing things like flushing toilets). Unfortunately we did not get a tub full but we could cross our fingers and hope.

We lost electricity at 7:30 AM.

We regained water pressure at about 9:00 Am. We are not sure exactly when that was because we were sitting out on the front porch, in an area protected from the direction of the wind flow, watching the wind and rain blow through the neighborhood. There wasn't much else to do.

We were not aware that the valve in the bathtub had been left open until we found water on the floor of the bathroom. Too late at that point. As it turned out, we would not lose water again during the storm. We really didn't even need the reserve supply.

Bean and Liz, our neighbors across the street, lost two trees in their front yard. One of them broke the top half away and left one part of the trunk. The other just leaned over until it was pretty much on the ground.

There were a few trees down further up the block.

Other than that there was not a lot of damage in our immediate area. Much less than Katrina three years ago (almost to the day). Lots of branches down and of course skads of leaves and wind driven debris on the ground. No where near as much roof damage as Katrina. On the other had most of the roofs have been replaced within the last three years (as a result of Katrina) and maybe that had something to do with it.

Our back yard, which seems to be the low point of the four adjacent lots, filled up with water, which was no surprise. It does that every time it rains here. Which it does often. This time it put about a half inch of water on the floor of the shop. That happens once or twice a year even without hurricanes.

By Monday night it was pretty much over. Except for a few wind gust and the rain. It rained all day Tuesday. We spent a lot of time on the front porch with our books and coffee cups.

We had thought far enough ahead to make sure we had a couple of bottles of gas for the grille. It has a side burner which is handy for making coffee and stuff like that.
We also have a small portable generator which we sometimes take to the track to run power tools. It comes in handy to run the refrigerator, electric coffee pot, and a couple of lights. Power outages in this area are not unusual either.

Mostly it was hot and sticky. Even with the breeze, for a couple of days after the storm it was hot. We had temperatures as high as eighty degrees at six o'clock in the morning. Even cold showers were welcome after the shock of that first breath taking step under the water.

Wednesday the neighbors began to come home. That's when the fun began.

I saw people going into neighbors yards to rake up leaves and bag them so that it would not be so bad a return for people coming back. With more people retuning, we began to hear more and more generators crank up as the machine crazy Coonasses in the area got down to the business for getting back to normal. Grilles were brought out and Wednesday night at least ten families were fed a hot meal of chicken, home made Italian or Deer sausages, pork chops, steaks, potato salad laced with Fennel, steamed broccoli and what ever else any one had that was threatening to go bad from an unprotected freezer or refrigerator. Naturally, all of that had to be washed down with cold beer. Cajuns don't just make do, they make a party. Parties like this happen in the driveway so that every one can see them and join if they happen to be going by. They will actually go out and flag you in off the street.

Thursday was spent cleaning up. Chain saws appeared and Beans trees were cut up and stacked at the curb to be picked up by the trash collectors. Stacks of bagged leaves and debris began to line the curbs. We borrowed Snake's bilge pump and began to drain the back yard. Liz, Bean's wife, decided she wanted to get rid of all the trees in the front yard and so Bean and Snake ( Cajuns absolutely love nicknames and everybody has at least one. They even use mine from when I was a kid which no one but my brother remembered ) cut down the remaining tree and added it to the firewood stack at the curb. They don't have a fire place. If they did it would have been split and stacked behind the garage to dry.

Thursday nights dinner was in Bean's driveway. It had two new dishes I had never encountered. One was called Pastalya. Essentially it is jambalaya but cooked with pasta. rather than rice. The other was butter beans and shrimp and it will become a staple for me. It's some kind of good. As with most Cajun dishes it starts with a Roux, a light golden one, to which gets added butter beans and river shrimp. If you don't happen to have any of the small tender fresh water river shrimp you can use regular bay shrimp but you will have to cut them in smaller pieces.

Right now we are waiting for the trash pick up crews to come. there are at least twelve bags of leaves waiting for them at our curb well as a pile of cut up tree limbs.. It is mostly oak leaves which is interesting. We don't have any oak trees in our yard. I hope they get here before the end of the week.

Of coarse the city of Laplace was closed. Winn Dixie and Home Depot were the first stores to reopen on Thursday.

At home depot there were three lines, one for portable air conditioners, one for portable generators and a third for general merchandise like rakes, hoes, chain saws etc.

At Winn Dixie there was a line half way around the store waiting to get in to search the already bare shelves. The fresh produce and meat departments were closed. They didn't get fresh eggs, milk or bread until Friday.

The electrical power came back on Friday at about three thirty in the afternoon. With in two hours we also regained cable and internet access.

We like to share so sent Hanna up the east coast. Now we are tracking Hurricane Ike. It is currently passing over Cuba and is expected to turn up into the Gulf of Mexico. If it follows the predicted track as well as Gustave did, it would hit here next weekend.

This week I will change the oil in the generator and revisit all the preparatory steps we made last. I just hope the stores get some trucks in in time to replenish some of the supplies we used up in Gustave.

It has been an interesting week.

Frank

Almost Here

2008-09-10T18:11:00.003-05:00

Installment Number 3
George
**************************************

6:30 AM Sept. 1, 2008

It is gusty and wet. Isn't that a surprise. We do have tornado alerts occasionally.

Gustave is still slightly off shore and expected to make landfall sometime this morning. Probably within the next two hours. It has weakened but is hanging on.

All of our neighbors have bailed. We will be the only occupied house on either side of the street for a half dozen homes in either direction.

The television people have been going crazy trying to find something to talk about since yesterday. They are providing twenty four hour coverage on an event that only needs to be checked every four to six hours to see a change. It gets boring pretty quick.

I'll keep sending as long as I can. Louisiana Light and Power usually fails when we have heaving rain. They take vacations when real storms show up.

Frank

Second Installment

2008-09-10T18:10:00.001-05:00

Here's the next in the series.
George

*************************************
Aug. 31, 2008

We have been busy clearing up[ loose debris in the yard, fastening down blow able items, boarding windows etc. The race cars are covered and the tarps bungied down.

The stores in the area have mostly closed as people have started to bail out. Gas is in very short supply and folks are having to go to several stations before they find any. We all filled up late last week knowing this would happen.

We have laid in our supplies of drinking water, candles, batteries, working portable radios, flashlights, extra coffee supplies, canned goods, butane stoves, charcoal grilles, and filled butane bottles.

Many of the parishes in New Orleans area have issued mandatory evacuation notices.

We will continue to keep you posted as long as we can.

Frank

Gustave Is Coming

2008-09-10T18:07:00.001-05:00

I thought you might find it interesting to read a sting of emails that Pop sent over the last few days.
George

***************************************************************

Since it has become traditional for my brother to give me hurricanes for my birthday I am preparing for this years gifts.

Right now the plans are for Hugh, Rusty and I to ride Gustave out here. It's too early to tell about Hanna and her little sister yet.

Last time (Katrina) the number of cursing bands of looters in vans and trucks were prominent enough around here to make it seem like a good idea to be around (and preferably armed). We will be doing it again this time.

It looks like Gustave might just come up the gulf and hit slightly west of us, but it is a hurricane and therefore not totally predictable.

All the same we will try to keep you informed and up too date as much as possible.

Just in case, my cell phone number is XXX-XXX-XXXX. The house number is XXX-XXX-XXXX.

If the electricity is out the chances are that both of these numbers will be out also but what they heck, it never hurts to try them anyway.

Here we go............cross your fingers

It's The Little Things...

2008-07-18T17:07:00.004-05:00

It used to be that when you went racing you did all your timing with a stopwatch. With the coming of small computer chips new types of watches became inexpensive and very exotic. I collect timing devices and the new digital watches blow the old analogs out of the water. I have one which records lap times to the thousandth of a second and then pauses while you write down the lap time. Never fear, it has already started timing the next lap. After giving you fifteen seconds to record the time it shifts back to the new lap it is timing. Pretty slick.

Even slicker is the system of transponders currently in use by most tracks.

It used to be that among the volunteers who came out to help put on a race were the timing and scoring people. One recorder could time maybe two cars, sometimes three in a pinch. That means in a field of thirty there were fifteen to thirty people required to keep track of the lap times for all the cars. At the end of the race someone had to sit down and sort out who was in what position based on the lap times. It was cumbersome, difficult and required a lot of dedicated but unsung helpers.

Now it is different. Each car is required to carry a transponder. As it runs over a control point on the track it sends a signal to a receiver which records the passing of the car down to a thousandth of a second. A computer then sorts it all out and it only takes one or two people to manage the whole show. The information is published at the track but it is also sent off to a national database. When you get home from the track you can download your lap times for the whole deal, both qualifying sessions and the race, from the database. Not only that, you can get a lap chart which shows you where every car on the track was at the end of each lap during the race. Neat.

Our team still manually records lap times however, because it gives us a handle on what is going on while the race is in progress. This is all done and recorded on a time sheet which has, in addition, places to write down things like weather, special track conditions, problems with the car, spinouts, crashes, and stuff like that. It is also provides a reminder for the shop sessions that will come between this and the next race. If you look over several sheets and see a recurring problem then you know where you have to work next before it bites you again.

Click the image above to download a sample timesheet

At the bottom of the time sheet is a little formula that lets you compute the average speed in miles per hour for the lap based on a number divided by the lap time in seconds. Simple. I added this so that people could convert lap times to something they are familiar with. Unfortunately I think it is misleading and not very important.

Miles per hour is a good handle if you are on a long drive, say from New Orleans to Houston, Chicago or Atlanta. Most people are familiar with it. It lets you do a little mental arithmetic and estimate when you will arrive or how long the trip will take. On a race car, miles per hour are not important but feet per second are. That gives you a real scale to use not only in judging how fast you are going but how fast you are in comparison to other drivers.

Lets say that at No Problem Raceway you post a lap at one minute and forty four seconds. That gives you an average speed of 62.3 miles per hour for one lap of the one point eight mile track with fourteen turns. Not bad. If I post a lap of one minute and forty two seconds the average speed is 63.5 MPH. 1.2 MPH, not much difference.

But remember we don’t drive for an hour. These are racing cars. Our average race is only thirteen laps or twenty three and a half miles.

The difference between laps of one minute forty four seconds (91.38 FPS)and one minute forty two (93.17 FPS) seconds is roughly one point eight feet per second and that is significant. In the one minute and forty four seconds you took to cover a lap I am now (one hundred and four (seconds) times one point eight (ft) = one hundred and eighty seven feet ahead of you. Multiply that by thirteen laps.

I’ll take that anytime.

In racing every thing is measured in inches. From building the cars to computing the speeds, it is the little increments that catch up with you.

Musical Cars

2008-07-18T16:40:00.005-05:00

It is starting to look like the formula one “silly season”. In formula one’s off season the drivers play hop scotch with the different teams as they align the next years rides. With us it seems to be the cars.

Hugh an I had helped Mike Norton find and purchase a car from a guy in North Carolina. We had even gone over to Georgia and picked it up for him. As it turned out, Mike got so busy he wasn’t able to race the car at all and decided to sell. We got busy and found him a buyer.

The car has now been purchased by Gary Scurlock, the Wizard of Hammond. Gary took it to his first outing a week ago and had a ball. I think he is hooked for good. I went out and crewed for him, just to help out.

We now have five cars, for sure, for next season. Eventually, Gary will probably finish the Autodynamics he was already working on and we might have still another.

John Hose sold the Panther he bought from Rory to Pat Fox without even driving the car. I think he has decided to race his Corvette instead. That’s a shame but not all bad. At least he will still be racing.

Fox is an ex-drag racer who specialized in Volkswagen powered cars. He has decided to try road racing and has also purchased a second Vee which he plans to use as a rental car. That will be a big help. Not only will we have another car racing but with a rental car available, people will be able to try out the cars to see if they are interested in the class.

Barry should have his C4 ready again by the beginning of the season. He has also purchased a Spec-Miata and is planning to drive them both. Good thing they run in different classes. I don’t know what is happening with Oren and his plans to build a car. So once again it looks like we have a promising field.

Hugh Warrior

Frank Grinch Phoenix ?

Gary Zink C4 Autodynamics ?

Barry Zink C4

Pat Panther Rental Car ?

If we get five cars out and people can see how much fun we are having, the class will really start to grow.

I like that.

2008-06-17T19:05:00.002-05:00

I had one more crack at fitting myself into the car. The remaining problem was the dash hoop braces.
In order to reach the accelerator, brake and clutch pedals I had to be able to bend my knees. If my legs were shorter or the car a little longer, it would not be a problem, but we have to work with what we have.

As it stands, the dash hoop braces and my knees are trying to occupy the same space at the same time. Not a good thing.

The only way I could see to relieve the situation was to remove and relocate the braces. It’s too late to change my knees.

To a certain extent the location of the braces is also determined by the shape of the fiberglass they hide under. (During the original design it is usually the other way around) The braces had to clear the underside of the body work as well as my knobby knees. After the braces are moved the constraining factor becomes the body itself. Harvey Templeton, one of the most innovative car builders ever, once solved a similar problem by simply cutting holes in the body of the car and letting his knees poke through.

I have to assume that his braces were never in the way. That would have been very un-Harvey like. His chassis usually fitted so closely around him that almost no one else could drive them.

By this time the season had ended with Hugh taking the championship as expected. He also ran the charity race and survived. His engine now had fifteen races on it and was getting a little tired but it was still going. An off season tune up is in store.

With a little time to work, I started looking at what still needed to be done to get me in the car. The old braces had to be cut away and new braces installed.

Hugh and I looked it over and decided that I would need to tear down the dash as well since he would be welding in the same area where all the wiring was. As long as we were doing that I might as well go ahead and make the changes I wanted to the dash setup. I had figured out a way to clean up the wiring and simplify the switching at the same time. It would require making a new dash but I already had the material needed for that. It would just take a little time. This was going to be my last shot at getting me comfortable in the car so I wanted it to be a good one.

On the other hand I had recently made a trip to Houston to pick up another chassis that I had purchased. If this one didn’t work out I was planning to go to work on the new one. I would get some one else who is bit smaller to drive the car until I could sell it. I have a kid in Baton Rouge in mind who is a real hot shoe. He ran a couple of laps in Hugh’s car that no one has matched yet, and that was his first time in the car. Race cars sell better if they are proven fast.

If it did work, then I would race it and work on the new one as time and budget allowed. When both were running, one could go up for sale or become a rental car for people wanting to try the class.

And just when I thought I was making head way I discovered a mid engine exhaust system manufactured by a group on the west coast. It was a balanced system that looked elegantly clean. I ordered one and got that sinking feeling when I realized that it was about thirty percent of the cost of the system I had had built.
I kicked myself, but I knew that you never find things like that until after you have already spent a fortune doing something else. It’s one of those rules.

After it arrived, I felt a little better. It didn’t fit the Grinch. Part of the frame was in the way.

It would fit the new chassis however, so I was another step along the way on that one.

Comfort

2008-03-03T06:41:00.001-06:00

Let’s talk about comfort for a minute. This is important. There are several kinds, but lets only worry about two.

One is passenger car comfort.

Nowadays, if you listen to manufacturers, comfort seems to be defined by the number of cup holders, flat screen DVD players and the type of stereo and navigation system your car has. To this you add seats, covered with exotic leathers, with seat warmers and which can slide forward or back or change the tilt to suit the driver. Some even recline to aide in your napping. (I’m surprised they don’t have inflatable pillows and those little blankets and slippers they give you on long range airline flights) Then there are adjustable steering wheels and thermostatically adjustable air conditioning and heaters. We won’t even discuss electrically operated windows, door locks and side mirrors.

And then there is race car comfort. This is sterner stuff.

The steering wheel may be removable to allow you to get into and out of the car, but there are no adjustments which can be made from the cockpit. That must be done before you get to the track. The side mirrors are adjusted, once, before you start a race. No A/C, but you get at pretty good breeze in an open cockpit at a hundred miles an hour.

You don’t just get into a race car, you put it on.

The drivers seat is fixed and non flexible. It may be padded but it should not move. The driver is strapped into the seat by a five belt safety harness that is cinched down so tightly that it prohibits any movement at all. The driver’s trunk, from shoulders to hips, should be solidly anchored to the car. His arms and legs must be free to move; to work the steering wheel, shift lever, accelerator, and brake and clutch pedals. Other than those, no movements are possible or desirable.

The cockpit should mold closely around the driver to aide in keeping him snugly in place. There should be adequate space for him to reach the instruments he must deal with (steering wheel, shift lever and peddles) but not an inch more. There should be no braces that constrict or impair the required movements. Where a brace is close (these generally occur at the shoulders, elbows or knees) it should be padded to keep from bruising the driver during hard cornering or heavy bumps.

There should be a rest for your left foot. Your right foot will be planted firmly on the accelerator. Nothing is worse than trying to get through a tight corner with your left leg flopping around. If it is braced against something it makes it easier to feather the throttle with your right foot.
It is minimal. It is what is required and nothing more……………or less.

That is race car comfort.

Then the driver can concentrate on what he is there to do. Drive the car. As fast as he can.

Since you are firmly anchored to the machine you have an amazing feel for what the car is doing. It’s not just the seat of you pants. It also your hips, back, neck, head, shoulders, arms, elbows, knees and feet. You feel everything. Centrifugal forces act on everything that is not tied down and you are very much aware of it. You feel acceleration in your back and neck just as you feel deceleration in the straps that keep you in the seat. You feel lateral movement when your shoulders press against the side panels of the cockpit and you knees get pushed sideways into a brace.

If, however, you can not achieve these minimal comforts; if you have difficulty moving enough to do your task, there is no joy in Mudville. In a way it’s like wearing a pair of shoes that don’t quite fit. It can be done, but it is not going to be fun and you’re going to pay for it later.

Trying to drive a car at high speeds when your knees are being brutalized by a steel bar or you can barely reach a shift lever, not only takes the pleasure out of it, it is dangerous. If you have to think ahead and make minor body shifts to accomplish a task, then what happens when a surprise occurs and you don’t have time to plan your next move?

There is a very thin line between “race car comfort” and disturbing distraction.

I was having to study that line very carefully. I had a lot riding on it.

Role Call

2008-03-02T10:55:00.002-06:00

Hugh has been showing up for every race and has been doing well. His stack of first place trophies has grown from one to five and he has locked up the season championship for the class.

Unfortunately he remains the only one in the class. A win is a win however, no matter which way you slice it. I just wish we had some competition for him. Everyone had the same opportunity to show up. What had looked so promising at the beginning of the season has not worked out as well as hoped.

My difficulties you know about.

Barry was feeling as discouraged as I was, but at least he had been able to get his car on the track for some practice sessions and the starts of a couple of races. With Oren’s help he is on the road to recovery. He hopes to make the Charity race.

Rory White, who had given Hugh his only defeat last year, has purchased a Formula Continental car (much faster class but still open wheel) and has elected to race it instead of the Formula First. Since both classes run at the same time and Rory could only drive one at a time, he sold the Panther to John Hose.

John also owns two cars. His other racer is a Corvette. At least he they are in different classes which don’t run simultaneously. All the same, John has not made it to the track yet. In either class. He complains about not getting enough time away from work or some other such lame excuse. He needs to get his priorities straight.

Mike Norton, who is still an owner in the restaurant, has taken over the management on an engineering company. Between those two pass times, (and Bonnie’s growing list of honeydos on the new house they purchased after the hurricane got their old one) Mike has his plate very full. His car is up for sale.

No one has heard from Gary lately.

So for the moment there it sits. There is one more race left in this season with the second annual charity race to follow. Hugh has the class championship locked up and no one is likely to oppose him unless Barry gets there faster than expected. All that nice momentum we had developed has ground to a halt. We need a jump start to get it rolling again.

And I have an idea.

Barry's Car is Hot!

2008-02-27T18:45:00.004-06:00

At least I wasn’t the only one having problems. Our friend Barry Broussard from Morgan City seemed to be snake bit.

He had purchased a good looking auto cross car which already sported wide tires mounted on light weight aluminum rims and a1600 CC engine. It seemed to be a killer combination which should have given him an edge in our class. It didn’t work out that way.

He had run the car during the last race of the previous season but had DNF’ed by the simple mistake of running out of gas. Most of us have done that at one time or another. We are not proud of it but it makes us sympathetic. In my very first race I died when I was running second and closing in on the leader. It makes you feel sort of dumb. It’s embarrassing and you don’t often tell people about it.

As great as Barry’s car looked it had built in booby traps. The car had been set up to run Autocross where the cars ran hard for a minute and a half and shut down to cool off. That is different that from the stresses put on a motor by running hard for fifteen or twenty laps without a stop.

When you only run one lap at a time you don’t have the extreme heat buildup you get on longer runs. In Vee racers we compensate for that by ducting large amounts of air over the heads, cooling fins and the oil cooler. These are “air cooled” engines after all. Barry’s car wasn't set up that way.

Barry was out for the first race of the season and ran well. For three laps. Then the engine seized up. DNF. (Did Not Finish)

Since, like most of us, Barry is not a trained mechanic, he took his car to an engine builder in Baton Rouge.

After the builder had torn the engine down he reported that it had a cracked case and a host of other problems. He suggested building a complete new engine and Barry agreed to it.

It took him almost three months to dawdle his way through the over priced job he did. Half the season had passed before Barry could get back on the track again.
This time it lasted two laps before the engine seized up.

Barry called the engine builder who informed him that they did not warranty racing engines and he would require an up front payment to even tear it down to see what the problem was, not to mention what he would charge to correct his own mistakes. I guess there are thieves every where. I have deliberately not mentioned the builders name. But if you are in the Baton Rouge area you might want to check with Barry for references on engine builders. He knows at least one not to recommend.

A saving grace turned out to be a friend of Barry’s named Oren Deupre who is a mechanic and a boat racer. The two of them got together and decide to rebuild the engine themselves. Well, Oren is doing it while Barry learns.

When they tore the engine down they found lots of brass in the strainer and all the indications of spun bearings. The original engine builder had not seated them properly and they failed.

At present they hope to have the car out for the charity race. With luck I’ll join them.

The up side of all of this is that Oren is getting interested and may want to shift his racing from boats to cars.

Still Plowing Forward

2008-02-25T22:40:00.009-06:00

I had been working on the brakes when I discovered that the left front was not working properly. The brake cylinder seemed to be OK so the problem had to be in the hydraulic lines.

I had never been too happy with the setup on the brake lines. If they worked fine I was going to leave them, but I didn’t like the way they looked. The fittings seemed strange to me and the appearance of the whole deal looked sloppy. I know, the rule is “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it“. I did it anyway. And regretted it later.

I went to NAPA an purchased a flaring tool, the brass fittings required and enough steel brake line to do the job. While I was at it I got a tubing bender as well.

We already had tubing cutters because we use them when building golf clubs. These are all small tools and not expensive.

With the car on the jack stands, I started striping out the old brake lines. It didn’t take long.

When I began to examine the old fittings I discovered the problem. With this type of fitting you had to have the passages lined up just so or they would not work. Some how one of them had be come twisted out of line and cut off the flow of brake fluid. Why anyone would use that type of fitting on a race car, which is subject to heavy vibration, escapes me.

I got busy and before long had a new set of lines run and all the brand new fittings snugged up tight. The job looked a lot neater I felt like I had accomplished something.

By this point the season was starting and I missed the first race.

Brian Kemp, who is managing the racing program this year, had established a new Formula First Class for us. It would be nice not having to compete against all other cars with much higher horse power knowing that we did not stand a chance of winning. Our problem was to get enough cars out to justify it.

Barry and Hugh were all set up to run the first and did.

Unfortunately about two laps into the race Barry’s engine froze up and he had to retire. Hugh went on to win the class. They gave him a nice plaque for his efforts.

Trying to be ready for the second race I got Hugh to help me bleed the brakes and clutch lines. We topped the all up and got ready to begin.

When The brake pedal went down we were flooded with brake fluid. Every damned one of the new fittings leaked.

I had purchased what was recommended but it was the wrong thing. Eventually I discovered which fittings would work and ordered enough to do the job.

I just couldn’t get my self to do it.

Maybe in any project you reach a point where you are ready to give up. For a while at least I had reached mine. I was temporarily burnt out. Even to the point of getting pissed off with Hugh when he teased me about how long it was taking to get this car on the track. So for a couple of months it just sat there.

I think maybe it was all the little things plus the growing realization that I may never be able to fit myself in this car. Oh sure, I could physically get in it and drive it but it would never be comfortable enough to really compete with. Not for me anyway. For a smaller driver it would be fine.

But Blind Mules are still blind mules. I wasn’t through yet.

Getting Ahead(er)

2008-02-25T22:22:00.006-06:00

When we were trying to find someone to mount our new tires, we ran across a fellow who advertised as a “Performance Specialist“. He had done a good job on my tires.

They didn’t leak. Hugh had had his mounted somewhere else and his did. I tried him first.

This guy did exhaust systems and tires. He had told me he could build custom headers. When I took the car to him however, he started to back peddle. This was a whole new ball game and he didn’t want any part of it. He was one of those guys who are great as long as you can take it off the shelf and bolt it on. If you have to invent and fabricate as you go???

He did however; refer me to a someone in Reserve. Remember Reserve? (I was beginning to think we should call this car the Reserve Special. Remember when I had the air scoops fabricated? That shop was in Reserve also)

Not a mile and a half from Brandon’s shop was a converted gas station where Butch Herring works his wonders. I drove over and talked with Butch for a while. Both he and his wife turned out to be real nice people. He also owned the great looking customized 1950 Ford out side that he was slowly working on.

A good set of headers can help increase power by three or four horses. Doesn’t sound like much when you say it that way. When you realize that this is a seven to nine percent increase for us, it becomes significant. On the other hand a poor set of headers can take you the other way.

It is important that the bends in a header system be mandrel bent so that they maintain the same diameter all they way around.. With a normal tube bender, like the ones you usually see in a muffler shop, the pipe gets necked down smaller where the bend occurs. This causes additional back pressure in the system and robs horse power. We don’t have that much to lose.

I had pretty much figured out where I wanted the system to go and what configuration it should take. I even had pictures of systems similar to the one I wanted. Butch and I discussed it and decided we would tackle it that following weekend when he had some slack time coming.

In the mean time I ordered a series of mandrel bent pipes in the shapes I thought we would need and had them delivered to Butches shop. We also got a fresh set of flanges from the same place. (J.C. Whitney rides again) I must have done alright because there were no parts left over when we got through.

I don’t think we had the car off the trailer five minutes before people driving along River Road (which is where Butches shop is) started pulling off and coming in to see just what in blazes we were doing. Several got their goodies by sitting in the car, but most just wanted to look and ask questions. Ever the marketer, I did my best to answer them and make it sound as interesting and fun as possible.
It took us most of the day but in the end Butch had welded together all those pieces of bent tubing and it was looking like and exhaust system. It was different than the original but that was just fine with me. It would now allow me room to add a zero roll rear suspension if I decided to go that way. With the old system it would not have been possible.
Adding up the cost of the mandrel bent tubes, shipping and Butches labor I probably spent about what a set of Roxanne’s headers would have cost but at least I knew they fit.

It's A Start

2008-02-25T21:58:00.007-06:00

Just for kicks, and because I had not done it for a while, I decided to fire it up and hear it run. It’s a reward therapy thing.

It’s a good thing I tried. It refused to fire. I could just barely get a little click every so often when the starter button engaged but it was certain that things were not working properly. The starter button and maybe the starter were suspect.

Now this is the kind of nightmare that I would not wish upon someone with bad -breath. Every time I run into something like this, it turns out to be just the tip of a berg big enough to supply ice for Mike’s martinis for several lifetimes. Guess what. This was no exception.

First I used a test light to check the starter button. Sure enough it had gone bad. It would work…..on occasion; but who wants to sit on the starting grid hoping this would be one of them.

OK, task one. Replace the starter button.

I pulled the old button and headed for the parts store to find a replacement. No such luck, they had none which were direct replacements. I tried one that looked like it should fit. It didn’t. The space behind the small dash in the car is very tight. We are not talking watch maker clearances here, but if it was not just right it would not work because the terminals would hit something that could short them out.

I tried four different starter buttons and six different parts houses before I found a replacement. This is the kind of thing that eats up your time.

It still didn’t solve the problem. The other player in this conspiracy was the starter. It wouldn’t work either.

Maybe the high humidity causes them to corrode or something, I don’t know. It had worked just fine before. Now it would not even try.

We had had this same problem with Hugh’s car and it turned out to be a faulty ignition switch. I checked that out with a test light and it seemed to be OK.

At least I knew where to get a new starter. Finding parts for cars, even one as common as a Volkswagen can be tricky. Especially when the parts are for engines which are forty five years old. They just don’t keep them on the shelf anymore.

My friends at NAPA would order one for me but they wanted the case for the old one.

Surprise, surprise. Remember the iceberg?

To take out starter you have to first remove the exhaust system. That normally was not a big problem. What the hell, this was not a normal car.

The exhaust headers came out without too much trouble and that should have been clue enough to worry me. I hadn’t caught on yet, but I was about to. With the exhaust headers off, replacing the starter was a snap. It went in easy as pie. I should have known better.

While I had the exhaust headers off the car I thought it might be nice to clean them up and give them a nice new coat of high temperature paint.

These were the headers that had been on the car since it was new. I could tell that by looking at the pictures taken by Mike Schiffer back in the Grinch’s prime.

I got out the sandpaper and started cleaning up the rust spots on the pipes. As I did I also began to take a good look at the pipes themselves. I shouldn’t have done that. The more I looked the more I found.

The flanges, where the header meets up with the exhaust ports, were cracked, leaking, and warped to hell and back. When I looked at the exhaust ports, I could see burns where the hot exhaust gasses had been leaking. This causes loss of power, can lead to burnt valves and also provides a fire potential.

In addition, the pipes themselves were full of little pinholes where the rust had eaten through. There was also evidence of leaking where the collector met the primary pipes.

In other words the entire exhaust system needed to be replaced. This is the sort of thing that will put fear in your heart. There is no such thing as running down to your local AutoZone and picking up a new one. You have to go to a specialty house like Roxanne’s Headers who specializes in Vee exhaust, or find someone to custom build one for you. In this case, since it was a one of a kind car, the latter seemed about the only option.

This was going to hurt. My wallet already had a dent in it from the roll bar and the starter. Now we were looking at custom work again and that always means money.

Origins Of The Species

2008-02-20T15:53:00.000-06:00

Why Blind Mule?

Someone finally asked. It was my aunt Louise.

It was this way……..

When I was a kid growing up in a pre Disney Orlando, I lived in a small neighborhood called Colonial Town.

On the corner diagonally across from us lived Mr. Carpenter, the neighborhood handy man who was always available to help mend kids kites and broken toys. He just did stuff like that. We followed him like the Pied Piper.

In those day most of us ran around in shorts with no shoes or shirts. We were brown as berries and considered it normal. Mr. Carpenter used to pinch an inch of hide and tell us like liked our rubber shirts. No molestation or anything like that, he just thought it was funny. We just thought it hurt.

One day I had broken something of my fathers that I was not supposed to be playing with. I couldn't fix it so I took it to him. He couldn't fix it either. It was too far gone.

Facing the wrath of my old man because I had screwed up his stuff, I was determined that it had to be fixed and kept fussing with it in hopes that a miracle would happen. After too long a time Mr. Carpenter finally drawled " Kid you remind me of an old blind mule I used to have. You can't see it can't be done and you are too damned stubborn to quit".

When I started racing at an age that was way beyond optimum to make it a career but not too late for me to enjoy, it was the same thing. The name seemed right and Blind Mule Racing was born.

Twenty five years later when I decided to go racing again at the age of seventy plus it seemed more right than ever.

Where's the (Roll) Bar?

2008-02-20T15:45:00.007-06:00

The next problem was another tricky one and it was critical in several areas.

Before we get into it too far let me make something clear. First, this car is actually a little bit too small for me. Remember I had purchased it sight unseen and had not had a chance to try it on long distance. I had been depending on measurements supplied by the seller and a little bit of wishful thinking.

It is not unusual for this kind of thing to happen in this class. When it does you just have to adjust the car to the driver as well as possible or get another car. (I couldn’t afford to do that) The cars are not large to begin with and as we have already established I am a full sized driver.

What we are talking about here is the roll over protection bar. It is usually just called the “roll bar” but when you give it its full name the importance of its function clarifies. It is there to protect the driver in the case that the car goes upside down. Remember we do all sorts of things to make it as safe as possible to tool one of these things around. The roll bar and its braces are basic to that cause.

In our case the roll bar was high enough but the braces cut across my arms in such a way as to pin my elbows in. I had limited use of my forearms and could steer but only by moving my hands from the wrist down but not my arms. Also it was difficult to move my arm enough to reach the gear shift. The only way I could change gears was to twist my right hand to the side and move the lever with my fingertips. Try that a dozen times a lap.

The ideal solution would be to move the roll bar brace from where it is to another location and free up my arms. But how do you do that and keep the roll bar braced as solidly as possible.

The perfect place for the brace would be for it to start at the upper point where it currently contacted the roll bar and connect at the junction there the dash hoop hit’s the side frame. This would provide good triangulation and at the same time clear my elbows and free up my arms a bit. Unfortunately it would not clear the bodywork.

I didn’t want to rebuild the whole body so I came up with another solution.

I would increase the size of the brace and tie it in behind where my shoulders were. That would give me as much freedom of movement as possible and still protect my noggin.

Since I am not a welder I had to find someone who could handle the job. The person who came to mind was Brandon Jeffers.

He has a small fabrication shop in Reserve, a little town close by, where he builds Hot Rods, Drag Race cars, and most any thing you want constructed out of metal. He does good work. He ain’t cheap, but he does good work.

I had done several sketches of what I had in mind. I do that a lot. I think better with a pencil in my hand. It is also easier to explain what I want with a drawing than it is to try to get a point across by talking and waving my hands in the air. It’s the sort of thing architects do.

I stuck my drawings in a folder, loaded the car on the trailer (stern first), and headed for Brandon’s shop.

We talked, looked at the drawings, waved out hands anyway for the sake of ritual, and agreed on a price. He would order the material, wait for its delivery, do the job and call me in a few weeks. He did. He got it almost right. Close enough that I could live with it rather than make him tear it all out and do it over.

Now I could bend my elbows a little, move my arms a bit more and could reach the shift lever with out being a contortionist. It wasn’t going to be comfortable but it would work. For a smaller driver it would be wonderful.

The only bad part of all this is that every time I have to farm out work on the car it eats up my budget. My budget is not a fat one. I have to find ways around having other people do things.

Well anyway. Another task done and another three weeks shot.

Putting It (Back) Together

2008-02-15T08:51:00.003-06:00

It was about three weeks later when we got together again. Gary was back from his trip and the sleeves had arrived.

When we had been taking things apart we noticed scoring on the link pins and Gary had put them in his polisher. Strange device. It is a container with a vibrator built into it. It is filled with crushed walnut shells, which are apparently very hard. When you put a piece of metal in it, turn on the vibrator and leave it for a while, the metal comes out squeaky clean and polished to a fair thee well. The link pins looked great.

The next task was to remove the old Micarta bushings in preparation for replacing them with the new sleeves. Like most old parts, they had other ideas.

The Micarta had grown old and was very set in its ways. It did not want to come out at all. After being in there soaking up grease for years, they had expanded and were wedged in solidly.

We tried using a long metal rod (which had to come all the way through he length of the tube to get to the back side of the bushing) to try to push it out. Instead of pushing the Micarta just began to notch the material and not move it at all. Finally Gray came through again and came up with the solution.

He took a hack saw blade and cut a slice through the bushing. This released enough of the pressure and we were able to knock the bushing out. We went through the same procedure on the other side.

Instead of trying to push out the inner bushings we just knocked them further into the tube where they would be out of the way and not interfere with the sleeves.

Let me say, at this point, that over the years a lot of people must have tried to lube those trialing arms. The tubes we packed almost solid with heavy grease. I mean buckets of it. It was amazing how much we gouged out of there. The car would be several pounds lighter because of it.

The new sleeves went in slick as a whistle and the reinserted trailing arms now moved just like they were supposed to.

We reassembled the front end and took a look at what we had.

Wrong.

The angle on the trailing arms was wrong and gave us too much ride height again. We maxed out the adjusting screw and still had too much.

Finally in desperation we took a cutting wheel and elongated the adjustment slot and spun the thing around to where we wanted it. Then we welded the damned thing in place. The hell with adjustments. The only problem now was that it still did not want to rise and fall like it should. It was free enough but something was still binding.

We were about to throw up our hands when it dawned on me. We had just taken the car down off the jack stands and had not relieved the pressure on the wheels. We rolled the car forward and back and tried again. It worked beautifully.

I had remembered that when you are setting the toe in adjustments you always had to move the car between adjustments or it would bind from the pressure of the tires on the ground surface. Moving the car stabilizes that.

The “one man loading” system worked again and with the car loaded stern first I headed home. The rear end sway was gone, and the car towed perfectly.

I was feeling pretty cocky.

* * *

I had been carefully taking pictures of this whole process and had full documentation of everything we had done. I was feeling very smug about that. It was a knotty problem and I had wanted to be able to show how we solved it.

A couple of weeks later, Hugh borrowed my camera to take pictures at the Ferrari club outing. When I got it back he had deleted all the shots I had taken. I guess he thought I had already downloaded that. I hadn’t.

Hugh, not realizing that the camera was set on the resident memory and not the two gig memory chip which would hold hundreds of shots, had dumped the shots so he could take pictures of the Ferrari event.

We had words.

Nothing Up My Sleeve...

2008-02-14T12:53:00.006-06:00

This was going to be the first time I would use the new trailer so it was going to be interesting. I now had a chance to see if the idea was going to pan out like I planned. On the road to Gary’s I would be driving over everything from highway to bumpy country road conditions, so it would be a good test.

The basic thought was to be able to load and unload the car with only one person, rather than having to have help to get it on or off the trailer. Surprise. It worked like a champ.

I loaded the car nose first this time because that is the way it was oriented in the carport. It just happened that way.

At low speeds it was fine, but at highway speeds it seemed a bit tail heavy and tended to wander a bit. I wasn’t too surprised since it had been designed to have the car loaded tail end first. That should get rid of the heavy end wobble. I’d have a chance to check that out on the return trip.

I got to Gary’s shop and found both he and his friend Jerry waiting. The “one man” unloading drew praise from both of them.

We got started by reviewing what the problem was.

The original front end on the car had a ride height problem. When the shocks were removed the floor pan suddenly rose to the point that it was seven and a half inches above the deck instead of the three and a half inches I was looking for. In order to get around that I had purchased another front beam which had a ride height adjuster on it. With the adjuster I could set the ride height I wanted but the front end would not work properly. If I pushed down on it, it stayed down or if I lifted it, it stayed up. In other words it was binding and would not allow the springs to work at all.

Normally, with a Vee front end, the are a number of minor changes made to the stock beam.

Remember. The original car weighed around 2000 pounds. A Vee, including the driver, is about half that. As a result we usually remove the lower set of springs and install a stiff steel bar in the lower tube instead of the springs. This functions as a sway bar and allows for the removal of the exterior sway bar that comes on the stock axle. I had already done that.

One of the problems is that for handling reasons we like to have negative camber on the front wheels. The normal condition for VW is positive camber. The way this is adjusted is by rearranging the shims on the link pins. This is a laborious process and not entered into lightly. The down side is that this sometimes caused the front end to bind up and not move properly.

One solution to this is use aftermarket offset bushings in the front end. I had ordered a set and had been keeping them in the freezer as recommended. (That makes it easier to press the into place. Again not a task entered into lightly). In order to do that we had to remove first, the Link Pins and then King pin carrier. Once the carrier was free then we could knock out the old bushings. Gary took this one over and tapped out the old bushings and wedged the new ones in place.

While we had the kin pin carrier off we took a look at the action of the trailing arms.

When working properly, the trail arms should move very freely and with as little resistance as possible. The only action should be from the springs in the upper tube and the sway bar in the lower. Not so in our case. The trailing arms themselves were binding.

We removed the upper springs and the sway bar and tried again. The trailing arms were still binding. We pulled the trailing arms out to check the needle bearing and got a nasty shock. There were no needle bearings. This beam was so old that it still had the original Micarta bushings and no bearings at all. No wonder it was binding. Those suckers were worn out.

The solution Gary suggested was the use of a set of urethane replacement sleeves. These replace both the inner bushing, the outer bearing and the grease seal. They had to be special ordered for the old Micarta type beam so we were at a stand still.

It is the knowledge of this kind of thing that makes Gary such a wonder. I didn’t even know that was such a thing as a Micarta bushing, much less what to replace it with or where to find it.

It was Miller Time anyway so we knocked off. Gary was going to be out of town for a couple of weeks, and we had to wait for the sleeves to arrive, so we just left the car scattered all over his shop floor and shut it down for the time being.

I didn’t even take the trailer home.

Making Sure My *ss Stays Covered....

2008-02-10T12:57:00.000-06:00

With season over it was easy to let things slide a bit. You get out of the habit of going out to the carport every day to do your task on the car. Besides that it was summer and the temperatures were in the high nineties and the humidity was approaching emanate rain fall.

In spite of that you realize that the new season is coming and you need to get in gear. Well, where do you start? What is the biggest problem?

The floor pan. OK, Study the floor pan.

I did, and discovered that maybe; after all, it did not have to be totally replaced in order to protect my delicate posterior. But it would require some surgery.

I put the car up on jack stands and got under it.

With a grinder and a drill I removed all the pop rivets which attached the section of the pan which was improperly lapped and I cut loose the trailing edge of the panel in front of it. Then I reinstalled the offending panel with its front edge tucked under the panel in front of it.

Now if the car hits a rough spot in the track, ( like when one wheel is off the track in the dirt and one is still on the track and you are bouncing along, almost high centered, on the pavement edge) the front edge of the seat panel would not dig in and peel it self away from what it is supposed to support and protect.

ME. We must protect ME at all times. It is important for health reasons. You see, I am allergic to pain. It makes me break out in a nasty rash all over.

So that is one thing fixed (unless the car is going over the same route backwards in which case you have a host of other problems). And it only took three days.

Good start. Next problem.

The binding front suspension.

I had almost given up trying to figure that one out. It was time to go to the mountain. It was time for a pilgrimage to Hammond.

I called Gary and made the arrangements.

Goofing Off

2008-02-08T13:20:00.000-06:00

So OK. I have been goofing off.

When I was in Houston last week, my friend Mike Aldag took me to task for not keeping up the blogsite and he was right. Once you start one of these things you have to maintain them and I had not been doing that.

It is so easy to let it slip. It’s like that exercise program you started. You skip just one day and the next thing you know six months have gone by and you have added another five pounds.

Now I haven’t been totally inactive during that time, so I’ll try to bring you up to date .

I guess the way to do that is in pieces the way the work was done.

Extra, Extra!

2007-06-25T13:23:00.000-05:00

Not selling papers, but an extra race for the season. It would not count in the points but that did not matter, it was a chance to get on the track and have some fun.

We were holding a race in order to help raise money for autistic kids in the form of a group called Unlocking Autism. They had gotten behind the organisers and had helped canvas businesses and individuals for sponsorships and contributions.

In addition they put on a series of other events in conjunction with the races.

For example, the day started with a two-mile foot race around the track. The first two runners came across the finish line in less than ten minutes but the walkers were still straggling in twenty minutes later. Every one had fun with it anyway.

There were several booths selling stuff and handing out info for the group. In addition they had out some neat cars to look at and lots of stuff like that. It was a much bigger party than we usually get at a race and there were a lot more spectators.

Hugh did his bit too by having some of the kids come over and sit in the car to have their pictures taken. The big thing seemed to be getting to sit in the car with their heads swallowed by his helmet.

We had a couple of practice and qualifying sessions in the morning, before the lunch break. I did get one good shot of him in the early session.

At lunch time there was another bonus. Amanda Shaw is a fifteen-year-old Cajun fiddler and singer. She has just released her first CD and seems to be on the verge of a big career.

She brought her band and set up under one of the work sheds to entertain the crowd. We don’t often have it this good.

One of the drivers took her for a couple of laps around the course in a Viper. It was pretty quick and when she came in her eyes had grown about three times their normal size and her hair two shades redder.

Everyone had a great time and I think they are looking into making it an annual event. It is a national organisation and we were able to raise enough money to keep the nationwide twenty-four hour help line in operation for a year.

After lunch we got down to doing some racing and Hugh did himself proud, finishing first in his class.

Of course he was the only one in the class…………..

Indy At Last

2007-06-14T14:49:00.000-05:00

I had waited a long time to see the Indy 500. I had listened to it on the radio and watched it on television as long as I could remember, and I can remember hearing Johnnie Parsons win in 1950. I knew about drivers who won before that, but Parsons is the first one I can actually remember for sure. You can imagine the excitement I felt when I climbed on the plane to Houston on Friday morning. I hadn’t thought about it but I was about to get the first of several bonuses on this trip.

The last project I had worked on before I retired was the remodelling of Hobby Airport in Houston. The central concourse was close to completion when I packed it in. I was now about to fly into it as a passenger for the first time. It lived up to expectations. I saw it with fresh eyes and all the problems encountered in the construction faded away. It was a nice feeling.

Bruce met me at the airport in Saint Louis. With the exception of having grown a head of grey hair he looked just about the same. Tall, and damn him, skinny. He could have, at least had the good grace to get fat like the rest of us.

We got back to the Hunninhake’s charming house and I got hugs from Karen and met their two young men. I couldn’t call them boys. It was great seeing them and meeting the additions to the family I had known for twenty years.

We went out to dinner and then to a gallery where Karen was showing some of her pieces. It was a pleasant excursion and something that I miss. Where I live, galleries don’t exist unless I drive forty miles into the crazyness of New Orleans.

Late the next day, Bruce and I loaded up, picked up Ken Eberhart, and we were on the way to Indianapolis. There I was introduced to Greg and Mary Ann Hebel and their son Hank, our host for the night. Wonderful people.

Greg is an architect with whom I share many interest and Mary Ann is nurse and as cute as a bug. We spent a wonderful evening chatting and getting to know each other. Hank was busy with a graduation party and we didn’t really see him until the next day.

In the morning sandwiches got built and coolers packed in preparation for the race. John, the final member of the party arrived and we were off.

Getting in to the speedway is like attending two big homecoming games going on at the same time. The crowds are immense. The best bet is to park in some ones yard a couple of miles away and walk in. As you get closer to the track the crowds get packed tighter. Once in side the tracks gates you hit the usual set of vendors for every thing from food to shirts, hats, programs, pictures of the drivers and some truly amazing souvenirs.

We found our section and climbed up into the grand stands where you get the first view of the track. After finding our seats we settled into the very cramped seating. As you might imagine every one had a cooler, stadium seats, umbrellas, packs of rain gear and bags of sandwiches. You come prepared for this race. Once you get in it is difficult to get out.

As we arrived they were going through the usual pre-race ceremonies. Jim Nabobs was not there this year, but sent his regards. After the national Anthem, the flyover and Taps, everyone waited for the call for "ladies and gentlemen, start your engines."

They meant it this year because for the first time, almost ten percent of the thirty three-car field was made up of female drivers. Danica Patrick was the best known and positioned highest. Sarah Fisher was set in mid pack and expected to do a nice but not exciting race. Milka Duno, a sharp, good-looking lady from Venezuela, was this year’s female rookie. I had been following her career in sports cars for a couple of years. She had driven in the twenty four-hour races at both Daytona and Le Mans as well as the twelve hours of Sebring, and done a good job. She has won three times in the Rolex endurance series, and finished second at Daytona. As far as I know she was also the only Indy driver, ever, who holds four masters’ degrees.

We were seated about a quarter of the way around turn four and had a great view of the short shute between the exit of three to the exit of four.

You don’t get to look very long but you do get to look often. The cars are going over two hundred and twenty miles an hour and are by you before you can blink. At that speed they are covering the length of a football field in less than one second. That also means they are lapping the track about every forty seconds so you don’t have to wait long for them to come around again.

It doesn’t take long to figure out that you have to tell which car is which by its paint scheme because you don't have tome to look for the numbers. It takes a few laps before you can stop referring to your car chart. Sponsors logos help too. They are easy to spot in most cases.

The wall of sound that hits you when they go by the first time makes it obvious why the vendors all sell earplugs. For motorheads, it’s like music. Even up there on the threshold of pain it’s beautiful. After a lifetime of watching races this was the loudest thing I had ever encountered.
The other thing I noticed right away was the smell of the burnt fuel. All of the cars in the race were using ethanol. It has a distinctive odor. Not bad, just different. I sort of missed the old days of Castrol. You could smell it too after the cars had gone by.

We settled in to watch the race. There were the usual cautions and resulting slowdowns (to a sedate one hundred twenty miles an hour) caused by debris on the track or crashes. This year all the crashes happened in turn two so we had to watch them on the infield screen. Other than these the pace was astronomical.

Formula One cars are faster but they do not make the same kind of sustained speed the Indy cars maintain. They can’t because of the type of course they run.

When the automotive industry was in its infancy, car racing began. At first, both here in the US and in Europe, the first races were city to city events. The first recorded race was from Paris to Rouen in 1894. The first race here was the following year and ran from Chicago to Evanston, Illinios and back. It took ten hours and posted an average speed of seven miles per hour.

It soon became evident that such races were extremely dangerous not only for the drivers (who could not practice on a course) but for the crowds as well. Additionally, you had no control over spectators or any way to collect money from them.

Horse racing had gone through this same evolution. By setting up courses where you ran in circles you could control the course, the crowds and the gate. Not only that the spectators could actually see the whole race., rather than just one little bit of straight or a corner. It took no great leap of imagination to see that the same could hold true with automobiles. And almost every county had a fairground where horse races were held. Bingo. You didn’t even have to build a new track. Oval track racing quickly became the tradition in the states.

Oval track racing has one great advantage for the racers. Speed. You don’t have that troublesome business of slowing down for corners, and then speeding up to get to the next corner. On courses like Indy and the super-speedways of NASCAR it is full throttle the whole way. The result is blinding speed and an emphasis on controlling the cars at the incredible speeds they maintain. It is exciting to see and spectacular when they crash.

Until it rains. They don’t race in the rain.

We made it through the first one hundred and fifteen laps before the bottom fell out of the sky.

The grandstands errupted in umbrellas and rain suits. People ducked under the stands or went souvineer shopping, and we waited……..and drank beer…….and waited. What else was there to do. Watch people.

While we sat we had time to observe some very creative methods of keeping dry. and in some cases that attempts to moist romance

Eventually the rain began to let up and we could see lighter sky behind the clouds. There was hope. The speedways fleet of red trucks went out on the track supposedly to help dry it out, but just maybe to give the spectators something to look at.

They announced that they would try to get the racing going again by Six PM.

We still had to drive back to St Louis to do so we called it a day and began the long walk back to the car. We timed it just right I guess because we did not have to fight the crowds this way. We did.get to see some interesting sights however. You’d be surprised at what happens when you ask for things.

We heard the rest of the race on the radio.

If you really want to see the race, the best place is at home on your television. As a racecourse for seeing an event Indianapolis rates about a three on a scale of one to ten. As a place to enjoy an event with good friends it’s a ten. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

But I’ll have someone make me a tape.

Trailers Done!

2007-06-03T13:42:00.000-05:00

In spite of being a bit annoyed by having screwed around and missing the whole season due to faulty judgment, I have something to be thankful for.

The trailer is finished, and it looks really good.

Rusty, Hugh and I man handled the thing from its vertical storage position to right side up so I could get the wheels and running gear installed. That part was pretty easy. So now it was sitting upright, on it’s own tires and the lights were wired and in place.

Through Pat Poche, a local contractor and friend of dubious reputation, I made contact with Bob Lapine at Associated Metal Components. They are metal building fabricators. Bob was very helpful and got the pieces I wanted ordered, cut to size, and prime coated for me. Rusty and I drove the truck over to Harvey and took delivery. They even loaded it for us.

Hugh put on the go-rilla welder hat and went to work on putting the pieces together as per my sketches. By the next day, the front wheel stops were in place and the ramps had been hinged to back of each piece. Now they just had to be painted and bolted to the trailer chassis. After a two-day delay for rain, the shade tree spray booth went back into action.

The ramps and wheel tracks are made up of twelve gauge, two and one half inch by twelve inch, channels. This makes it possible to extend the wheel tracks beyond the sides of the trailer to make it a little wider (that’s what all the effort to get a longer axle was about). Now it was plenty wide enough for the race cars wheels to ride in and the two and a half inch flanges keep the tires from sliding sideways.

The ramps are attached to the tracks with a couple of door hinges, which are welded, to the wheel track on one side and the ramp track on the other. When folded down they are used to run the car from the ground up on the trailer. Once the car is on the trailer, the ramps are rotated up and folded down to form restraints against the tires. In that position they are locked down to keep them form moving.

With the ramps up and strapped, the car is then locked in place and does not have to be tied town for towing.

I added a couple of other accessories as well. A retractable third wheel (Wal-Mart or Harbor Freight) on the trailer tongue makes it possible to roll the trailer around easily when not in use. A winch (Bass Pro Shops) makes it possible for one person, with out extra help, to haul the car up on the trailer or to unload it. A wench to help would make it even better but Bass Pro Shops didn’t have any in stock.

It is a lot of effort was directed at making it possible for one person to operate without having to depend on a pit crew. Sometimes you just don’t have any one around to help, but you can’t let that stop your fun.

A New Plan

2007-05-24T11:48:00.000-05:00

With the decision to go back to the frame and start over, comes a multitude of opportunities that I had avoided before.

This would be the time to do some serous clean up in the engine bay. I have never been satisfied with the oil cooler arrangement. It is clever and it works, but the deflector tray which routs air from the intake ducts to oil cooler is large and is always in the way when you are trying to get to the engine. It must be removed every tine you want to work on it. There has to be a simpler way to solve the problem. Simple is good.

There is a persistent oil leak at the sump cover. With the engine out of the car, that can be fixed.

This would also be the perfect time to install the zero roll stiffness rear suspension. A "zero roll" rear end has a number of handling advantages that make it well worth while. I had not attempted this before because of the other changes that it would necessitate. Like installing a whole new exhaust system. The existing one would not clear the new suspension members.

Fortunately we have most of the parts required to build the zero roll system. We can have an exhaust system fabricated locally.

With everything stripped off the car I can turn the chassis upside down and replace the offending floor pan. I can’t get over the thoughts of what could happen if the bottom grounded out at high speed. These cars have so little ground clearance that might happen at several points on the track. Does the idea of having someone run a high-speed belt sander over your ass get your attention? It sure does mine.

I have wanted to rewire the car. What is there is twenty years worth of cut and patch engineering. I would not be surprised if some of the wires had not been put in place when the Dassinger’s built the car in 1986.

Re-plumbing the brake and clutch lines falls into the same category. It has been there forever and carries several coats of paint to prove it.

This would be the time to address the roll bar brace problem. With the chassis stripped bare, any welding that needs to be done to accommodate updates is much easier. It would also be a good time to decide wether to change the front shock mounts and remove the existing shock towers. This is a new item allowed by the formula first rules which was prohibited by the Vee rules.

With the floor pan off and any modifications welded in place the chassis could then be sand blasted to remove scale and rust and repainted or powder coated, before starting the reassembly. With everything clean and in place it is much easier to work on and maintain the car.

Now we’re having fun.

Back To Bear Essentials

2007-05-21T10:21:00.000-05:00

The season is over and done with the exception of the extra race added at the last moment to raise money for a local charity. Actually we’ll use any excuse to get on the track. This seemed like a win win deal.

I’m not going to make an effort to run the charity event since I have been doing a serious revaluation of the condition of my car.

In addition to solving the front suspension problem (which I think we have finally figured out) I have discovered that the floor plan is spliced in several places.

One of the splices has a leading edge which could very easily grab at a high spot on the track surface and rip the floor pan right out from under the area where I sit. Since I sit directly on that self-same floor pan, this raises images that I do not like to consider. A new floor pan is in order.

Added to that, I have been getting in and out of the car a good bit. One of the problems that showed up on the test day was a matter of having the roll bar braces in the wrong place to fit me.

The brace comes down meet a point where it works with the triangulation of the frame to reinforce the roll bar and at the same time add to the rigidity of the chassis. Unfortunately it also cuts right across my arms in such a way as to pin my elbows in and forces me to drive by moving only my wrist and forearms. Not good. It also makes it difficult to shift gears since I can not move my arm to reach the lever. Large bears need more space. I have to do it by turning my hand sideways and use my fingers. At NPR we shift six to ten times per lap. Change needed.

Another problem was that the starter didn’t want to work. I know the problem is in the wiring rather than the starter or the new battery. After sitting in Sal’s garage for so many years the dissimilar metals have caused corrosion on the terminals. It needs to be cleaned or replaced or even better completely rewired.

I am now at the point of deciding to do what I should have done in the first place. Stop taking half measures in an effort to get on the track and go ahead and strip the thing back down to the frame and rebuild it so that it will work and be safe.

Decision made. Back to the frame and start over. If I had done this in the first place, it would be finished by now.

Heading For the Brickyard

2007-05-12T21:04:00.000-05:00

We got through the last race of the season.

Hugh an Rory had a nice run and even swapped positions a time or two. It looked like they were having fun. Rory finished in front with Hugh right on his tail.

The rest of us duds didn’t make it out. Mike had a business obligation, Barry’s car wasn’t ready and neither was mine.

Since it was the season’s final race they handed out the awards at a party after the final session. Hugh finished fourth in the open wheel class, which is pretty good considering what he was running against.

They also announced that there would be a special event coming up on June third. It is a charity race to raise money for the Autism society. Any excuse will work for us.

The chances of my being ready for that are slim. I have been working on the trailer, which is now close to being finished, and I have obtained some offset bushings, which I hope will solve the binding problem in the front end. Still the time from now till than is tight.

Also I have to factor in another little deal.

At long last I am finally going to go to the Indy 500.

My friend Bruce Hunninghake, an old vee racer and former garage mate, had invited me up to go and this is going to be the year. I am looking forward both to seeing him and seeing the race.

We're Racing Now!

2007-03-22T19:49:00.000-05:00

It has finally happened.

On the next to last race of the season, we had more than one formula first racer in the field.

Barry Brussard had his Zink C-4 out and Rory White rolled is primer gray Panther to the line. Hugh filled out the field.

Mike Norton had a business engagement and couldn’t make it and I was still fighting front end problems and didn’t bring mine.

All the same it was nice that we had the beginnings of a class to run in and it actually began to show as soon as the flag dropped.

Hugh was grided first with Barry behind him and Rory in third. As soon as the starter waved the green flag, Rory slipped by Hugh and Barry took off. Hugh was able to stay with him but was not able to get past. It stayed that way for the rest for the race. Hugh was right behind him and had several chances to make a move, but didn’t.

Barry was having the usual "first race" problems. He seemed to have plenty of acceleration and good stopping power. Too much maybe, because somewhere during the first few laps he shut down all together and cloud not get it restarted. There seemed to be excess oil on the engine surface and we were worried about engine failure. (The next day we got a phone call from him telling us that the problem had more to do with an empty gas tank than with engine ailments).

In later conversations with Hugh, I learned that he had not felt comfortable trying to pass Rory anywhere on the track.

I tried to explain to him that he needed to get over that pretty quick.

After all, that’s what racing is all about.

A Physics Lesson

2007-03-11T19:03:00.000-05:00

The laws of Physics state that bodies in motion tend to stay in motion and that bodies at rest tend to stay at rest.

It axiomatic that the older the resting body the greater the amount of energy required to get the resting mass moving. Seventy year old bodies are hard to nudge off dead center once the momentum has died. Holidays are definite momentum killers.

It has been only by effort of supreme will that I have been able to pry myself loose from the sofa and back to work but at last it seems to be starting. We are now rolling the stone uphill again.

Of course, we have not been totally inactive in the interim.

The new stretched trailer axle has been drilled to match the mounting holes and has been fitted in place and the wiring has been run but no lights have been installed. The trailer is no longer upside down, but is standing sideways on end and tied to the carport frame to keep it from falling over. The next time we have four healthy bodies together we’ll drop it down right side up and put on the wheels. Then we can install the lights and bolt on the fenders.

I have already been down to the local Department of Motor Vehicles, gotten a title and picked up a tag for it.

The cold weather of the last couple of months has mostly passed. It is now possible to back outside without wearing enough clothes to make you look like the Mechlin man.

The biggest problem is the front axle assembly on the racer.

I seem to have gone from bad to worse with my selection of parts. I had removed the original front axle (which rode too high) and replaced it with an adjustable front bream that I picked up locally. Unfortunately the range of adjustment, which may have been perfect for its intended use, was wrong for this application. It put the nose right on the ground and could not be raised high enough to provide adequate ground clearance. I tried refitting the springs but that didn’t help.

Now I am faced with a couple of options. I can continue to fool around with the beam I have on the car and try to find a useful solution, or I can go back to the original beam and add an adjuster, which has been set up for my particular use. At this point neither is especially attractive in terms of the amount of work required for the results obtained. Especially since this will be the third go around.

On the other hand there seem to be no other options that will get me back on the track and the car into action.

Ready To Roll

2006-12-21T17:13:00.000-06:00

The new axle arrived right on schedule. It was exactly like the old one.

By this time we had redrilled the old one to match the alignment holes and found out a way to mount it but the clearances were awfully tight and I wasn’t happy with it.

I was concerned that I had made some kind of assembly mistake which had created the problem, so I called the company. They suggested that I loosen everything up, reinstall the axle, then tighten everything back down.

Now, this is not rocket science. I could look at it and know that this was a sellers stalling technique. It would not get the job done.

Since I had two axles now, I took one of them to my handy dandy local welder and told him to "stretch" it for me. He is splicing in plates, which will keep the same strength in the axle but make it four inches longer.

After that I’ll re-drill the puppy and install it the way I think it should be.

There’s always more than one way to skin a cat.

A Little Hitch With the Trailer

2006-12-12T10:08:00.000-06:00

The Trailor

2006-12-10T17:55:00.000-06:00

After the Testing session.

Going over the list of things to do before the next race is less intimidating than I thought it was going to be. It’s long, but not too frightening. Especially since we have about six-week’s time to work with. Although I must remember to factor into that Christmas, New Years day football, a trip to Florida for the final punch out on my aunt’s house and a trip to Houston to get the tow car legalities straightened out. Still it looks doable.

More importantly right now is the dirty deal the weather is pulling. The temperature for the last two nights has been below freezing. Our work area is out of doors. And shaded. Not good for arthritic fingers. Remember that I am a gentleman of the south. I consider that any place that habitually gets temperatures under fifty four degrees is uninhabitable.
Still, they’re a couple of things that can be done.

The trailer kit from RedTrailers has arrived. All it requires is bolting together. That can be done with gloves on.

Rather than lay every thing out in the driveway (which is already crowded with two trucks, a trailer, a Mercedes and a Porsche) we elected to do the first part of the construction in the work area. I’m not sure we did the right thing, because when it is mostly assembled (which is done with the trailer up side down) we will still have to move it outside to install the axles and wheels. Because of the confined space we can’t easily flip it under the carport.

Anyway the worst part is done now. We did a little welding on a few points just to add some strength and to fill the gaps where the manufacturer had neglected to drill some holes.

I discovered, after I had ordered the trailer, that I had made a mistake. I ordered the "landscape trailer" kit knowing I would have to make modifications to get what I wanted. (Like throwing away a lot of parts I didn’t need and wouldn’t use) Had I studied their website a little longer I might have found a trailer base they designed to use as base for "Teardrop" campers, which would have been perfect. And I would also be a hundred dollars richer.

Once the wheels are on there is only one little step left to do. That will be to get a "stick" of twelve inch by two inch U girt from a local metal building fabricator. It comes in thirty foot lengths. I will have that cut to the right sizes to put on the trailer to function as loading ramps, wheel tacks, and tire holding areas.

Like I said, the parts to build things for formula cars are all there. You just have to find out who is hiding them.

Th Grinch Makes an Appearance

2006-12-10T17:45:00.000-06:00

At long last we were ready to go out for testing. The car was looking good if not totally complete.

I wasn’t going to tell anyone but the car looked more complete than it actually was. On the other hand it was a long way from being the car that I had first unloaded in the front yard.

What I had thought was going to be a practice day turned out to be a driver’s school of some sort. That meant I would not be able to get on the track unless I paid the fee for the school, which I was not interested in doing.

Still, there are a lot of things you can test at a track, or at least a lot of open driving area, that you simply can not deal with in half a carport. A rolling car and a static car are different animals.

I knew we still did not have a complete handle on the ride height problem and the springing wasn’t just right, but not to what extent the problem would manifest itself. It turned out to be considerable.

It felt good to have the Grinch out in the open. No one but Hugh and I had seen the car and I think there were a few who were becoming skeptical of its existence. But it existed. And I could prove it.

As important, was to let other people see that there were more of our cars coming out. Hugh’s had been the one they had seen most and it was developing a lot of interest on it’s own. Mikes had been seen briefly and mine would be the third. When Barry's comes out for the next race it was going to be a surprise for lot of people. Even some of our group will be surprised because all of a sudden the will be five cars out at the same time rather than just one.

Rory White, from Homa, has purchased a car he found down near Sebastion Inlet in Florida (one of my old fishing haunts).

Up to now I have claimed the "best buy" of all of the cars in our group but Rory has beaten me hollow with this one. He found a current spec, race ready car, with a fresh Noble (the best of the best) engine an extra transaxle and some other spares for sixty percent of what I paid for mine. I told him if he didn’t take it I would. I knew there would be a market for it. Any way, he will have it in time for the January race and we can expect for him to be fast.

That will mean that suddenly there will be five cars running in our class and the hook should be well set to snag others.

Tom Walter, our neighbor, who is usually handling race control for the track, is a noted car builder. He most often works on big bore stuff but he does have a good working knowledge of things Volkswagen in general and race car suspensions in particular. When he stopped by we spent about an hour discussing possible remedies for some of the trouble spots. It’s good to have neighbors. Especially smart ones. At the end of the day we were pretty well whipped. It had been a productive day and we were headed home we a two page "to do" list. That includes putting the driver on a diet.

* * *
Sunday was race day.

I wasn’t near ready but Hugh was. He kept all his wheels on this time and finished second and scored the first podium spot for the Vees.

Bench Races with Barry

2006-11-30T16:39:00.000-06:00

On Friday, after recovering from too much turkey and football, Hugh and I drove to Morgan City to visit Barry Bussard and take a look at his new car.

It is impressive. That 1600 cc engine is going to be something to reckon with. It looks even more frightening with that huge carburetor and after-market intake manifold on it. Fortunately, Barry knows that it is way outside our limits and in making plans to use one that fits the rules.

He is currently in the process of making the car safe and legal, by installing an on board fire suppression system, new fuel cell, etc.

His only other major problem will be cooling. I am told that the 1600 engine really puts out a lot of heat and takes twice as much cooling as the 1200’s. The conventional wisdom is that it needs at least twenty four square inches of controlled intake cooling duct to prevent the heads from overheating.

It is a Zink C4, similar to Mikes. It is amazing that two cars that started out exactly alike can now look so different.

We spent and hour or so going over it, looking at details, making suggestions, discussing options, and doing some bench racing.

You have to do the bench racing…..It’s a rule.

Rat's Nest No More

2006-11-26T12:22:00.000-06:00

I was looking at the rats’ nest of wires and tubes that made up the engine compartment on my car. There had to be a way to clean that up so you find a problem when it occurred.

When they first started building formula vees they used dead stock engines. That doesn’t last long in any kind of racing. Soon all the racers were "blueprinting" their mills.

That means they made sure that all the rods were the same weight, as were the pistons and valves. The valves springs all had the same compression strength and the cam followers and pushrods were dead equal in length and weight. It didn’t mean big changes but when you only have forty horses to start with even a little bit is big.

But still you had a big fan shroud enclosing a fan, which rotated about the main shaft of the generator, which was driven by a belt connected to a pulley on the end of the drive shaft. The job of the fan was to force air over the cylinders and cylinder heads and also to push air through the oil cooler. That’s why it’s called an air cooled engine. Actually it’s as much oil cooled as air cooled, but you use air to cool the oil as well.

All this cooling comes at a price. Engine power. Since every thing drives off the crankshaft of the engine, you burn horsepower to make all the stuff turn.

Vee racers are an inventive lot. They are also very skilful at reading rules. The rules said you had to have a generator, and it had to be driven by the belt connected to the pulley. Nobody said it had to be functional.

Soon the guts were stripped out of the generator and a freely spinning shaft drove the fan to cool an engine with a couple of extra horses.

The next step was to loosen the fan belts. If it slipped a bit, who cared? Certainly not the guy who was getting the advantage of the extra power not used to whirl all that stuff around. There were even a few cases of drivers who worked out squirters which on demand, sprayed a little oil on the belt so it would slip a lot during that few seconds when they needed an extra little burst of power.

Then some smart guy figured out that you get a pretty good breeze at a hundred miles per hour. Why not use that moving air to cool the motor rather than a fan. Again the rules stated that the fan shroud had to be there but it didn’t say that there had to be a fan in it. Next thing you know they were ducting air from the outside, through the fan shroud and over the engine and oil cooler and the fan was junked. And since the generator casing no longer had any function what so it was done away with along with the fan belt, and the fan.

Once everyone was cooling with out side air, there was no longer a reason for the fan shroud and it went away. Finally that left the old generator tower sticking up there with no function except to supply a tube to pour oil through and provide a breather for the engine case.

So someone devised a little plate that serves that function and bingo, there goes the generator tower. And with it a stumbling block which makes it possible to start cleaning up the rats nest.

Neat.

Under Tow

2006-11-19T15:30:00.000-06:00

Another Step Forward

When you have a formula type racer you have a built in second problem.

If you are going to race it you have to get it to the track. You can’t drive it there because the DOT gets funny about cars with no turn signals or horns, or lights or all those other things that NAPA and Atutozone are in business to sell us. I think it is an economics thing.

That means you have to have a trailer to haul it on. For me, that is where the next part of the economics debacle comes in.

In the after-Katrina environment of southern Louisiana, the secrets of ancient alchemy have been rediscovered and through this process every small landscape trailer in the state has been turned into pure gold.

It starts with the guy who has a pick up truck and a trailer who uses it to haul all the storm debris from his house and yard to the dump. The next thing you know, his next door neighbor gets him to perform a similar service. After that, his next door neighbor's cousin’s sister wants it done and the waiting list grows. It’s not long before the man’s teen age kid (if he has any moxie at all) figures out that this beats the hell out of mowing lawns cause you can charge a ton because of the law of supply and demand. So he borrows Dad’s truck (or uses his own) and the trailer and is in business for the summer. By the end of the summer he has four of his own trucks and all of his friends are working for him and the cost of trailers has tripled.

Needless to say it is not the best of all times to be buying a trailer down here.

I had even drawn up a sketch of what I wanted and had the welding shop, which does my serious welding, price it out for me. It turned out to be nearly what I paid for the racecar. That dog won’t hunt.

I finally found a company in Quakertown, Pa., which sells trailer kits. It is just the right size, comes complete with all the parts (even a few I don’t need for my purposes) and is supplied with a certificate of origin which the DOT needs to prove it’s real. They won’t license it unless you can prove it’s real.

So it’s ordered and should be here next Wednesday. At half of what it would be cost to buy a used one locally. I guess they don’t have hurricanes in Pennsylvania.

Old VWs never die, (they turn into parts)

2006-11-14T19:22:00.000-06:00

It was Sunday and we had nothing to race. We needed parts. There was only one thing left to do. We had to make a trip to Hammond.

In Hammond lives Gary Scurlock, our supplier of esoteric Bug parts and acknowledged guru of all things Volkswagen. If it fits on a bug, Gary has at least one copy sitting in his back yard, or failing that, he knows where one is. Handy fellow to know.

Besides, he was holding for me, a transaxle I had purchased a few weeks ago to have for spare parts. Like crown nuts and backing plates.

On top of that he was in the process of restoring an old formula vee to use in the Vintage races and we wanted to take a look at it.

When we arrived, Gary was already in his shop working on the vintage car. He stopped work long enough to chat with us and show off what he was working on.

It is an old Autodynamics, a design that came initially from Ray Caldwell if my memory serves. Ray would go on later to design the famous D-13 and D-13S series, the first vees ever subjected to the MIT wind tunnel. Now he designs chassis for NASCAR.

Gary is doing a beautiful job on the bodywork of the Vee, using techniques more often seen in fiberglass boat building than automobiles. You can track his progress on one of his three web sites.

Naturally he had just the parts we needed. Just on the off chance (I really knew he would have them) I asked about the head shrouds that Mike and Barry were going to require to solve cooling problems. Sure enough he had both the single port for Mike and the dual port for Barry. They were rusty but that is not at all unusual for old VW parts. Some sanding and paint would cure that.

There was some general discussion about the torqueing of the crown nuts on the rear axles. It sounds simple but it is a real problem.

Almost everything else on a bug tends to be a little loosy goosy. Not the crown nuts. They have to be torqued down to somewhere between two hundred seventy and three hundred foot-pounds. That’s a lot. Normally it is achieved by using a three-foot long pipe for leverage on the end of a thirty six-millimetre socket wrench. It is a straining experience and you run the risk of either a stripped thread or a hernia. Not fun. When that happens, you start looking for a new axle…..or a truss.

Of course Gary had a magical mystery tool to do the job. It bolts directly to the brake drum and through the use of gears, multiplies the torque by ten. No more straining on a long handle. Beautiful. Thirty pounds on the torque wrench equals three hundred pounds on the crown nut.

With the transaxle and shrouds in the truck and the borrowed magic tool under our arm, we let Gary get back to his work, and headed home.

It was almost time for the Saints game.

Big Wheel Keeps On Turnin'

2006-11-13T16:02:00.000-06:00

When Mike and I got home from the day at the track, Hugh already had his car on the trailer and ready to go. All we had to do was transfer my toolbox and a few other little items from Mike’s car to the truck, and we would be ready to leave the next morning.

The throttle repair had been made and every thing was under control. We didn’t have to rush. It was a nice feeling.

But Hugh gets antsy on race days. He’s like that when he goes fishing too. He just won’t be happy until he is under way and moving. Heaven help you if you want to sleep in a little. We were leaving the house at six forty five because it was a magic number in some mental schedule he had not bothered to communicate to anyone else. At least this way we could stop for breakfast somewhere.

So, at six forty five we were off, Hugh with the truck and trailer and Rusty and I in the Porsche with it’s FOR SALE sign stuck firmly in the window. We gassed up and stopped at the local Waffle House to fuel the humans. Before Rusty and I had finished breakfast he was up and itching again. We let him go, finished our coffee, made a pit stop and got on the road. It didn’t matter. Nothing was going to happen until after the drivers meeting at nine o’clock anyway.

When we got to the track he had already picked a spot and we started unloading the trailer. We got the car down and erected our new shade tent although it was one of those dark and overcast days that indicated it was more likely to be needed to keep off rain than sunshine.

Everything had pretty much been checked so there wasn’t much to do but torque the lug nuts a final time, add fuel, and check the tire pressures. I was trying a different tire pressure setting this time and was anxious to see if Hugh felt it made a difference.

All the usual open wheel guys were there except Charlie (vintage Brabham) and Robert (Swift Formula Ford).

Bill Roland, (the only other driver my age) and his son David were pitted near us. It is sort of neat to see Bill there with his teen age grandson pitting for him. Bill drives a Spec Renard and David was piloting a sports two thousand. The sports two thousand is a closed wheel sports racer sort of car but it was running with us rather than with the much taller fendered flounderers. Like I said, it is and embarrassment thing.

The other new comer was Rory White, who showed up with is Formula five hundred car. These are neat little things, which are like big go carts in that they have no real suspension. They do however run a very potent water cooled snowmobile engine which puts out more horses than a vee to a chassis that weights less than ours.

Barry Brussard arrived to help us and we got Hugh launched for the practice session. All went well and he seemed to be settling in with no hassles. When he came in the car was smoking badly but we found the culprit quickly. A valve cover was leaking oil on one of the exhaust headers.

When it was time for the qualifying session we sent him out with instructions to post a decent lap time. He seemed to be working at it this time. At least he was pushing hard enough that he spun twice during the session. Best of all however just as the session was about to end he put in the fastest lap he had ever run.

I was getting excited as he started around again, thinking that maybe he was going to give us another.

Not to be. He didn’t show up again. The session was over, but still no Hugh.

That meant something had happened out on the track and he was stranded.

After a while we got word that he was OK. We watched as the wrecker was dispatched to go pick him up

As he explained it later, he was just getting to the end of the long straight (where you are going your absolute fastest) when he felt a little thump, and then a larger bump as the left rear of the car settled down. Just about then he looked up to see his rear wheel pass him. Remember that this is all while you are going about a hundred miles an hour.

Since he was riding on three wheels and a backing plate the car slowed down and eventually spun to a stop. Pretty exciting for a few minutes, but no cuts no bruises, no bleeding. Damp trousers maybe.

A wheel nut had come off. It had sheared a cotter pin and released the brake drum from the splined axle shaft. A soon as Hugh put a little pressure on it setting up for the turn at the end of the straight it had slipped right off, gone on vacation with the tire and dropped the brake backing plate on the track to take the abuse.

They eventually found the wheel, with the brake drum still bolted securely in place, a hundred yards down the track, sitting on top of the safety tire wall. I guess it felt at home there.

We didn’t make the race. Where are you going to find a 1964 Volkswagen wheel crown nut on Saturday morning in the south Louisiana sugarcane fields……………………and there wasn’t even a lawn mower shop in sight.

Doing Their Part

2006-11-11T20:09:00.000-06:00

One of the things I have always loved about racing formula Vees is that you can buy parts right off the shelf. They are just not usually the parts of things you connect with racecars. They may belong on motorcycles, bicycles, dump trucks, spacecraft, wagons, boats, airplanes, washing machines or a plumber’s bench. Nothing is taboo.

On the other hand you usually have to fabricate things from scratch since there are few race car parts made to do what you need done. Either way I love the imagination required recognizing a perfectly good solution to a problem when it is presented "out of uniform".

Hugh resolved his difficulty with the throttle cable…. With pieces obtained from a lawn mower repair shop.

Flight of the Norton Vee

2006-11-11T19:54:00.000-06:00

Today was kind of a red-letter day for us. Today our second Vee made it to the track. We had hoped there would be four out for this practice session but it just didn’t work out that way. It was time for Mike Norton’s maiden flight.

My car was not ready. Neither was Barry’s and Hugh was out (just for the day) with a broken throttle cable.

Mike had to go to the restaurant first thing to set the days specials so we left about ten thirty to go pick up his car and head out. We got to the track just as they were having a lunch break so the timing was right on.

We talked with Winston and had him do a safety check. After that we put Mike in the beast and had him making slow laps around he paddock area until he knew where all the gears were and was he sure the brakes worked.

It was the first time he had driven the car so it was all learning experience.

We got one of the Spec Miata drivers to take Mike out on the track as a passenger in a practice session. The made about ten semi-fast laps around the track showing Mike the lines through the corners, braking points, etc.

Mike said the guy had this neat head set to head set speaker system in the car so they could talk even at speed. It seemed to be OK while they were going slow but when they got up to speed he could hear him any more. I still haven’t figured out whether he meant it got too noisy or he just couldn’t hear anything when he was going that fast.

After a couple more laps around the paddock area, Winston waved Mike out on the track. Again, the timing was just right. The only other cars on the track were Bill and David Roland’s who are old hands and knew not to scare him too badly.

I had what I thought was going to be a great shot of Mike leading Bill through the last corner but when the picture came up it was just Bills car.

The shutter lag on the digital camera makes it difficult to get action shots at times.

Mike came off the track wearing that same silly grin Hugh had worn on his first day. I think every one of us has borrowed it for our first time out. There is just nothing else like it in the world.

So Mike lost his cherry and we found a couple of things to fix before the next time out.
The cooling system needs some work. There needs to be a better way to direct the air over the cylinders to cool the engine, a duct to the oil cooler, and the mounting for the seat belts needs to be modified to better contain the driver.

Other than that the car worked fine.

Oh, there was one other little thing. There needs to be a better way to attach the bottom clips for the nose. Mike just does not look his best in this position.

More About The Axle Beam

2006-11-11T19:43:00.000-06:00

Well, the other shoe has fallen. It was another of those little things that you don’t see coming.

I had felt less than my usual strapping self over the weekend and didn’t get much done on the car. On Monday morning I got after it and attacked the front axle beam again. Remember that our goal is to remove the one that had been on the car for the last twenty years and install one that had a ride height adjuster on it. And get every thing else done by Thursday so we could make the practice day on Friday. No pressure…..no, none at all.

I had the second beam all prepared and painted and ready to install. I had even transferred the neat little shock mount brackets.

Removing the old one turned into a bear. I took all the battery tray pieces off the mounting bolts and let it hang. The bottom was pop-riveted to the undertray and I hoped I wouldn’t have to drill it all out and redo every thing there. With the tray dropped down, mostly out of the way, I started on the bolts for the beam itself.

Let me tell you. Bolts that have grown to be twenty years old think well of them selves. They have grown strong and are convinced that since they have been holding things together so long they have acquired tenure and are harder to move than an aging academic. Especially with a little rust and a few coats of paint welding them in place. Time for the convincer.

With a piece of pipe slipped over the end if a socket wrench I had enough leverage to crack the nuts loose and get the removal al started. It took a bit, but finally all the nuts were loose and the bolts came out. The beam still would not budge. I had to go looking again.

I found it. The mounting plate for the master cylinders is a piece of sheet metal which folds ninety degrees from the vertical plane under to form the leading part of the cars belly pan. I think the idea here was that this thicker metal would also protect the driver’s feet should some seriously unfortunate grounding take place. I liked the idea of protecting the driver.

Through this vertical metal plate a series of holes were punched. Three for the barrels of the front and rear brake masters and the third for the cutch master. Above and below each of these are two additional holes where the bolts hold the masters to the plate.

When we tried to move the beam, we could see flexing in the plate and when we looked closer it appeared that the plate was welded to the bottom of the beam. What’s more, it was in an area where you could not get to it to break the welds loose. That was a crusher. It would mean that the entire front end of the car would have to be disassembled in order to remove the beam. Pedal assembles, master cylinders, brake and clutch lines, undertray and everything.

It was already late in the day (did I forget to mention the afternoon rain delay), so with that depressing thought I decided to call it a day and put away my tools.

* * *

I worried over it all night.

I just couldn’t believe that the builders would put something on a car, which could not be dismantled. Especially in an area like the front beam which is prone to damage and likely to need replacement.

So I looked again, and sure enough, hiding behind the front plate was a piece of angle welded to the bottom of the axle beam itself. I guess that someone realized that the plate alone was not strong enough to resist bending from the pressure applied to the brake and clutch pedals. The angle solved that by adding strength at the top of the master cylinder assemblies.

As a mater of fact the top bolts of the masters, all three of them, were attached through the angle. That was why the beam still would not move. Easy enough, undo the top bolts and slide them out. Right. You got to be kidding. They were twenty-year-old bolts, sitting in an awkward position, and not ready to give up the place they called home.

Finally I had them all loose and Hugh and I were able to lift the old beam off the chassis.

With that out of the way I could test fit the new beam. I discovered that the bracket for the ride height adjuster on the lower bar was trying to occupy the same space as one of the master cylinders. Since the lower bracket would not be used it could be cut off and thereby remove the problem. It just takes time.

Of course by this time it was mid day on Tuesday. I realized there was no way to still get the car ready to load on a trailer by Thursday.

On top of that we had promised to help Mike Norton get his car ready for it’s first outing this weekend. The hours just were not working for us.

So we switched gears and started the final preps on Hugh’s car since he was planning to run the practice sessions on Friday.

* * *

Wednesday afternoon we went out to Mikes and helped him putter with his yellow beast.
He had turned the car over to Brandon to have the new roll bar installed. It would be higher in order to go up over Mike’s head.

Brandon did a nice job but the additional roll bar height and braces meant some adjustment had to be made to the bodywork.

A little work with a sabersaw and we were in business. It looked like Mike would be able to run.

* * *

Wednesday evening we had a nice dinner at Bull’s Corner with Barry and Kathy Bussard, Mike, Hugh and I.

It was our first chance to meet Kathy who turned out to be an attractive and charming lady. She is a little skittish about all this racing stuff but I think she will come around with exposure.
Since we are the only Vee/FST racers at the track we are sort of out own rules committee. Over dinner we had our first unofficial non-meeting. We decided that while we were trying to get the class started we will sort of just run what we have and have a good time with it.

I like that kind of rules.

* * *

Thursday morning we were doing the final prep stuff. Just the usual. Charging the battery. Cleaning up all the dusty and dirty places. Checking the camber settings, installing a new rain light. Checking the new running lights on the trailer. Stuff like that. With luck we would be ready to load the car by lunchtime on. Makes it easy that way.
Wrong.

Last time we went through this process, the starter was bad. This time we didn’t find it until late Thursday morning.

This week’s Judas was the throttle cable. It had frozen solid inside the tube that runs from the Go pedal to the carburetor. It was like someone had poured glue in the tube.

We removed the old cable to use for checking lengths and set out in search of a new cable.
It sounds like a simple thing, but nothing ever is. At our third stop we found something that might work and went home to try it in place.

When it got too dark to see what we were doing when Hugh blew the whistle. Stop for now. He would attack it again in the morning.

I, in turn, would escort Mike to the track and see him through his first practice session. If he was lucky, Hugh would make it out for the afternoon sessions.
We’ll see.

Ferrari Dreams

2006-11-08T20:27:00.000-06:00

We can dream can’t we?

Rusty and I attended the Ferrari Club event on Friday at our home track. Lots of red out there, with an occasional touch of yellow, a splash of blue and of course, a little black. Lots of interesting cars. It was a real hoot to see four car haulers drive in and then try to guess what was going to spill out of them.

We had gone under the guise of working corners just like we would for a race, but I don’t know why. These guys don’t look at flags. No, never, nada, nyet. They drive Ferraris. Black flag the field and they speed up. Oh well, it’s their equipment and their lives they are playing with. I guess if you drive a Ferrari you are invincible and your equipment is bullet proof.

After meeting and partying the night before, the F people got down to business. Part of the process of all this fun is that the drivers meet in New Orleans for an early in the morning breakfast and then drive in caravan to the track. With a police escort, no less.

The first four cars showed up (without the police) grinning like a bunch of high school kids with their fathers cars. Seems they got tired of gong slow, and drove away from them. (A nameless police officer told me later that the caravan was cruising at over eighty) Twenty minutes later the rest of the main group arrived (with the police) and entered with full fanfare. About forty really great automobiles shining like new gems.

The race prepared machines were already at the track and were now uncovered for everyone to see. These included four of the new challenge cup cars, one really yellow M type, one 335 SR ex LeMans car, and the real class of the show, a beautifully restored vintage roadster. Being a little older than most of the crowd, It caught my eye.

One look at the roadster and you could see Juan Fangio, Phil Hill or maybe even Moss behind the wheel. You might see just one of these in your lifetime. Merely sitting there in all its glory it gave me thrills. When it went out on the track, the driver wore a period correct half helmet with fabric earflaps. Wonderful. And the best part is that the damned thing was fast and sounded like the sweet music only Ferrari’s produce.

The French Quarter Classic crew did a great job of making the event memorable. All the right flags flew and the Ferrari garage (There actually is a Ferrari garage reserved where a couple of cars are stored and worked on) was converted to a hospitality suite, complete with buffet. No track burgers today.

The weather was beautiful, the cars fast and all in all a great outing. Lots of spins, a little excitement and a few raised heart rates, but in general all went well. Most importantly there were no accidents.

One exception. Some uninformed turtle thought he could make it across the track between turns six and eight and had the misfortune of walking under the wheel of a flying Ferrari. It had to be his fault and besides, he broke the wheel.

It was fun, very interesting and I’ll leave you with a few pictures for your imagination to swim in.

(Click on the small pictures to enlarge)

A Show of Restraint

2006-11-05T12:39:00.000-06:00

With the guys gone, I settled down to solving the problem of the camber limiter.

The original Grinch had been a "Z-Bar" car. That is it used a Z shaped bar to act as a torsion bar for the rear swing axles and additionally to keep the axles from going in to positive camber.

Mike Schiffer, the Grinch’s first owner after the Dassingers built it, decided he didn’t like that.

At the beginning of his second season with the car, he installed a cable restraint system.

The idea is simple. Cinch up the cable to the point that the rear axles are constantly in negative caber and can not droop any farther even if both wheels are off the ground.. Short, quick, positive.

It can mean however, that you get some very nasty transitions when the cable is at the end of its tether. You don’t get much warning of impending loss of traction. I guess you just have to learn, by unpleasant experience ( like spinning out), when it is going to go…… and not go there.

I could do without that. I wanted something a bit more forgiving.

I knew I was planning to build a "zero roll" system for the back end but I didn’t have time to do it before next weekends race. I also knew that in order to get the zero roll assembly under the rear end bodywork, I would have to drop the whole thing down as low as possible. That, in turn means I have to get a new exhaust system built that will not be in the way of the zero roll gear. Everything on a racecar is give and take. Move this a little bit here and you are in the way of something else. It makes you really appreciate watchmakers.

I finally figured out a system of brackets mounted to the upper coil over shock mounts and connected to the rear axle locating arm with a bar. The bar, in turn feeds through a spring mounted on the top of the bracket. Since the bar is threaded I could then crank down on the spring to adjust the amount of camber. The second spring should provide some slight warning the you are about at the end of your reach and maybe, just maybe, let you know when to back off.

We’ll see next week when we go to the track.

Beam Me Up!

2006-11-05T12:36:00.000-06:00

Part of today was spent working on the new axle beam.

For Mike’s purposes the old steering box and steering arms and torsion bars had been left in place. I didn’t need or want them, so I set about making them go away.

The tower nuts had cotter pins in them to stop them from turning during heavy road vibration. Of course, the ends of the cotter pins had been eaten away to the point they very difficult to get to and had to be pushed out with a nail. Then you have to break loose the old rusted nut and spin those off. It is a good example of how little task eat up your time.

Once all of that is cleared, we pulled off the trailing arms and removed the spring leaves from the lower tube so I could replace them with a sway bar.

None of this is unusual, but it takes time to do.

Anyway at the end of the day the beam is clear and all of the old hardware has been removed.

The next step is to remove the old beam from the racecar and then start swapping out parts. The long-range goal is to have a beam with an adjustable spring package in the top tube and an anti-sway bar in the bottom tube.

* * *
Tomorrow Hugh and Rusty are going over to the track to play corner worker for the annual Ferrari club track outing. They are expecting a nice turnout of cars and it should be fun.

I’d like to go but since there is a race next weekend I am staying home to work on the car.

Snug Fit

2006-10-24T17:57:00.000-05:00

Hugh has been fighting the "fitting" problem on his car again.

Over the past few races and practice sessions he had discovered that the position of two braces were restricting his arm movements making it difficult, or at least uncomfortable, to steer the car. The old bars hit him about half way between the shoulder and the elbow. It was like trying to drive with your elbows pined together.

Yesterday he cut the braces out and replaced them with a couple of curved pieces which will give him another three or so inches for his arms. It doesn’t sound like much but it makes a whole lot of difference. This allows his elbows to move which means he can turn without having to pass the steering wheel from hand to hand. He can keep both hands on the wheel and steer rather than aim.

* * *

I am still working on getting the Grinch ready.

Mike Murzi had told me he had a link pin type front end he would be willing to part with. What made it special was that it had already had the ride height adjusters installed on it. Since I had some serious ride height problems it sounded like it would be worth checking out.

Saturday morning, Rusty and I drove up to Maddisonville to take a look at it. It was perfect for what I needed so I bought it and we brought it home.

I had met Mike in an auto parts store and we started talking about racing. It turned out the he is a big VW enthusiast and always has a couple of projects going. In his garage I got to see a beautiful customized VW bug convertible. Sweet.

On the way back we stopped in Ponchatoula for lunch. They have done a nice job with the little town and it is quite charming. All of the old empty down town stores have been cleaned out and turned into antique shops, restaurants etc. As a result the side walks are filled every weekend with people walking from shop to shop having a good time. It is an interesting approach, which is salvaging the small downtown economy.

* * *

I’ts like Christmas; The postman has been busy again.

My helmet and two new front tires arrived today. I was expecting the helmet but the tires got here a lot sooner than I thought they would. Fantastic.

Carl's Gizmo

2006-10-14T20:16:00.000-05:00

I sent an email to Carl Watral asking about the spring-loaded gizmo on the shifter.

Carl is a very sharp guy and does not put things in a car without thinking them through. I knew it had to have some good purpose or it would not be there. I had just never seen anything like it.

The more I work on Hugh’s car the more impressed I am with the very original thinking Watral did. Most drivers sort of follow along with what everyone else is doing. Not Carl. He seemed to have analyzed each problem from a fresh viewpoint and come up with some elegantly simple solutions. This is not to say that the solutions were achieved with out a whale of a lot of work. For example, compare the original body to the current version.

Current Vee thinking has a lot to do with first, body aerodynamics and second, how easy it is to draft behind. Carl slimed the original Warrior down to a needle that would punch the smallest possible hole in the air. The smaller hole means it will have less wind drag to make it less work for our limited motors to push through the air and less turbulence behind the car. The less turbulence the harder to draft.

This kind of evolution is apparent in every aspect of the car.

Carl explained that spring trigger was a reverse "lock out" devise. That I understood. It is possible, on occasion to get the car into reverse when you are slamming things around during the heat of a race. This gadget was to keep that from happening. I did not understand however, how you got to reverse when you wanted it.

The FV rules say you have to be able to access reverse from the inside the cockpit of the car.

Now that I think about it, I have never seen a race official check that out. Maybe it is better to risk on being called out over something trivial, not performance enhancing and easily corrected, than to lose a race because you had a bad shift problem.

Sometimes you have to make choices.

Saturday

2006-10-11T11:20:00.000-05:00

The schedule for Saturday started with a drivers meeting at nine followed by the first round of practice sessions.

Formula cars would be first since it was the smallest field. Then came the bracket racers and the Spec Miatas, followed by the formula Mazda warm up and finishing up with the GTO, Vintage V8, practice.

After that would come the qualifying rounds in pretty much the same order. About the only change was that the red bracket would run with the Spec. Miatas because the lapping times were similar.

That would carry us until the lunch break.

After lunch we started on the days racing. Most races were scheduled for twenty minutes. First the open wheel cars, then a fifteen minute all bracket / Spec Miata heat race. At two thirty we would have the forty minute Formula Mazda feature followed by the big V8 bash and a final heat race for brackets and Spec Miatas.

* * *

We gassed up and started getting Hugh ready.

He took it out and turned only one lap before coming back in.

He could not get the car into fourth gear.

We took the rear body section off the car and started looking for the problem.

When you looked at it you could see that where the connection to the shifting shaft had moved. I also noticed for the first time, another of Carl Watral’s many innovations. He had some kind of spring loaded mechanism which I think was supposed to keep the shift handle in the right position.

After a bit of struggling we got to the point that we could get the car into gear again. First was still a little dicey but the only time you might need first on this track was when you left the grid. Other than that, most races only involve third and fourth gears.

Hugh took the car out and put in three qualifying laps that were not too inspiring and came in saying that the car as very "squirrelly" and that it seemed to be "all over the place".

Working with this incredibly astute and descriptive data I tried to analyze the problem and plot what a solution might be.

We had already resolved the camber situation so I went to the next item on the list.

I checked the tire pressures and was really surprised. The rears were running over thirty pounds and the fronts were 19 pounds on one side and twenty five on the other. No wonder the car would not handle like it should. I adjusted the tires to eighteen pounds on the front and twenty on the rears.

Hugh had not run enough laps to do much more than get in a qualifying time but it really didn’t matter. The grid position was going to be the same anyway. With four different cars, which would normally run in four different classes, lumped into a single "open wheel" group, the grid would be determined by the relative speeds of the different classes. That was exactly the way it worked out. We were slowest and last.

Until we get enough cars in our class out there to make a field we will be stuck in this category. There will be no opportunity to race with anyone, much less win a race. We haven’t gotten to the fun part yet.

All of us were pitted in the same area. The fastest of the group is Lee Romine, who drives the Formula SCCA car. It is very, very quick; even faster than the Formula Mazdas.
Lee is a super nice I guy. (I think he is an Orthodontist) He seems to be a very gentle man and it always amazes me that some of the most soft spoken people are the most competitive on the track. He also competes in the Spec. Racer Ford group in SCCA.

Hugh lined up in last place on the grid and went out behind the pace car to start the race.

I was keeping lap times getting frustrated. The times were awful. I could not think of anything that would cause them to be that bad, especially when every thing we had done should have made the car faster instead of slower.

It was the next day before Hugh told me that since he knew where he was going to finish he had not bothered to try to make good lap times. Instead he had spent the whole race just concentrating on one or two corners at the time, trying to work out his best lines through them. Unfortunately this also leaves us with no knowledge of what other problems we might have that show up when you are going fast. He did however say that the car was handling better than it ever had.

Thanks for small favors.

Friday

2006-10-10T17:22:00.000-05:00

Hugh gets really itchy on days like these. Somehow if he is not the first one to the track he feels like he missed something. We had loaded the car on the trailer Thursday night and packed the truck so he was off before daylight. Rusty and I followed at a more leisurely pace. As we were driving the 53 miles to the track we got a call from Hugh telling us there were very few cars there and not to rush. Now wasn’t that a surprise.

We got to the track and signed in plenty of time. I went on to help Hugh unload the car and Rusty went out to work as a corner Marshall, something he has done often with the SCCA.
They were running three groups. First would be what might be called prepared "Race cars". This meant racing Corvettes, GT 1 cars, Production based racers and anything else that was not street legal.

The next group was the open wheel cars. That was us, a formula SCCA, a gaggle of formula Mazdas, and two formula Fords.

The final group was "Street Legal" cars. This would include The Spec Miatas, improved touring cars, etc. The three groups would cycle 30 minute track sessions all day or until every one got tired of running.

* * *

Our car was essentially ready so all we had to do was gas it up and start checking it out.

I planned to use the day to get the car sorted out after the changes we had made. This would be the first run with the new wider tires and the heavier wheels. We left most of the settings just as they were so that Hugh could see what it felt like. I was curious about the changes in handling.
During his first session, he was no faster than normal and if anything a bit slower. When he came in he reported that he felt like he was on roller skates. Straight line was fine but the minute you turn it was sliding like it was being on ice.

One good look at the rear tires revealed part of the problem. The inner third of the tire was there only part being used. You could see the pattern where one part of the tire was touching the track and the rest of it very clean fresh.

A rear camber adjustment solved that problem.

Formula Vees tend to run a lot of negative camber for the rear wheels, but that is on much thinner tires. With the wider tires only the inside edge was actually touching the ground. By decreasing camber, or the "lean in" of the tire, we could make the tire sit more flat on the ground and provide more wear surface. With more surface in touch with the ground you had more traction or grip. More traction should equate to higher cornering speeds. Higher cornering speeds should mean lower lap times.

I didn’t see it happening. Ours was the slowest class on the track so most of the time Hugh had to drive with one eye on the mirrors to keep from being run over by faster cars. This does not make for great lap times. That might be part of it. But there was still something else wrong. Toward the afternoon he did get in one fair lap but that was about it.

On the other hand, he reported that the handling was improved and that he felt like he was getting more grip into and out of the corners. He said the steering was more positive and that maybe he was steering too much.

He also told me he did not have to slam the car into gear as he had before. Later in the day he said he could not get into first gear at all.

That really had him worried. He was afraid he was going to break something he could not afford to fix. I wasn’t concerned because I had been through this before.

The shifting linkage on a Vee is a strange hodge podge of tubes and U joints. It sometimes gets out of whack and has to be adjusted to get it all back in place. I was sure that was the problem.
It was getting on into the hot part of the afternoon when a couple of guys pitted near us came over and asked if we would like to use their "easy up" shade tent. They had to leave to get something done on their car and rather than take it down only to put it back up the next day they left it with us for the afternoon. It was a real luxury and fast became one of the items on our "have to get" list. Saves a lot of sun burned ears and necks.

Even better news was that when we got home the postman had delivered my new driving shoes and gloves. Now I only needed a helmet.

Cinco Logos

2006-10-06T18:50:00.000-05:00

Further to the logo and Grinch saga.

We got a call the next morning telling us the pieces were ready and we could come pick them up

I made the fourth trip over and looked at the items. They really did not look bad but there was one little bitty problem. I had asked for four logo’s and one Grinch. What they had was four Grinches and one logo. I waited while they redid the order.

On the up side I now had five logos and four Grinches.

It worked out just fine, Rusty wanted a logo for his truck window, and now we had a spare.

Hugh decided to put his on the nose of his car. I wouldn’t have thought so but it looks pretty good.

Riding High and Running Late

2006-10-06T18:46:00.000-05:00

Well, it is official. I won’t make the first race this month.

It turned out that the race was one weekend sooner than I had thought. There is just no way to get it done in time.

Especially since I discovered the front end problem.

I had noticed that the front beam seemed to have an awfully high ride height. I suspected that this might be partially due to worn out shocks that did not want to function properly. Surprise . Surprise.

When I took the shocks loose the front lifted up another three inches. Not good.

A couple of quick measurements showed me that the clearance between the bottom of the chassis and the ground in the rear was two and a half inches. In the front it was five and a half inches unloaded. Even with me in the car it was still going to be too high. The car would go down the track looking like a dog sliding his rear.

On top of that we had other problems. The starter on Hugh’s car had gone out and would not turn the engine over. The solenoid worked but not the starter.

This meant we had to find a new starter or take the one off my car and put it on his so he could run.

Fortunately, a few phone calls solved the problem and I had one ordered which would be in the next day. Hugh had a chance to fish a private lake filled with trophy bass that day and was not about to miss it. I didn’t blame him, so we planned to make the change on Thursday.

The next morning I picked up the stater and since it was Wednesday, went by to pick up the Logo and the Grinch to put on my car. Naturally they were not ready. “Please come back at four”. Around two thirty in the afternoon I got a phone call from the girl in the back room who was just beginning to do the work which was supposed to be ready at four. From the conversation it didn’t take long to realise she didn’t know what the hell she was doing.

I went by the shop at fifteen minutes to five, thinking I give them all the time I could. They had closed early.

I don’t usually deal with Tony’s Tinting any more. This kind of behaviour was the reason. I had been through something like this with them before. They had done the numbers for Hugh on this spray can paint job. The numbers were ok when we finally got them (late) except for being the wrong numbers. They did them again and finally got it right. Somehow they never have enough time to do it right the first time but always find time to do it over.

We have found that we can order our numbers from SR Racing in Kentucky and have them in LaPlace sooner than we could get them form a local supplier.

Ain’t that a kick in the head.

Lo Go

2006-10-03T18:40:00.000-05:00

We made back half a step.

I found a local shop who would take on the Grinch and the blind mule logo. Should be ready next Wednesday. We'll see how it works out.

* * *
I got around to asking why the Grinch was called the Grinch.

Luanne, Gary's fair lady, explained it to me.

It seemed that Gary and his brother Wayne had developed a reputation for showing up late for races. Often late enough that their names didn't even make it to the printed grid sheets. In spite of that they were winning a fair portion of the ones they entered.

The whole time they were building the car with their Dad they were kidding around about sneaking in at the last moment, with a home made car and stealing the race like the Grinch stole Christmas

It would be nice to fulfill the plot line with a win but it didn't happen that way. They had overheating problems and finished third.

So much for stealing Christmas.

The Grinch didn't get away with it either.

Paint By Numbers

2006-09-28T19:53:00.000-05:00

Two Steps back again. I got a call from my graphics guy saying that they did not want to take on either the Grinch or the Blind Mule logo. Too time consuming for them. Frustrating.

The only other options seem to be for me to try a local source and offer to do the time consuming part myself or just to hire a good sign man to paint the pieces on. Either way it looks like it is going to get expensive. Maybe even more than it might be worth.

On the other hand, they did promise to get the rest of the order out that day. This included the numbers for the sides and nose and the drivers name.

We had just put Hugh’s new numbers on his car and they look really good. He went with red letters this time to go over his all white body. I like the new paint scheme. It shows up the shape of the car very well. The graphics really set it off nicely. Makes it look like a serious racing car.

* * *
We got the silver on the top part of the car done and have just sprayed the black on the side panels.

Once again the shade tree spray booth has come in handy. We found an added benefit in a low reaching limb. It makes a great place to hang small parts that need to be painted on all sides.

I had decided to stay with the existing side air scoops for the moment. I don’t like them, but with the deadline rapidly approaching I need to spend the time dong other things rather than that. It ain’t broke, so don’t mess with it……yet.
* * *

The graphics package arrived and looks good. The silver numbers for the sides are nice and the black numbers for the nose look fine. There was one small problem in that the drivers name letters came in silver. That will not show up well on a silver background.

I sent an e-mail to Jim explaining the problem. He got right back to me and promised to ship the name panels in black that day.

Quick commercial here:
Every dealing I have had with SR Racing has been a good one. They are quick to respond, easy to work with and generous with advice and knowledge. Give them a try when you need something. If they can’t do it, they will tell you so rather than wasting your time.

Getting The Grinch Ready

2006-09-19T18:53:00.000-05:00

For the last week I have been waiting for parts to arrive. Parts for 1964 Volkswagen Bugs are not on your average AutoZone shelf anymore.

It has also rained every afternoon and that puts a damper on things. Rain makes for nice afternoon naps, but it also sends the humidity through the roof.

Since there was not much I could do with out the parts I wanted, I started working on the body. The body was the least of my concerns. All things considered the body was in fairly decent shape. For a twenty-year-old racer it was in great shape.

There were a few fiberglass repairs that needed to done, but relatively few.
Some past owner had cut the side body panels right at the line where the leading part of the trailing arm pivots from the frame. I suspect this was so the rear section, which covers the lower part of the engine, could be removed without having to undo the trailing arm.

Later, for some equally obscure reason, they had made an attempt to glass the pieces back together and had really botched the job. That all had to be broken away and redone properly. Not a difficult job, but time consuming and just the thing for a couple of rainy afternoons.

After I got these back together I put body filler on the outside face and smoothed over the area where it had been cut. I also cleaned up a lot of little nicks and gouges and sanded them smooth. Not perfect but better. Perfect bodies on race cars are only for Vintage show cars. They are meant to be seen more than driven.

There was a section on the right rear end of the body that had received some damage. This was glassed on the inside for strength, and body filler applied to the out side to cover up the cracks, sanded and made ready.

Hugh, having graduated from spray cans to a spray gun, pitched in and shot the three pieces with primer. For this we use our shade tree spray booth. The compressor for the spray gun scares the dogs and they stay inside. With our dogs that is an advantage. They think the perfect place to be is right where you are about to put your foot.

With the primer on and dry you could really see the ripples and defects in the bodywork. The biggest problem was the air scoops that force air over the oil cooler. These were badly damaged and in great need of repair. I aligned the broken pieces as well as I could and reinforced the backside with new fiberglass to give them some heft. When I was satisfied that they would not fly off, I started on the visible side.

Some people are just naturals at doing little things like this. I’m not one of them. I have to foul it up a few times before I get it right.

I had been having a problem with the body filler hardening before I could get it all in place. High temperatures and high humidity probably had something to do with that. So, smart rabbit that I am, I figured I would ease up on the amount of hardening stuff I mixed with the filler. This time I got all in place before it began to set. It was late in the afternoon so I planned to let it harden over night and attack it in the morning.

It didn’t work that way. The next morning it was still soft and gummy. It was not setting up at all. I left it for another twenty-four hours and checked it again.

Now I was faced with the prospect of scraping all that crap off the body and doing it all over again with enough hardener to make it set up. Sometimes it seems like two steps back for every step forward.

That was the bad news.

The good news was that I got my numbers ordered. I was going with the number sixty-nine on the car and that would hold with tradition. My first Vee had been number forty-five because I was forty-five years old when I started racing it. I was sixty-nine when I started on this car. Sixty-nine seemed right. Besides, there was just something about that number I liked.

As part of the number package, I was getting the eight inch high numbers for the sides and four inch class designators to go with them. There were also six inch numbers for the nose, and a two inch high drivers name tag for each side, To that I added a couple of other little goodies.

I sent them the camera-ready artwork for the Blind Mule Logo that appears on the banner at the top of this page and the Grinch logo.
I was planning to place the blind mule logo one each side just under the drivers name and the four inch high Grinch on the nose, just under the front numbers.

The side panels of the car would be a glossy black. The top section however was going to be a silver gray. The side numbers would be silver to match the top. The front number, the driver’s name and the logos would all be black to show up against the silver. This combo would be set off with bright red pen stripping. I hoped it would look as good in three dimensions and it did in my mind.

It wouldn’t make it any faster, but it would make me feel better.

Steering

2006-09-11T20:01:00.000-05:00

We had already established that the engine ran but that it needed a good tune up.

I’m no engine builder.

Normally I would take the engine out and ship it to my engine builder to be refreshed, which I’m sure it needs, and tuned. In this case I was already planning to switch engines when I rebuild the rest of the car. For that reason I intended to limp through the rest of the season with this one.

I have all the settings I need for the retuning and I am sure I can find someone whose expertise is far greater than mine. I might even learn something in the process. So no worries on that part of the project. Not yet anyway.

The next big problem was the steering. I had two problems there. First the steering box was shot. We had a spare to replace it with but I wasn’t planning to do that because of the second problem. The braces that mounted the steering gear hurt my knees when I was just sitting in the car. I didn’t want to think about what it would be like to have them slammed against the brace when hitting a bump or during a race. That kind of pain I can do without.

My plan was to use rack and pinion steering rather than the stock Volkswagon steering box mounted up side down as in the existing car. That would mean I would have to remove the steering box, the pitman arm, and the steering mechanism that the Dassingers’s had devised. It also meant that I no longer need the braces that cut across my knees. Score two for one.

I unbolted the steering box and discovered that the pitman arm had been welded to the box. Good thing I wasn’t planning to just swap it out. That would have been a bear to break loose and replace.

About this time I discovered that I had to remove the side body panels in order to remove the remainder of the steering apparatus. In an earlier conversation, Gary Dassinger had told me that one of the innovations they had been working toward in building the car was to have a single removable piece that allowed you to get to everything. That meant that the side panels would never be taken off unless you had to get into the frame for repairs, so they are semi permanently screwed on rather than using the more common Dzus fasteners. In order to remove them you also had to detach the steering arms and the rear axle locating arms.

After removing the body panels, steering assembly came out easily.

I got out the saw and a grinding wheel and went to work. It took some doing but eventually I had the braces and the tabs for the steering cross member out of the way.

I discovered I was also going to reduce the weight of the car a bit on this trade out because the steering bar, steering box and pitman arm hit the scales at just over twenty two pounds. At six pounds the rack and pinion and the mounting bar was a lot lighter. I wish it were that easy to take sixteen pounds off of the driver. (Now there is an area we could work on)

With the front tires back in place, I tied a string between the steering arm connection points at the wheels to use for alignment. At this point I realised what a nice thing the Dassingers had done for me. They had notched the top rail to receive their steering assembly. This provided me with all sorts of clearance for my steering arms.

I had found an Empi Rack and pinion rig in the JC Whitney catalogue. It was designed to be used in the center of a dune buggy so it fit my needs nicely. The next part of the problem was to devise a mount of it.

The box needed to be mounted fairly high in order for me to slide my feet under it. That would give the greatest length I could manage and make it easier to slide my six foot plus body down in the car. If I put the new assembly where the old one had been I should have good clearance all the way around.

The only problem that presented was that the mounts for the new steering box were on the lower part of the housing. There was also a one quarter inch plate on the back of the rack housing that kept it from sitting flush on the mounting plate.

I made up a quick sketch and Hugh got a machinist friend of his to fabricate it for us. Then I had a piece of two inch by two-inch angle fabricated to act as a crossbar. Hugh did some of his famous go-rilla welding to attach the mounting bracket to the cross bar. I test fitted the R&P rig to the plate.

Then we placed the cross bar in the car and welded it from top rail to top rail right where the original Steering rig had been.

After that it was just a matter of bolting the steering assembly in place and fabricating the steering arms. Bolting it in was easy. Getting the length right on the steering arms took several tries.

The steering arms that were part of the original Empi kit allowed for adjustment on one end only. I went ahead with it since I had paid for it. Unfortunately I measured wrong and they didn’t fir properly. It wasn’t a big problem but it was annoying. Architects should be able to measure better than that. I never said I was smart.

Small Changes

2006-09-04T13:31:00.000-05:00

One of life’s conundrums is that when you are at your peak earning power, and have disposable income, you don’t have time to spend. The corollary is also true. After you retire you have the time to spare, but funds must be carefully marshaled. It then becomes a matter of using imagination, ingenuity and labor, rather than cubic dollars, to achieve a goal.

We were trying to get to Formula First. On the other hand we, as a group, still had a learning curve to go through. Vee’s are simple, but not easy.

After discussion, we, Hugh, Mike and I, decided that we could take it in steps rather than blowing a lot of bucks in one big swoop to make the transition. We knew what the overall rules were but that did not mean we had to make the transition all in one step.

Our goal was not balls out racing toward a national championship but to have a little fun competition amongst our selves and any one else who cared to join us. Sure, eventually the rules would be needed as a restraint, but not this season or probably the even the next.

What we were doing was finding older cars, generally in the less than five thousand-dollar range, and beginning an education in open wheel racing. To keep it simple we were buying formula Vees or maybe a former vee that had been converted for Autocross or Solo F modified competition.

We could use wider tires, either engine size and begin to learn how to race. The rules specified the maximum but we didn’t have to be there tomorrow.

We knew that disc brakes were allowed but on this course the brakes were used in only three spots and even then not hard. Converting to disc meant changes in both the front and rear wheel assemblies from spindles out. It was expensive and maybe not required. We could save dollars by not making the jump from drums to disc immediately. Especially if we were still running 1200 cc engines. The car and driver weight was around a thousand pounds. The drum brakes were designed to stop cars twice that weight.

With racing cars, brakes are used more to slow down than to stop, and drum brakes work as well as disc provided that you are not using them to the point of over heating or running in the rain. Since after market wheels were allowed we could go to wider tires (within the set limits) that would fit the existing brake drums. There are many dune buggy and Bug kits available to accomplish that.

This still left us open to convert to disc later, if we wished, and could convert to the Formula first specified wheel and tire then. For now we would use our own rules.

So where would I go with my car?

For the rest of this season, I planned to run it just like it was with one a couple of minor exceptions. The steering box was shot and the steering box mounting braces were a problem to my fitting the car. I would switch to rack and pinion steering which would allow me to get rid of the braces without interfering with foot room. This would make it a much more comfortable car for me to drive. It would also mean changing out the inventive system the Dassinger's had devised.

I would switch to wider tires. That just required a little research into wheel rims and tires. No big deal there, the Internet would be a big help.

What other changes? For now, none. I wanted to switch to a zero roll rear suspension but there was a time constraint. The car needed to be taken back down to a bare frame and brought back. I wanted to do that, but for now I needed to get the car running and safe to drive. There were only a couple of outings left in the season. Over the winter I would do the frame up rebuild. That would also be the time to make the rear suspension modifications.

In the mean time I would get to find out what it was like to be the Grinch.

The Grinch: A Car With A Past

2006-09-02T13:54:00.000-05:00

I sat down with the package that Sal Iannelo had sent. It contained not only the logbooks but also the original homologation certificate and a series of nine photographs of the car taken by one of its original owners.

It was really neat to see it in that form. All of the paint was glossy black and neatly pen stripped in red. The frame and the aluminum parts looked clean and bright. That is the way a race car should look.

In it’s current form it looks a little like I felt, surface chipped and a little rough around the edges. The trick would be to get it back like it was, and maybe heal myself a bit in the process. Consider it therapy.

On the back of one of the photos was a note that said "The Grinch MX1 Was built by Gary and Wayne Dassinger of Sebring Florida, in 1986 & ’87 and raced by Mike Schiffer from ’87 to ’92 at Sebring and Daytona."

This took into my home country. I had grown up down there. On top of that, the name "Mike Schiffer" sounded familiar to me. It was like something on the tip of my tongue that I couldn’t quite enunciate.

There were also pictures of another car, a Mysterian M2 of slightly later design that indicated a lot less frontal wind drag, shown next to the Grinch. I figured this was the driver’s next ride. Another Vee. Maybe he was still racing.

I looked through the logbooks and found that Mike had raced the car the car almost eighty times and had finished in the top ten in 67 of them. Seventy seven percent top tens is not shabby.

Succeeding drivers were not as successful. John McFarland raced it twice, Bill Hornack eight times, Brian Goodchild eleven times. None had outstanding records. It seemed to have become a "drivers school / first season" sort of car.

I had one like that once. It taught me a lot of lessons. I kept puttering with it, trying to imitate the latest trick until I discovered that the biggest trick of all was proper set up. When done right, my car was as fast as the latest stuff on the track. As old and as out dated as it was it could stay in there with the best of them. I would have to remember that. It was a lesson hard and expensively learned.

Sal Iannello bought the car as a project in ’99 and held it on to it, hoping to get around to working on it, until he sold it to me in ‘06.

That’s a long life for any other kind of racecar. Not so with Vees.
* * *
Since they were racing in the same area, I thought Carl Watral might just know Mike Schiffer, I called. He did and gave me a phone number.

I called Mike and missed him. He later returned the call and we had a nice chat. He clued me into the location for the original builders and even came up with a phone number for Gary in Sebring.

I called Gary Dassinger and got a brief history on the car, It had been built by Gary’s father, he and his brother Wayne. He talked fondly of the time. His father had since passed on and he and his brother had occasionally spoken of getting the car back and restoring it. Just for kicks. Sort of a tribute to their Dad.

Having lost my own father a few years ago I understood the feeling and was in sympathy with the idea. I thought about that for a few days.

AT this point there were several ways to go with the car:
- ONE: I could update it to formula first (remember therapy), run it our little track and have a hell of a good time. That would entail some drastic changes to the car that would alter it significantly from the standard Vee class.
- TWO: I could restore it as a vintage Vee and run it in it's original configuration. I had all the documentation, and photographs of the original car. It was vintage eligible. Vintage racing is a laid back form of the sport and one that I had seriously considered before becoming infected by the Formula First virus. It was just a matter of restoring what was there. I even had the original builder to use as reference. This would be, by far, the simplest and least expensive racing option
- THREE: I could give it back to the Dassingers and let them restore it as they wished and find another candidate. There were plenty around.

Any one of the three was attractive in its own way. I thought about it a lot for a few days. Whichever decision was made it would have to happen soon as I needed to get to work on the car in order to make the October deadline or find another one that needed less effort.

Finally, I called Gary and offered the car to them. I could not afford to just give it to them but I did offer to sell it to them for what I had in it at that point. I just could not get away from what a neat thing it would be for them to redo the car for themselves and their father.

Unfortunately, Gary was just about to go in for surgery and his brother now lived in Portland. They tried every way they could think of to pull it off but finally had to give up the idea. I was kind of sad for them.

One the other hand I could now get to work and get the car ready and I had some ideas about stuff that I wanted to mess with.

The Congregation Grows

2006-08-30T15:56:00.000-05:00

Things got real busy for me right about then, but most of the things that happed were good news.

A friend of ours, Mike Norton, is one of the owners of Bull’s Corner, our usual watering hole and about the best eatery in LaPlace. He had not been around the day we brought Hugh’s car back from Florida. We had stopped by for a cool one on the way to the house (and maybe to show off just a little). Keith and Pat who are both diehard racing fans were there and rushed out side to take a look.

Hugh’s car has a very tight cockpit and it was way too small for Keith who is a really big guy. Pat jumped right in and made himself at home.

Any way, Mike heard us talking racing over the next few weeks and decided it sounded like fun to him. He had raced a Porsche in the past and wanted to get back into the sport. We helped him find a car and next thing we knew he bought it.

It is a Zink C4 that a couple of guys in Virginia had found in a barn and restored enough to use it to go through drivers school and run for their first season. The only problem was that it was in Virginia and we were not.

As it happened I was about to make one of my regular trips to north Florida for meetings related to a house I had designed for my Aunt Louise. Hugh was planning to go with me and we were going to make a side trip to Milledgeville for a quick visit with our cousin Marion. (Marion is the author of Their Last Lap at Indy which was published under one of her pen names, DeNonie Barber) It was also sort of a nostalgia trip for Hugh since he had attended Georgia Military College in Milledgeville and would have a chance to see what forty five years had done to his old campus.

I had talked with Bill Coursey, who was selling the car to Mike and discovered that he had family in Macon which is near Milledgeville. Bill is neat guy, and like most Vee people was more than willing to go out of his way to help other Vee drivers. He is the headmaster at a private school in Virginia and was taking his vacation during the summer break period. He also was planning to visit with the family in Macon. Since the car was being sold with a trailer, we had timed out trip to coincide with his and he dragged it down and met us in a parking lot on Hugh’s old campus.
He and his racing partner, Rick Krason, had obtained the Zink and cleaned it up nicely. Rick is a veterinarian and a neighbor of Bills. I think they are buying another car and will continue to race Vees.

We drove back to LaPlace and got in touch with Mike. The next day we delivered the car to the new home he and Bonnie were finishing out. I would give my eyeteeth for the garage space he has under the house. You could put six cars in there.

So here we were, less than six months after we started this thing and already we have three cars in the class. I have just heard from Barry Boussard that he is buying another C4, so that will make four.

If Gregg and Tom get the one they are looking at then it will be five. With five running it will not be long before we have a real field.

Who said I couldn’t preach?

Adapting to the Environment

2006-08-28T23:58:00.000-05:00

It took a few days and a lot of shifting things around. The bass boat came out from under the carport and took up a new station in the driveway with a "for sale" sign on it. The golf cart, also a former carport resident, was sold and gone. Now there was room for two Vees in the single file stall. This way at least they were under cover, shaded from the sun and protected from the rain. Mine went in first because it would probably be there the longest before it's next outing. Hugh's was closest to the gate in the front. I stripped off the top of the body and began a careful study of what I had. The first thing to do was to see if I could fit in the car. I am larger than your average rabbit.

My broad butt is simply too wide to fit in the molded fiberglass seat. I took the seat out and tried again. I could, if I used the fuel cell cover as a backrest, fit snugly into the cockpit. My shoulders would be firmly braced against the topside rails and under the roll bar braces. There would be no lateral movement during cornering….good deal. It might take a little adjustment of the pedals but that was not too bad. A bigger problem was that the steel straps that supported the steering box cut painfully across the tops of my knees, Have to do something about that.

There was also a bar across the car about where my bottom settled. I’m not sure what its purpose was but it was wrapped in a foam pad and would render the submarine belt unnecessary. My tail couldn’t slide forward if it wanted to. On one hand if I cut out the bar my knees would change position. On the other hand, if I changed the steering I had a secure bottom brace that would hold me firmly in the car during hard cornering. Its little things like that make it interesting. Every tiny little change affects every thing else.For a car that had been in storage for as long as it had, it was not in bad shape.

The steering box was shot. It took half a turn of the steering wheel in either direction before you got any action from the pitman arm, so that would have to be replaced. The brakes were frozen up. Could be master cylinders, or slaves, or rust; have to check that out.I replaced the battery, drained and replaced the oil in the crankcase and changed the oil filter. I removed and cleaned the sediment out of the oil cooler. I added a little gas to the fuel cell and with my heart in my mouth hit the start button. Shortly I saw gas in the fuel filter and suddenly it fired. It was a little ragged, but it fired. It was running rich, but it fired. The elevation change from Buffalo to sea level could account for that but mostly it sounded like it could be healthy. I could breathe again and I didn't even know I had been holding my breath,I checked all the gauges. The tachometer and oil pressure gauge worked but I could see no reaction at all from the oil temperature unit. I may not have had it on long enough to make a readable change, Have to check that later. All the switches seemed to work. I tested the fire bottle and got no reaction on the test light but a full green on the battery check. Need to have it recharged most likely.

The front beam was as stiff as a board. Lots to do there. All in all it seemed fairly sound. It needed a lot of cleaning and caressing but it looked OK. . Now, I had some thinking to do. I spent the first of many days just sitting on a stool looking at various aspects of the car. I was trying to imagine what happened when I changed one thing or another. It’s a lot easier to do it once rather than rush in and have to do it over because you didn’t think it through.

* * *

If you live in southern Louisiana, the weather soon teaches you some valuable lessons. You begin to realize that the Mexicans are not crazy.When you go on vacation, like to Mexico, you usually take your own schedule along with you to judge the world by. When you see the locals knock off at ten in the morning, just when you are getting started, you wonder what kind of lazy people Mexicans are.

If you are there long enough you begin to see that they started their workday at six in the morning while you were still asleep. By ten the day is almost half over for them. It is also reaching the sweltering hot part of the day. At ten, they go home, have a nice lunch, play with the kids, take a little nap and maybe have a cool bath and get ready to come back to work at two or three so they can finish the rest off the day and knock off at seven or eight. They are not crazy. You just did not understand the realities of the climate and a logical adaptation to it. Not all of the world is air conditioned.In the delta swamps where we live, you work out doors early in the morning and late in the afternoon. During the heat of the day you go inside where it is air-conditioned. This because, like the Mexicans, we also have ninety plus degree temperatures. To that we add eighty percent humidity. Us old farts are not crazy either and retired old farts take naps. We’ve earned them.

There is another aspect of this two part daily schedule that I did not appreciate at first. The break in the middle of the day gives you an opportunity to think over what you did in the morning. Sometimes you find that this mornings decisions were not the best. The afternoon gives you a chance to make corrections. It keeps you from looking stupid later.

My Turn (Or - The Grinch That Stole My Socket Wrench)

2006-08-23T20:01:00.000-05:00

OK. So here it is. My brother is getting racy. I’m crew chief for a car that is all dialed in and ready to run. It only requires maintenance and set up. The rest is up to the driver. The cosmetic aspects are Hugh’s. It is his car after all. I had no real problems to solve. Nothing was broken and it didn’t need fixing. Where is the fun in that?

I was still preaching the Formula First doctrine and getting some interest. Especially since Hugh had put the car on the track and done surprisingly well with it. A lot of people were looking. The idea of fast fun at a reasonable price was beginning to set in. We needed another car or two to set the hook.

The other part was that I want to get back in myself.

So now it was time to think about what I would go looking for. Where were we headed. Formula First. Right. But what did that mean and how would we get there.

The SCCA had put out a set of rules to use as a trial Spec in the Central Division, where FST is a being tested. So let’s use that as a basis. Basically a Formula Vee but with specific changes allowed.

You could use:
- Rack and Pinion steering rather than Volkswagen steering box
- A 1600 cc engine instead of 1200 (requires a restrictor plate on the intake manifold)
- Only one Carb and it is specified as to make, type, and mfg.
- Ball joint type front beam is acceptable.
- Front shocks are free and don’t require the original shock tower.
- Disc Brakes are allowed instead of drums.
- Wider tires are allowed but use a spec tire.

I figured we could take older cars, picked up at budget prices, and work our way in that direction, while building a class of competitive cars. Plus we get the fun of messing with the cars.
I had a direction.

I had been keeping an eye on Ebay, the SR Racing Sales Board, the SCCA sales list and other places for potential cars in my low budget price range.

I found one on Ebay that looked as if it could be brought around with a bit of work and put in a bid on it. It was a former VEE, which had been converted for Auto Cross some time in the past. It had a 1600 cc engine but nobody knew any thing about it. There was even a small trailer. It had been purchased sight unseen when some a guy in Jacksonville bought container contents which had been in storage until the owner had failed to keep up his storage payments. I bid on it and lost out to a higher bidder. Scratch one.

There was another one in Texas that looked even more promising. The front brakes had been converted to disc, had a 1600 race engine and some decent bodywork. It looked like an older Lynx chassis or at least a Lynx clone. I lost out on that one also.

Then I came across a car someone called a "Grinch". It was being sold by Sal Iannello in Buffalo, New York. Just the car and the body moulds. No spares, no trailer, but it looked pretty good.
The pictures of the car showed a body in an older design style that was pretty clean.

The chassis was straightforward. It had a gimmicky steering system that showed where someone was trying to out think the FV rules. It also had the cable type droop limiter that was used on the first Formula Vees in the sixties. It already had a remote oil cooler, a fuel cell and on board fire system. It was perfect. It was tinkerers dream and the expensive pieces were already there.

I started email correspondence with Sal in April. He had a couple of interested parties but we were finally able to come to terms that were acceptable to both of us. That took almost a month. I must say that Sal turned out to be a really nice guy who was very helpful and cooperative.

I did estimates of what it would cost for me to drive up to Buffalo (which turned out to be near Niagara Falls on the US/Canada border) and decided it would be less expensive to ship the car. It was a long way from New Orleans.

It took a while for find a shipper who would give us a reasonable bid. Nobody had tried to ship a racecar and they were afraid to take it on. Another problem was the body moulds. Sal came up with the idea of strapping the moulds to the body and shipping the whole thing as a package. It worked out just fine.

We had a slight delay with the shipper picking the car up but finally, on June first, I got an email from Sal saying the car was loaded on the trailer and on the way. A couple of days later the Grinch arrived and was sitting in the front yard while we tried to figure out where to put it.

So now I had a car and was faced with the proposition of having to put up or shut up. After all the talking I had done about being able to take an older car and make it respectably fast I had the job to do.

The next race at No Problem was scheduled for October. That was my target date. About a week later, I got a package from Sal, which turned out to be the cars logbooks and a stack of pictures. That set off another adventure.

New Numbers, New Paint

2006-08-21T10:50:00.000-05:00

One of the things that happen when you get a Vee is that you have to mess with it. It is a condition you catch from the car. As soon as you are the owner there are changes that have to be made.

Passenger cars are like static things. You get in one and the first thing you do is adjust the seats, the steering wheel and the mirrors. The car stays the same.

Racecars are not like that. They don’t have adjustable seats and steering wheels. What you do is adapt the car to fit the driver. This is the first stage.

Maybe you have to change the pedals to fit the length of your legs. Or make changes to the roll bar so that it is far enough over your head. There are lots of little things to do, but when you are finished, getting into it is like a putting on a snug glove. All the parts and pieces fit smoothly around you. Your hand falls easily on the shift lever, hard places are padded to keep them from bruising you. That trite old phrase about you being part of the car could never be truer.

Then there are the other things that you just have to fuss with. Maybe you want to make it look like it is yours rather than the previous owners. Maybe some neat racing stripes will make it go faster (or at least make you feel faster).

It doesn’t matter that you may not be a brilliant mechanic. It doesn’t matter that you don’t even know how to set it up yet. It doesn’t matter that the previous owner spent years honing the car so that it performs like a Swiss watch. You just got to mess with it. Change things. Fix things that are not broken. It’s a rule.

As soon as Hugh could keep both feet firmly on the ground after his first outing in the car, his hands began to itch.

We had already made some basic modifications to fit the car to him. We changed a roll bar brace, shifted some straps, and relocated the mirrors. Little stuff. The car came to us basically race ready. It was just tweaking that was required to adapt it to a different driver.

But he didn’t "own" the car yet. He hadn’t made it his. So it started.

He bought some Bondo and started smoothing out some nicks in the nose cone. (Nose pieces always get the worst of it in open wheeled cars. They are constantly blasted with small rocks and track debris, and when there is a crash, you can count on repairing or replace one) Then he started peeling off all the old numbers and the advertising from someone else’s sponsor. Stuff like that.

Then came the sandpaper. I slept late one morning and when I woke up he was on the back porch with some spray cans going at it like the happiest elf that ever existed. It was your basic fifty / fifty paint job. (Fifty feet away at fifty miles per hour it looked pretty good.)

The next week we were back at the track, ready to run his novice race in the "open wheel" group. New numbers, new paint, and it was finally his.

Even the track photographer got a shot of him in action.

My little brother was becoming a racer: at the age of 65.

Once You Get The Bug.....

2006-08-18T14:47:00.000-05:00

When I retired at the age of sixty-seven I had sort of assumed that my racing days were over. I was now a "used to be" driver. I still had the interest but as far as I knew the closest place to race was College Station, Texas about eight hours away. That’s a long way to drive to attend races on a regular basis.

Tom Walter, who lives about three doors down the street, told me about a little track down near Donaldsonville. I didn’t know at the time but Tom was heavily involved and often functioned as course marshal during events. When he wasn’t doing that, he was building Corvettes to be driven by his brother or working with a crew racing a Porsche. While the tracks main functions are involved with drag racing they do have a road racing course laid out off the back section and they are working with the New Orleans Race Drivers Association to get a regular road racing program established. A track, less than an hour away, was an attractive proposition. The next time they had a race I went down and volunteered to work corners.

The track was called "No Problem Raceway". Don’t ask. I don’t know why either.

It’s a nice little course; 1.8 miles with eleven turns. All paved. Mostly 40 feet wide but the section where you run down the end of the drag strip is 60 ft. Good run off (read spin out) areas. Flat. No big topography changes. Three straights, one at 1900 ft, second 500 ft and the third 800 ft. When you look at the track map it is hard to figure out what they mean by straight but that’s what they advertise.

The bulk of the road racing is sanctioned by NORDA rather than the SCCA. They put on what they call "The Grand Bayou Road Race Series" and stage 6 to 12 races per year. It’s a real "run what you brung" deal. In an effort to get some competition out of small fields they do what they call bracket racing. If you run laps between X and Y you are in Green bracket. If you are a little faster you are in the next bracket. If you are sand bagging and run faster than your bracket you get bumped up to the next bracket automatically. It doesn’t matter what kind of car you drive you fit into one bracket or another. The result is some strange combinations. You might see an F production Midget racing a street stock BMW and a 944 Porsche. There are even guys who drive to the track, tape the headlights and go racing. It’s like being back in the fifties when that sort of thing happened a lot.

There are a couple of exceptions of course. They have enough Spec Miata’s to make a field so they get to run by themselves. So do the Formula Mazdas.

The rest of the open wheeled cars get dumped into an "open wheel" group. There is no racing there because the cars are so different and run at such different speeds. The average open wheel field might be a Formula SCCA, A vintage Brabham, a Formula Ford, a formula Mazda, a vintage Cooper and a Club Ford.

For a year I worked corners at the track for NORDA events and for various Porsche, BMW and Ferrari club track days. I even got my brother to come out and work with us when he retired. He was getting a big kick out of it and although I didn’t know it was getting the bug to go racing.

I started preaching the Formula First gospel to any that would listen. A quick, low cost class would be ideal for that track, especially if we could get several cars out quickly. To do that, we would have to find a bunch of older formula vees and do the conversion. The good part of that of that there are a lot of older cars around that could purchased cheaply. Ebay always has a couple and so do several other reliable sources like SR Racings sales board.

The next thing I knew Hugh was looking for a car and found a good one. Carl Wartel was selling his extremely evolved Warrior. It had recently come back from the SCCA National Championships where it had acquitted it self well.

In late Feb. we made the drive down to south Florida to pick up the racer.

Hugh got the car, a truck bed full of spare parts and a trailer for a very reasonable price. In the process we got to know Carl and found a friend as well. We have been on line with him several times since then to ask questions or just to shoot the breeze.

A couple of weeks after we got back they had a track day. We got Hugh ready loaded the car on the trailer, and headed to "No Problem". We also took the Porche so that he could get some seat time while we were waiting to get some track time for the open wheeled car. They don’t like to run open wheel cars with ones with fenders. I think it embarrasses them.

Hugh put in three sessions in the Porsche, with his lap times dropping slightly with each lap, before thay finally called a break and let him take the open wheeled car out. His very first lap in his new car was a couple of seconds faster than the best he had been able to do in the Porsche.

When he came in he had a little grin on his face that didn’t go away for several days.

A Lesson For George, The Sailor

2006-08-13T11:52:00.000-05:00

You may not have been aware of it but after Cunningham stopped racing cars in the early sixties he stepped back into his earlier interest. He built a 12 meter yacht called the Columbia which he skippered it in defense of the America's Cup. He won. He was later inducted into the America's Cup Hall of Fame in 1993 and the Motor Sports Hall of Fame ten years later. So far as I know he is the only person to be in both.

Formula Vee also has a link to sailing. Bill Duckworth and Col. Smith were both sailboat racers prior to becoming involved with sports cars. It was the idea of single design racing classes, fairly common in sailboat racing, that was behind the concept for formula vee. When they happened on to Enrico Nardi's design for a VW based formula junior (which had been commissioned by a car dealer in Miami) they thought they had it locked. They wanted to take a single design and make it a "drivers" class rather than just buying the "trick on the week" in order to be the fastest. The SCCA wanted it to be a bit more open than that and set the rules so that everyone had to run to the same basic formula and had to use the same stock Volkswagen parts, but could make variations with in the rules. It worked and more than 40 years later, FV is still one of the largest and most competitive racing classes in the world. (The attached picture is the actual restored "Nardi" that was the basis for the "Formcar", the first formula vee ever produced (in Orlando of all places)).

The only real difficulty now is that it is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to find the required pre 1964 Volkswagen parts required for the Vee ( A new racing engine for a vee is $6000 (55-60 hp) where a new engine for a First (85-90hp) is $3500). As a result formula first, which uses parts from later versions of the bug which are still available and still being manufactured in various parts of the world, is coming in to being. It is not so much a replacement for formula vee as it is an evolution.

Why Not Give It Your Best Shot?

2006-08-12T22:20:00.000-05:00

OK, I am an addict. I love car racing. All forms but of it, but especially sports cars. I’ve been this way for a long time and I am not interested in any ones twelve step program to cure me. I like it this way.

I grew up in a pre air conditioning, pre television, pre Disney Orlando. Daytona was seventy miles away and Sebring not much further. It was a great place to live. I was a teenager and a car nut.

Over in Daytona a young guy named France was organizing stock car races in a new way. They ran partly on public highways and partly on the beach. It caught the attention of the news reels and became a fascination for the country. Folks were used to seeing cars make land speed record runs on Datyona beach but this was different. These ran in circles. Marshall Teague and his Hudson Hornet and Lee Petty became nation wide heroes.

Bill France was doing something else too. He was trying to convince the stock car drivers that they could make a real living as drivers. He would go on to turn the south eastern stock car circuit into NASCAR. He would also build the first super speedway. That is when NASCAR really came to life.

In Sebring they were starting to organize sports car races. The guys coming back from the war in Europe had brought with them an interest in sporty little cars like MG, Austin Healy, Triumph, Morgan and Jaguar. With sport cars the next step is to race them.

I saw my first sports car race when I was in high school in ‘53. My Dad had been transferred to Albany, Georgia to open a new Winn Dixie store. There was a Strategic Air Command Base on the outskirts of town.

Curtis LeMay was the big cheese in SAC and he was also an avid sports car racer. Using the thin disguise of creating a charity event for the Airman’s Relief Fund they held a big sports car road race on the runways at the base.

LeMay entered his Cadillac-Allard. Brigs Cunningham entered three of the Chrysler hemi powered cars he was building in West Palm Beach Florida. Lots of other people I’d never heard of showed up with lots of cars I had never heard of. Like Ferrari and Porsche. They had a D type Jaguar that didn’t look like any XK120 I had ever seen. As the weekend wore on I was astounded by the assemblage but when a Ferrari clocked a hundred seventy one on the back straight I pledged my allegiance. Ultimately the three Cunningham's finished first, second and third driven by Cunningham, John Fitch and Phil Walters. Later that year he would also finish third in the Lemans twenty-four hour race with the same car.

My active involvement with sports car racing came in the late fifties while I was in the navy and stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. I became a member of the local sports car club and through the club met some racers. It was not long before I was crewing for one of them and later going to driver’s school. That was when the addiction set in. I have never lost it.

In ’58 I became the owner of one of the first Bug Eye Sprites in the country. It cost about eighteen hundred dollars and I traded in a one year old Hillman Minx coverable to get it. The Hillman was the more expensive car but I still had to pay a little extra to get the Sprite. My car payments were twenty five dollars a month for a year. I had to take a part time job to cover them.

When I left the Navy I left racing for a while as I headed back to school to finish my degree. I attended races whenever I could but usually as a spectator and occasionally as a crewmember for a friend. I would not return to the track actively for twenty years.

In the early eighties Formula Vee was one on the largest racing classes in the world. It was inexpensive, simple, fast enough and very, very competitive. I loved it. I still do. I raced Vees until I moved to Hawaii. They didn’t have any wheel to wheel racing over there. When I returned from the islands I did not get actively involved again. I was too busy chasing a life and a career.

Then I retired. Now I have the time to spend the hours doing all the work required to put cars back together.

Like the Blind Mule if you can’t see it can’t be done why not give it your best shot.

Welcome

2006-08-09T18:01:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the blog site of the blind mule racing team. The ramblings of a bunch of Lambs trying to find their way back to the race track.