Howdy, Lateral-G members! I just wanted to introduce myself before you start to read this build thread. I own a shop in Plano, Texas where we design, CNC machine and assemble various suspension components for late model sports cars mostly for road course use. We are a small company but have some great fabricators, engineers, our shop manager takes the pictures, and several of us come from professional and semi-pro race team backgrounds. Not trying to sell anything, just explain who we are.
We build and service street and race cars in our service shop, mostly for road course use but also autocross, drag racing, hill climb, and high speed events like Bonneville. Our shop is known for LS swaps and we have done V8 installs (and make swap kits for) several BMW chassis, the Scion FR-S/Subaru BRZ, NB Miata chassis, and this 69 Camaro has an LS3 as well. I've been racing since 1987 with SCCA and since 2007 with NASA, and have run the Mustang below (which we built) in the Optima series and Goodguy events for the past 4 years.
Whenever we have big build projects like this one I always document the construction for the customer with pictures, videos and write out all of the details as the construction progresses. Its not much extra work to share the build publicly, so I do these detailed build threads on forums that will let me post there. A moderator here (Flash68) follows this build on another forum and today he asked me to port the thread over to Lateral-G, so here it is. Feel free to comment, make suggestions, poke fun, and share. We started this build in May 2015 and the customer allowed me to share the build starting in August, so I will post that first then follow up with more updates after that until I catch up with real time. Plan is to have the car on track in 2016. Thanks for reading.
Project Introduction August 6th, 2015: This one is a bit unusual for Vorshlag - a Pro Touring build. Yes, this is the first classic Detroit iron we've done up to this level. No, we're not selling out and trying to cash in on a "new trend" - I grew up building and driving 60s-70s F-bodies, Mustangs and Mopars. They were great looking cars with good drivetrains but had pretty terrible brakes, suspensions and chassis. I have watched the Pro Touring trend evolve from day 1 (
BigRedCamaro) and have been waiting patiently to build one with more of a performance slant than a show car.
This customer came to us with his 69 Camaro project because he thought we had the skills that best fit his needs. This will be no ordinary Pro Touring show car / Cars & Coffee queen, but a real deal track beast with giant Hoosier tires, big aero, and LS V8 power. Sounds a lot like what we do, but it needs serious safety gear and custom everything to work well.
Quick picture from where we are now on this build, in August 2015, when we launched this build thread
We've been working on this car now for about three months and this has turned into something pretty amazing, and I cannot wait to see what the end result looks like. Many people have commented after seeing the car in person or the few pics we've shown that they wanted to see a build thread. So let's get caught up on the progress, starting at the beginning - when the customer found us. I will start this forum build thread with the first post showing the tear down and some of the new frame work, and follow up with more progress in upcoming posts.
Picking A Shop Is Important
Earlier in 2015 we had a customer contact us about finishing a build he had started at two previous shops, which will remain unnamed. He came to our open house event in February 2015 to check us out in person, see some of the work we've done on customer cars, and get a feel for our shop - to see if we might be able to deliver what he wants.
He focused a lot of his attention on a 2013 Mustang GT (below left) road race car and silver Subaru Land Speed Racer (below right) that were in our shop that day, with recent work completed by Vorshlag. The owners of several cars we have built were also in our shop so he could talk to multiple customers face to face.
This type of research is smart, because not enough customers really check the background and skills of the shop building their dream car. They might hear about some shop that a friend says "check this place out", then without much further investigation they drop off their car and hope for the best. Well, this guy didn't take our word for it - he came to our shop when several customers and their cars we built were there and learned a lot.
I watched
this video recently where shop owner Vinny Ten said these things - that customers need to research the shops they work with - and I hadn't really thought about this much before. Sometimes customers want to blame others for their poor planning and bad decisions, but Vinny says its partially their fault for not researching the shop that did the work.
Luckily this 69 Camaro customer did his home work - and after he researched Vorshlag he brought the car up to us for a look, along with a truckload of parts, back in April 2015. We looked over it, made a list of recommendations and changes, had some good discussions with the owner about intended use and concerns, gave him some detailed estimates, and work got underway in May. Here's what we've been up to...
Note: Most of the pictures in this forum thread were shot by our shop manager,
Brad, and most of the work so far has been completed by one of our fabricators,
Ryan. Our whole shop has been involved in researching and selecting components, ordering parts, in discussions about safety and layout, Jason and I have had engineering input on many aspects, etc - its always a team effort here. If a photo looks noticeably ugly, though, I most likely shot it with my #potatocam phone or my old Nikon DSLR.
New Direction + Inspection
There were a number of significant changes in this build when it came to Vorshlag, many of which entailed removing previous work and starting over. We quoted the hours to re-do the frame, floor, cage and more, and we have stayed on our time budget so far.
We noted a lot of things that needed to be changed to comply with safety, classing and engineering standards for what the customer had in mind, which was serious HPDE and Time Trial use. I won't go into all of that, other than the list was detailed, extensive, and we re-used as many parts that were applicable.
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