Some of you may not have realized on our shake down day the car wasn't ready to race or run many laps because the interior tin wasn't sealed & the exhaust wasn't thermal barrier coated.
The cockpit needs to be fully sealed from the engine bay & fuel cell area. We use a 3M Fire Retardant Sealer good up to 2000°. The exhaust runs so close to the transmission, the gear oil would overheat in it if the exhaust was uncoated. So we Jet-Hot coat the inside & outside of the header tubes & exhaust. (Mufflers only on the outside) This knocks down the radiant heat around the transmission & driver by 40-45°.
The Mustang comes apart late this week to go to powder coat. In our Track-Warrior cars like Greg's ... the steel floor, firewall & bulkhead/rear deck sheet metal are welded to the chassis ... and get powder coated along with the chassis & cage assembly. When it goes back together for final assembly, Randy Chastain will utilize the 3M Fire Retardant Sealer on every seam under the car, at the firewall & at the rear bulkhead & decklid sheet metal. This prevents C0², smoke, oil, fire, etc from entering into the cockpit.
I'm outlining this important step, because many of you already have, or will, modify the sheet metal in your builds & NEED TO KNOW it's critical to seal it & what to use. It's NOT OK to leave any seam unsealed. It's unsafe.
The car will go back together later this month & get ready to go run the NASA event at Thunderhill Raceway in Willows California on Aug 4-5. Since the car wasn't built to fit a class, we will run it in the "Unlimited" class of NASA's Time Attack, known as TTU. Since it is an unlimited class, often there are Prototype race cars that run in TTU.
We won't stand a chance against any Prototype race cars, with our Trans Am style 70 Mustang. But if there are no Prototype race cars, we'll have a good shot at running up front. Our driver Benny Moon is super talented, but hasn't been in a real race car is many years, so he'll need to shake off the rust as we work up to speed.
I don't know how fast we'll get this first weekend. I plan to do only basic tuning for balance. But it would be fun to have a pool of folks betting on Benny's best lap of the weekend.
We have a betting pool ... similar to a football pool.
* 100 times between 1:50.0 & 1:59.9 lap time, a tenth of a second apart
* Pick one time or as many as your wallet can handle
* Closest time wins all the pool money & bragging rights
* Only 1 time, Best time of the weekend, counts
Not sure you'll know, but just curious on the amount of shop time to build a race car from scratch. Was this car worked on everyday, all all day to get to this point, or a few days a week, one guy, two, ?, etc...
Brian Hobaugh SCCA National Tour June 2014
First Hemi 'Cuda Convertible Ever Built
Short clips: Goodguys Pleasanton autocross and pit videos
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