So one of my high school friends (he still has his GSL-SE) had been talking about building a race car, and going racing for so long, his brother in law signed him up and me too. presumably i was invited because anyway you buy beer its divisible by 3....

picking the car was pretty easy, he's got a pile of Rx7's, and he picked the worst one. It sat behind a local shop long enough where getting it involved trimming some bushes....

the good news is that its an Rx7 and i'm posting in the right place, the bad news is that its full of rat poop and blackberry bushes

 

after a pressure washing, its wet


it is originally a Sunrise Red and Gray GSL-SE, but someone had painted it a metallic burgundy (or something) and then parked it in the sun so long the interior was brown

 

Wet, and mostly less filthy! Nice wheels. This will be interesting.

 

Appears to be a solid and straight car to build! Will definitely make an amazing car!

 

it is solid, basically zero rust. someone must have spent some $$ on it, because the odometer says like 200 something, but it had the little rubber nubbin on it still, and its got the original headlights too (Koito)

i'm not sure about amazing though, amazed that it works?

 

we decided that, while it ran when it was planted, we should probably pull the engine apart and at least change the rubber bits, which we did. they were nice enough to pull the engine out, apart and clean it, so i just showed up and put it together. you could tell that the engine was running fine, but having fresh water seals just means we don't need to worry about some question mark used thing

 

we were tempted to port it, but due to time constraints we ended up just leaving it stock. the race was supposed to be early December, and this was October or something. the other engine is a GIANT bridge port, and if was had time we may have plopped it in, but we decided that stock was easiest/fastest

 

Amazing because it doesn't appear to be full of rust, it appears to be straight, and is an excellent platform for what you're doing with it.

 

its a good candidate for a race car, no rust, i recommend the blackberry and rat poop rub for that. the rocker panel and floor are not as straight as they should be, and the hood, header panel and left fender have all been replaced with junk yard parts.

oh and something sat on the roof

 

while i was building the engine, the other two guys were changing brakes and bushings and stuff.

 

in the above picture you see a roll cage, and my friend, who we can call grinder spent a whole weekend putting it in. the whole reason why this worked is because he had the cage, and thought he could put it in this, and we're done, but the old cage was for an FC, and we ended up calling John, from Evil Genius over to look at it. it turns out we're running Lemons, because the other guy Steve plays softball with the guy who runs lemons or something, which is better than my using the same bathroom as Jerry Kunzman in NASA....

so anyways the old cage didn't pass tech, so Grinder spent the whole next weekend grinding the cage out. and while he was doing that i dressed the engine, and put it in. its 100% stock except the emissions were deleted. its running an RB street port system for an exhaust

 

my friend, Grinder, has all the stuff to paint a car, and he's painted a couple. i asked him, between roll cage install/removals if we were going to paint this thing, and he said no we don't have time.
since i was sort of done, engine was in and plumbed. we needed some kind of livery. since Grinder didn't want to paint (only grind), it would be best if the livery was something he didn't like. we do this all the time with my normal NASA group (we've been racing since 2003)

so i called the design department, Fungus Mungus, and Gary. and got told MONDRIAN!

i didn't get it, but its simple enough, and it might lend itself to being spray painted, like street graffiti style
out of the 57 cans of spray paint in Grinders garage, he only had red, white, black and silver though sooooo i give you the Morondrian!


i think FM was right, there were two other cars at the race in this style, although the Volvo is technically a Rubiks and not a Mondrian. its not every day i'm on the forefront of an art movement, but here we are

 

The Volvo reminds me of the Partridge Family tour bus.....yes I am that old.

 

we spent another couple weekends putting stuff on the car, like a seat and belts, and the radiator turned out to be bad, and the oil cooler. then we screwed around with the suspension a bit, they ended up getting an old pro7 setup, which was fine.
we had gotten a little lucky because the December race got cancelled, which saved the last minute thrash, but we still showed up on April 3rd with a car nobody had ever driven, and three drivers who were, well, bad.

we were assigned number 1, and all i need to paint is a windy parking lot, although i like it better if its sandy

 

car basically ran great all weekend. our biggest problem was the lack of mirrors, which we added as the weekend went on. on Sunday it was warm enough where we had to add a cardboard and duct tape oil cooler duct (makes me want to go full imsa...)

the brakes were great, which was a surprise, we could out brake everyone. power was fine, i just left it in 3rd the whole time. grip was good (big tires), but handling was, well it could be better.

 

This is great! You spent your shift-**** money on a mirror.

 

so the other red engine has the biggest bridgeport EVER. i predict that the ports are so big that it probably looses a bunch of low end power, and top end too

 

Hahaha!
Reminds me of something I read on ausrotary about massive, gigantic ports... "Ever notice the pictures are always of rusty parts pulled from a scrap pile and not clean parts from a running engine?"

What it will lack in power it will make up with audacity! And in Lemons, I think audacity is a +5 boost

 

I keep telling myself, that my car's paint looks like the German WW2 Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter's paint job

 

that would be cool!

 

yeah you never see engine stuff like this assembled in a good running engine!

 

Nice job on the car thus far and great to hear that it did well its first time out!

 

Just saw this thread for the first time...

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

For the third event (i didnt make it to the second), we ran sears point again. we managed to blow the diff up about 90 minutes into the race, and the spare was in Monterey. so two guys went to get the spare diff, and we got the car ready and drank beer. changing the diff isn't actually that bad, so we had it ready for Sunday. Car is surprisingly good, we have a little above average power, which is great. we can out brake everyone, which is a surprise. grip is ok, however if we loose anywhere its the handling and the drivers, we could really use better drivers. its hard to get a good lap time, there were 150 cars on the track, but the best was a 2:18, and a bunch of s:19's. i had half a lap that was open and ran a 2:27

we did a whole photo shoot with the Lemons people and i've been waiting for that to appear somewhere, but here are the pics i took

we couldn't find a dentist...

 

That's crazy to see how the ring gear was worn like that. Do you think the pinion gear failed and milled down the ring gear?