Loving My First FC
07-28-11, 09:04 AM
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Loving My First FC
Hello,
I'm a recent graduate of Western Washington University's Vehicle Research Institute (VRI), as an extra curricular project, I took on the role of Manufacturing Director for the Formula SAE team for the 2010-11 car. If you are not familiar with the Formula SAE competition, a team of students from a university or technical school designs, builds and operates a small formula style vehicle (visit http://wwufsae.com/ for information, and the News section for team, facility, build and car photos). The program is largely about applying the classroom learned engineering to a real-life scenario.
Here is a teaser; this is Viking-51 the car that I had a large part of building:
After the competition I found myself with a huge amount of free time and not enough projects to fill the void that Formula car had taken. I decided I needed a project car, I wanted to continue learning, and I figured the best way to do that was to buy an FC. I've always loved the styling, and the FR configuration is the only one that really makes sense to me from a performance standpoint.
After a little searching, I bought myself a 1987 GXL for $750. It has 88,000 miles on it, and has a little body damage. A perfect starting point:
My plan is to turn this into a purpose-built racer primarily for autocross in the short term and eventually track days. I want to familiarize myself with the design and construction of this car to the point that I can start making changes to every system in such a way to as to improve the performance to my liking. Comfort and ease of driving is not of any real interest to me as it will not be a daily driver and I'm really only interested in improving performance.
I've begun modifications (threads and pictures to come), but for now here are some pictures of the car from when I picked it up.
I'm a recent graduate of Western Washington University's Vehicle Research Institute (VRI), as an extra curricular project, I took on the role of Manufacturing Director for the Formula SAE team for the 2010-11 car. If you are not familiar with the Formula SAE competition, a team of students from a university or technical school designs, builds and operates a small formula style vehicle (visit http://wwufsae.com/ for information, and the News section for team, facility, build and car photos). The program is largely about applying the classroom learned engineering to a real-life scenario.
Here is a teaser; this is Viking-51 the car that I had a large part of building:
After the competition I found myself with a huge amount of free time and not enough projects to fill the void that Formula car had taken. I decided I needed a project car, I wanted to continue learning, and I figured the best way to do that was to buy an FC. I've always loved the styling, and the FR configuration is the only one that really makes sense to me from a performance standpoint.
After a little searching, I bought myself a 1987 GXL for $750. It has 88,000 miles on it, and has a little body damage. A perfect starting point:
My plan is to turn this into a purpose-built racer primarily for autocross in the short term and eventually track days. I want to familiarize myself with the design and construction of this car to the point that I can start making changes to every system in such a way to as to improve the performance to my liking. Comfort and ease of driving is not of any real interest to me as it will not be a daily driver and I'm really only interested in improving performance.
I've begun modifications (threads and pictures to come), but for now here are some pictures of the car from when I picked it up.
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