Vorshlag S197 Development Thread

Vorshlag-Fair

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Update for August 14th, 2014: In my last post in this S197 build thread (July 17th) I had a lot more written but it ran long, so I waited until I could get caught up on other projects, including several customer cars and our search for a new Vorshlag HQ, and here we are and its August already. In this installment I will cover 3 events we attended after NASA at Hallett in late June, which include an autocross, a car show, and the Drift vs Grip "5 lap" exhibition race. We will also start covering the race car conversion of Jamie Beck's 2013 Mustang GT, which is being transformed from a track day/street car to a Wheel to Wheel race car using NASA ST3 class rules. And I touch briefly on a customer's Fox Mustang Coyote 5.0 swap and another customer's Coyote 5.0 swapped BMW. But first, new Mustang parts!

More S197 Brake Cooling Products

The S197 Mustang is a heavy car, and has a lot of power and the potential to go fast around a road course. This means one thing: it is going to turn a lot of kinetic energy into heat, and that heat has to be dissipated or it can boil the brake fluid and then you will lose your brakes.



I personally feel that the factory optional 14" diameter (355mm) Brembo front brakes are a damned good set-up, and we've kept this on our car for all 4 years we've raced it. The move to larger 15" (380mm) rotors normally means you are most likely going to have to use at least 19" diameter wheels, which I am loathe to do for many reasons - namely weight, cost, and poor tire selection. We've recently found some 18" solutions for this brake, which I will discuss with our 2015 Mustang very soon (which will keep the 15" brakes). I feel that 18" wheels and tires are the sweet spot right now, and we do everything we can to keep the 14" front brakes cool (and have upgraded to 14" rear brakes as well, to help shoulder some of the load).



In a previous installment in this thread we showed a new 4" brake duct backing plate that we built for our TT3 Mustang, after the issues I had at Road Atlanta. This one-off set is shown in the first two pictures in this post. Now our 3" ducted brake backing plates are more than adequate for 99% of the S197 track crowd, but for heavier/faster cars or for race cars that run in longer stints/races than a typical HPDE session or 20 minute sprint race, the 4" ducts are the way to go. Here is our oval 4" ducted front brake backing plate for the S197 being built.



Ideally you want to keep the incoming cooling air going to the hub and inside the rotor face, which was easy on the 3" ducts but the 4" round tube had a lot of the air pointing right at the rotor itself. Our new 4" oval duct backing plates now force almost 100% of the incoming air towards the hub and inside the vented part of the rotor, which will allow the rotor to "pump" the air out through the vanes and cool more effectively. These 4" oval tubing sections were first hand rolled (slip roller), welded in round, then ovaled using a couple of custom made tools. It will probably make sense to just buy 4" oval tubing, but it was pricy and we wanted to make a small run of these first - we like the finished look on these first few sets and will make another production batch soon.



When we were making the 4" oval plates we also updated our 3" backing plate design, choosing a different Ford part number for the backing plate itself. This new backing plate has more "inset" area for more even brake cooling around the hub and actually takes a little less time to make, as big chunks of the plate don't have to be cut away from this design. The oval versions are more expensive and time consuming, and fewer of these will be built and sold, so they are priced a little higher.



Both the 3" and 4" backing plates are about 1.75 pounds for the pair, so the need for the super expensive carbon backing plates seems a little spendy, to me. But the backing plates and hoses are only part of the brake cooling solution - that cooling air has to come from somewhere. Ideally you want to get high pressure air from the front of the car that has a provision for the 3" or 4" hoses to clamp to. On the 2010-2012 Mustangs the factory fog light holes in the "CS" lower fascia (see below, left) are an ideal way to get the brake cooling air to the front rotors and backing plates. If your 2010-12 GT didn't have the CS lower, get one, and then just don't add the fog lights... this becomes an ideal place for getting inlet air for brake cooling. We've even modified these openings to accept 4" tubing and hoses on our car.


Left: Brake ducts on a 2010-12 via the CS Lower Fascia. Right: There are less elegant inlet ducts kits for the 2013-14

The problem is the GT500 style nose, which is also used on the 2013-14 GT and 2013 Boss302, doesn't have a good place for inlet air for brake cooling. There are some kits that use the add-on foglight housings, but they are located further outboard and don't get the same type of air (pressure) as the 2010-12 CS lower grill foglight holes do. And they have to be reworked heavily to attach the brake ducting hoses to, and the hoses have to make a lot of turns to get to the backing plates. We've seen some kits that just drill a big honkin' hole in the lower grill (see above, right) but we think there is a cleaner way to add brake inlet ducts on the 2013-15 or GT500 nose.



If you have been reading this thread for a while you will remember my black 2013 Mustang GT, shown above. One of the track upgrades we made to this car was a set of custom front brake inlet ducts behind the egg crate grill. We utilized an unused, outer section of the lower front grill opening, opening up 7 "hexagons" on each side (see above, right) to allow for air intake, then made some duct inlet brackets behind the grill and plumbed the 3" hoses to the backing plates. And it worked perfectly. These inlets were quite stealthy and if you didn't look closely you'd never know they were there, unlike the "just drill a big 3 inch hole in the grill" solution shown on the red 2013 above.



We did that one-off inlet kit for my black Mustang back in February of this year, and since then we have made several batches of the 3" backing plates and even our first run of 4" oval plates. People have been asking us - how do I get air to the backing plates on my 2013-14 GT? Well now we finally have an answer: our new brake duct inlet kit for the 2013-14 cars, shown above and below.



We took the old templates, transferred them to CAD and made a run of Laser Cut parts. The video above at left (also linked here) explains how this is built and installed. Look for these kits in our S197 Brake section, available now.

Fire Extinguisher added to TT3 Mustang

Most road race cars have a full fire system with multiple nozzles. Usually there are nozzles in the engine compartment, some more pointed at the driver, and often one or more near the fuel tank/fuel pumps. One of the things racer practice is what to do when a fire happens... normally its: 1) kill the main power 2) pull the car off track quickly 3) pull the fire system 4) BAIL OUT. Burning up inside a race car is not a fun way to go out. Sometimes tech inspectors will ask a driver to come to tech in their race gear, strap into the car and have the nets up and prove they can get out of the car in 15 seconds or less, which is the typical requirement.



"Pulling the fire system" is very unusual, and you won't be allowed to race again until you can prove that the system has been refilled and recharged. The common systems these days are ESS foam based, which can be refilled track side, but many systems like dry powder and Halon cannot be easily recharged. And the most common cause of fire in a race car is an underhood fire, hence the common practice of having a secondary, hand held Halon fire bottle mounted in the car within reach of the driver.

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So if something like this happens (above) you can get the fire put out quickly and without blowing your fire system and potentially ending your race weekend. The Pikes Peak car above had the required fire system but no nozzles in the engine bay, and no secondary fire bottle, so there was considerable damage to the wiring and plumbing underhood before the fire was put out on the side of the road (with sand). I saw the results of this engine fire, and another engine fire at Hallett during the June NASA race weekend that torched a friend's ST Corvette, too.

Also, when I blocked the lower mesh cover for the radiator opening at Hallett and "popped" the radiator cap it released a lot of steam, which looked like smoke, and it kind of freaked me out. It was THEN that I realized... I don't have a fire bottle in this car anymore. It isn't required in Time Trial, but I used to have one (it was added to run a certain event a couple of years ago, but removed when we sold the harness bar it was bolted/clamped to). All of this got me thinking: I need something to put out a fire on the TT3 Tank.



We did some looking and found a nice CNC aluminum fire bottle mount with a spring loaded quick-release pin, which makes it come loose from the mount in one second. Pull, rotate, and go. I picked up a DOT approved, low cost A/B/C 2.5 pound fire bottle, too. I should have purchased a Halon bottle instead of this powder based version, but Halon costs 4-5 times as much. Powder based fire extinguishers make a MESS when used, which is why Halon (an inert gas that smothers the fire) is much preferred.



Now the "quick-release" mount and clamp that came with the fire bottle would have been sufficient, but those spring-loaded clamps always worried me and I liked the feel of this Drake Offroad quick release bottle mount. The black anodized mount felt nice and was made to mount to a roll bar or a flat surface. The mount is in 2 pieces and the bottle is clamped to one side and the other side is bolted to the chassis. Then there's one pin at the back you slide into and then swing the front over another pin, which has the red quick release pull. Olof drilled the holes, used some stainless countersunk bolts to go through the carpet and tunnel sheet metal, and used washers and nuts on the back side. This fire bottle set-up is now secure and gives me a little more reassurance on track.

This Week in the Vorshlag Shop

I started a new forum thread over at the Vorshlag Forums and every week or so I will update that thread with pictures of the strange variety of cars we're working on at any given time. Since we don't have much to cover as far as mods on our TT3 Mustang this time, here's a few of the Mustangs and/or 5.0 Coyote powered cars that are being worked on now. You can see more in the This Week in the Vorshlag Shop forum thread.

Steve is an existing customer who recently brought us his 2014 Mustang up from Houston area for ARH full length headers, catted X-pipe, K&N cold air, a track-worthy dyno tune (at True Street), and some other work. Steve currently tracks this car regularly in Houston running on D-force 18x10" wheels and 285 Michelin PSS tires. For suspension he has Vorshlag camber plates and Ford Racing shocks and P springs.



As I tell a lot of people, we're not a traditional "horsepower shop" and mainly focus on suspension, chassis, fabrication and track prep - but we do offer a few bolt-on power parts, like the K&N cold air kit shown above. This is an easy bolt-on cold air intake that complements the headers.



Another mod we did to Steve's car was installing ARH 1-7/8" Full Length headers and their catted X-pipe. We've done a lot of these but the install never gets easier, heh. Due to the massive girth of the 5.0 Coyote motor getting access to remove the stock exhaust headers is difficult. There's a half dozen ways to do this, but we've found that it goes easier (least time and least busted knuckles) by dropping the front crossmember down about 12 inches.

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The factory service manual shows a custom engine hanger, but we use an off the shelf hanger, which sits on the front fender rails just under the hood. We set it forward, just above the front of the engine. After adding longer M8 bolts and chains to the only two access bolts at the front of the block (goes through the front of the heads, through the front cover), the front of the motor can be secured. Then you raise the car on the lift, remove the front motor mounts, starter, disconnect the steering shaft, loosen the front crossmember bolts, and drop the crossmember down while supported on a telescoping hydraulic jack. On this 2014 model we had to drop the A/C compressor (didn't have to on 2011-13s, so something must have changed slightly) to access the right front header bolt.



Once the crossmember is down it is a game of wrenches, extensions and patience, but the stock stuff comes out and the new bits go back in. We've done a half dozen of these and it always takes about 7-8 hours, with a lift and all of these specialized hangers, jacks and tools. But the results, the added power at all RPMs, there's just nothing else that adds this much horsepower for the money. We typically see peak gains of 35-40 whp with these headers and cats and low to mid RPM gains of 60 whp. No other single bolt-on can do that without adding boost or nitrous.




And as we show above, there is also a weight savings when going from the stock tubular manifolds, cats and H-pipe to the 304 stainless ARH long tubes, high flow cats and X-pipe. We call this a Win Win: a nine pounds drop isn't anything to sneeze at, and there's even more weight to be found in the axle-back exhaust, which we recommend MagnaFlow for. One question we get a lot when choosing the ARH header primary size is: Won't the larger 1-7/8" primaries give up power at low RPMs to the smaller 1-3/4" primaries? The answer is NO. We've seen the data, and talked to the owner at American Racing Headers, and they only offer the 1-3/4" version "because people asked for it", but the 1-7/8" version "always makes more power, at all RPMs. Its the obvious choice". We couldn't agree more.

Eric's Boss 302 powered BMW - Fabrication and Rework



Vorshlag has been known for V8 swaps for over a decade, and lately we're getting cars in that other shops have attempted a difficult swap on and didn't quite get the details 100% on, and we're asked to "fix it". We inspected this '07 BMW 335 for the owner over 3 months ago, where we documented 100s of errors in the fabrication and plumbing. It left our shop until last week with many of the safety and plumbing issues corrected, and a few longevity and aesthetics issues were taken care of too.



I'm not going to bash anyone here, and I won't even show some of the sins we removed, just wanted to warn people: do you research on any shop, and even ask for a list of customers you can contact to ask about the work they do. When it requires substantial fabrication or engine swap work like this, there aren't a long list of places that can do the work cleanly and make it safe for track use.



We had to remove everything and take this car down tot he tub, then re-do substantial fabrication work that included new motor mounts, almost a 100% replumb of fuel/oil/cooler/brake lines, aero rework, Lexan rework, cage removal/rework, and so much more.



Without trying to, we managed to lop 122 pounds out of this car, just doing fabrication rework and track worthy/safety related upgrades. The customer left with his BMW a rip snorting beast that will be safer, run cooler, and looking a lot cleaner than before.

Reney's Fox Mustang Coyote 5.0 IRS Swap - Fabrication and Rework


Reney's 1992 Mustang LX "5.0" is the real deal - Coyote V8, Saleen 17x9s, Cobra 13" brakes, 2004 Cobra IRS, Tremec T56

We just got another Coyote V8 swapped car in the shop and I am strangely excited to work on this. If you didn't know I owned and raced in a half dozen Fox Mustang V8s in college and after, and even worked at a shop in Houston for a bit that specialized in Mustang work where we did engine builds, dyno tuning, suspension work, fab work and cages and more. So this one... Hnnnggggg, it hits me in the gut!


Some of my old 5.0 LX notchback Mustangs - including a white 1992, similar in looks to Reney's notchback

The owner bought this in an eBay auction and it was built a couple of years ago by a shop up north, and again - it has a lot of short cuts and errors that we are being tasked to fix. Its got 99 problems, but a motor ain't one! Unlike the BMW above, this is not a track-only car but more of a fun street car that might see some track use in the future. We hope to get this one ready enough to go on track at the October 25th Five Star Ford track day at ECR and invite Reney to come out and do his first track event with us then. The BMW 5.0 above should be out there, also. That might be our last event in our TT3 Mustang at ECR, too.



The main concerns with Reney's notchback include fixing some heinous exhaust rattles, and it didn't take our shop long to find the contact points (3 places hitting badly). It has a tubular front crossmember, so the plan is to remove the aftermarket shorty headers (likely from an S197 chassis, that do not fit) and replace them wit the only Coyote 5.0 / Fox swap headers we can find, the ones from BBK.



After a year of tinkering with the car, Reney is ready for a shop like Vorshlag to take over and complete the difficult work that remains. We already have the BBK long tubes - which will fit much better than the shorties, strangely enough - and matching catted X-pipe. That's the first work we will tackle, then it will get some new front struts, swaybar rework, fender rolling out back, and lots of plumbing rework (fuel lines are beat to snot) and the battery relocated and wired properly. Lots of little things were noted in the inspection we did and it might be in and back a few times to get everything right.


The issues that this car has are all underneath - and they are many.

We neglected to weigh the car while it was here for a day but we will before we start work on the headers/exhaust, which should kick off in about 3-4 weeks. I know one of my old, nearly stock 1987 LX 5.0 notchbacks was light, and weighed it several times at 2980 pounds soaking wet - that was a full interior car, with A/C, an iron block and iron heads, and heavy cast wheels. Reney's car has a 5.0 Coyote and a T56, plus the IRS, so who knows? Reney has already repainted the car in a Lexus white pearl paint and it looks AMAZING! We are so overbooked at the shop right now we had him take the car back but it should return in September and get the first round up repairs. I will update this thread as we attack each set of issues.

Jamie's 2013 Mustang GT - ST3 Prep



I showed Jamie's GT briefly in my last S197 build post, as it was after we had received the car with much of the interior removed. We weighed it at 3276 pounds with one front seat, which was down from 3553 pound weight before the interior was removed (no back seat, race seats, AST coilovers, Maximum 4-point roll bar).



Jamie brought what he pulled out and we weighed 171 pounds of interior bits, not including the front seats, which consisted of the interior panels, carpet insulation, and 3 days worth of scraping of seam sealer from the floor pan. It has lost a lot of bits and pieces since then as well as gained a wing.



Let's start with the wing upright design and fabrication work. Ryan started off by swapping on another new Ford sourced rear trunk, as Jamie wanted to keep his stock one unmolested. The trunk rework on the inside will be shown in more detail in my next post, but we started by laying out the center line then measuring. The guys used a laser and measured the maximum height allowed in ST3/TT3, which was 8" above the roofline, and kept the top of the wing at 7.5" above the roof at maximum AoA.

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These lower brackets are similar to what Ryan built on the Pikes Peak Subaru, shown at right above. Those worked so well and these were built with an eye towards a production kit with patterns made for laser cut parts. While the Subaru brackets mounted to the fenders, per the crew chief's request, the Mustang brackets are mounting onto the trunk structure itself - which we have shown is plenty strong with our AJ Harman wing mounted similarly and tested to over 160 mph. There will be some under-side trunk reinforcement, don't worry.



After Ryan made mock-up parts for the uprights, Jason scanned them and put them into SolidWorks to create CAD files. I emailed these to our friends at Friction Circle Fabrications and then I drove over and met the owner, Todd, who also is one of the principles at MyShopAssist (our service tracking and customer interface software we use) as well as a fellow Optima Challenge, GTA and NASA TT competitor. We used these uprights and trunk brackets to mount the AJ Hartman Racing carbon fiber wing, which Jamie ordered directly at 68" wide. We are an AJH dealer (his first) and we would have ordered it in the 14" chord and the full 72" width, because more is better here.



The finished uprights came out great, and have a lot of hand rework to bull nose the leading edges and knife edge the trailing edges, for lower drag. Jason and Ryan both fought me on the "windows" added to these uprights, but the mechanical engineer in me wanted to drop some weight with those holes, and it was worth 1.9 pounds. Will it add some drag? A small amount. We will play with this set-up and do some testing to see if blocking off these windows is worth any time, especially near the bottom of the wing where airflow is critical.

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Brad removed the door panels, the side window glass and regulators he cut out the structure on the right side door. Ryan cut out the structure on the left side door, as both sides will have cage tubing in those areas. Next Ryan began removing the dash to be able to extract most of the HVAC hardware. The airbags were already removed.



Here is the interior - before (at left) and after (at right). In this last picture Ryan has reinstalled the tubular and steel sheet metal inner dash structure, which the factory "dash bar" is welded to. This structure will be replaced soon.

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We are going to add a simpler and much lighter defroster, then the dash pad will go back on, as will the factory gauges and main gauge binnacle. The wipers, lights and a few other bits will stay but the A/C and a lot of interior and under-dash bits are coming out.



We've started removing and weighing lots of parts, and you can see the lightweight defrost unit that will go back in (above right). The glass is all out and weighed, as is the A/C bits. Look for more updates on this project in my next update in this thread with more weights and cage pics. The rear and side quarter glass will be Lexan in the final iteration.

Lone Star Drift at TMS, Round 4, June 29, 2014

Lone Star Drift is a drift series here in Texas that is pretty popular. I will admit I don't know much about drifting, other than we used to practice this skill set after autocrosses in college, to learn better car control (notice the sideways silver Fox notchback in the post above? That was normal "autocrossing" for me back then). Still, the only time I have ever been at an actual drift events was when I was doing something like Global Time Attack events where they had a crossover with Formula D or something similar.



One of my buddies who does drifting with Lone Star Drift contacted me about a month before this Lone Star event, Josh Garcia. He races his 1UZ Toyota V8 powered AE86 Celica (shown above, left) in TT3 on street tires with both NASA and GTA and also drifts a bit in this car and some other cars he has. So Josh called and asked me to find a few NASA TT drivers that might want to participate in an exhibition race at TMS on the road course there.... running against 5 or 6 drifters. They called it a "Grip vs Drift" race, hoping to promote road racers to drift and drifters to road race. It sounded pretty crazy, so I called the craziest mofos I know. TTB racer KenO was going to be in Mexico that weekend and TTU racer Paul Costas was too buried with work, but I did manage to snag one crazy TT driver.

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TT1 Corvette driver Marc Sherrin wanted to join us, so we showed up the day of the Lone Star Drift event not knowing a whole lot about what was going to go down, but we were down for whatever. This was a one day (Sunday) event, from 8 am until 7 pm, and lots of drift entrants arrived. They were using part of the infield road course for drift competition, and we used the entire 1.1 mile road course in our two sessions on track (practice and race). Yes, the same course Marc and I both ran at the Optima event in March, where I took 1st and Marc took 3rd place in the Time Attack portion of that 3 day event. My best time in 6 sessions in March on street tires was a 39.803 second lap and Marc had a 40.236 (but his day was cut short by a rotor that popped). We were curious what we would run on our normal NASA TT tires: Hoosier A6!

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With good Hoosiers, real aero, and previous experience on this course we both had high hopes this day, but had no idea how a fast the lighter and more powerful drift cars would do here. We got to the track before 8 am and set up our trailers next to one another, unloaded our two TT cars, checked a few things (we both left the same set-up and tires on from Hallett a week earlier) and waited a bit. Shop manager Brad and his wife Jen (both SCCA racers) arrived and stuck around all day to help with car prep, taking pictures (see gallery below), checking fluids/tire pressures, and loading the car up at the end of the day. I was still in a bit of pain (and still using the back brace 24/7) from the Road Atlanta injury, so that help was much appreciated.

Event Gallery: http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Racing-Events/Lone-Star-Drift-TMS-062914/



We went to the driver's meeting at 9 am. There we met Aaron Losey and Derick Rogers (who I knew already), who talked about the overall event then the "Drift vs Grip" exhibition. They admitted that this was the first time they'd done this and asked Marc and I what we thought should happen. We had discussed a 10 lap sprint race, we talked about passing and point-bys (which never really happened, heh!), and warned the drifters that our cars were not caged and asked them to "pass with care", but of course... be ready to be passed. :D



The 6 drifters chosen to join us were all veteran drivers with beastly cars that had lots of "tandem" experience - almost all of them RWD Nissans with 500 whp or more. I told all of them that their cars were much lighter and probably faster than mine, and maybe even Marc's TT1 Corvette (which is a handful of pounds form being TT2 legal), but that our tires... might give us an advantage in turns and braking. Marc and I took Aaron's truck out on course after the driver's meeting and set up braking markers into Turn 1 and looked for debris to move on the rest of the course, but we only had about 5 minutes so it was a quick look at best.

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They had drifting going on until our Practice session started at about 10:50 am. We did a 20 minute practice session and I went out in two stints for most of that time. I first did a couple of "feeler" laps to check the set-up. The bleachers were pretty full and the crowd was having fun watching the three TT drivers and another 6 drifters sharing a small road course and making hot laps.



The practice was fun, but it was pretty hot. We were all asked to wear driving suits, and Marc and I both did, and were both boiling in no time. Speaking of boiling - the Hoosier A6 tires on the back of the Mustang got pretty hot, and I spun it pretty good on lap 3 of the practice. Of course I have excuses: first of all, the track was VERY DIRTY in a few corners, as the drifters tend to drag tires in the dirt and bring a lot of it on track with them. Second, my tires were fairly burned up from 2 drivers racing for 2 days on them at Hallett. And, well, its a solid axle Mustang... in these fairly low speed corners I had very little downforce to help add some rear stick. It handled about like it did in March with Optima on the street tires, just with better braking and more front end grip than back then. Still kept the rear tires on the friction circle on all corner exits, with a little bit of yaw.


"When in Rome..."

When I spun (see above) I was 3 laps into the practice, and had JUST ran my fastest lap of the day (39.02 seconds), so I was feeling a bit too confident and the rear tires were HOT. I was fastest on this tight, low speed track once again with a LOT of slip angle on the rear tires. The crowd was going crazy and the car was loose on the exit of the last turn before the bleachers, so I was show boating a bit. I managed a couple of good saves in the video above, but one time was just too much (not enough steering angle!) and I spun it like a jackass. I came into the pits to face Amy's wrath. She was NOT happy, as you can hear in that first video.



The crowd loved it and were all clapping and I was laughing, but Amy wasn't smiling one bit. No sir, she was PISSED. "Don't mess up this car at this event, now..." I went back out for a few more laps, calmed down, but didn't find any more time. The tires got hotter and hotter - these A6s are not made for continuous lapping on a heavy, somewhat powerful car like this. I've warned people countless times that A6s are for autocrossing and VERY short lapping stints (1-3 laps) for Time Trial only. Was it going to hold together for 10 full laps? I was also getting pretty hot, so I came in after about 15 minutes, talked briefly to Amy, then headed for paddock to let the car and tires cool off. I couldn't get out of that driving suit fast enough - it was HOT! It was only 84°F in that session but I got really hot anyway after 25+ minutes in the car (I sat in the car, belted in, for about 10 minutes before we were sent out). Marc was still out there trying to get me to do some lead follow laps but I was overheated and done.

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After this practice session Amy was questioning my sanity, with the potential risk of spinning and tagging a concrete wall here (it happens) or having a drift car bump into our car, for an event that "doesn't count" towards our normal NASA TT or Optima goals. But the truth of the matter is we make a lot of LS1 V8 swap kits for various cars (see above), and a certain percentage of those are purchased by drifters, which I reminded her of. So it was our customers here.



We had a LOT people come by our trailers after this session to see the Mustang, take pictures of both of the red TT cars, and even had people ask if they could sit in the Mustang (and lots of requests for rides on track, which we weren't allowed to do). We even had this picture taken that showed up on the SOUTHERNFRESH Facebook page, where it got over 7000 likes and 164 shares - yowsa! This crowd loved the sinister look of the Mustang - so much so that I don't think we're going to paint the bumper red after all, but leave it black.

Drifting started back up right after our practice session and ran non-stop all day and into the night. They never really stopped for lunch, and it was getting hotter and hotter. We drank a lot of water, but never ate anything. By 12:40 when they had us go out for the exhibition race it was up to 98°F and humid. The heat was exacerbated when we sat in our cars, suited up, belted in, and engines running for a good 10 minutes before they had all of the drifters off course and the track set-up for us. Turns out only Marc and I wore driving suits, too.



About an hour before this race Aaron came by and told us a lot of the drifters were asking for a shorter race, so we all agreed to 5 laps instead of 10. This was a good turn for me, as the Hoosier A6s were getting really greasy after about 2 laps, but I figured I could nurse them to 5 laps. They asked the TT drivers to start at the back, to give the drifters a fighting chance. I was wondering if we could pass 6 or more cars in only 5 laps, as there was really only 1 or two good places to pass. As I noted in practice - we could WAY out brake these guys, most of whom didn't have ABS and were all on street tires. The safest place to pass would be into Turn 1, which was after the longest straight and had a WIDE turn-in area, and went from tight to increasing radius on the exit. Of the 7 turns on this course, maybe we could make some passes into the decreasing radius/off camber Turn 5 (right before pit in), but that would be tricky with a drift car that had flapping/disposable body work right next to you...

Aaron lined us up, and put me and Marc on the back row side by side. Turns out only 3 drift cars + Josh's Celica on street tires made it the race from the practice session. We were lined up 2 by 2 on a dirty patch of track at pit-out, just before the start-finish line. I was hoping for a good start, and as the green flag dropped the 345 rears dug in and I cruised by a couple of cars on the first straight.



I had a good run on the lone remaining car ahead, "Fielding" in his 500 whp 2JZ powered 240SX. He was going fairly deep into turn 1 but I had a lot more brakes left. He guarded the inside line, but I had my nose in place... but backed off at the last second. Glad I did because as the corner opened up on exit he was 45 degrees sideways and yawing a good bit. I got a better exit out of Turn 1 and clawed my way side by side with him towards Turn 2, expecting him to leave me room so I could pass him in the Turns 2-3-4 high speed switch back. Nope! He didn't see me and I had to drive 2 in the grass to avoid contact, but he saw me at the last second and gave me room and I got around.



Marc and I had devised a strategy when it was going to be 10 laps of slowly picking off the cars one by one, but with 5 laps I didn't think we had the time to wait. Marc wasn't as fortunate at the start and had to pick his way through a couple of cars for the first 3 laps. Meanwhile I got out in front by corner 2 of the first lap, put my head down, and pounded out a bunch of 39 second laps with zero traffic to deal. That put me about a 1/2 lap ahead of everyone else pretty quickly. The title screen of the video says my best lap was a 39.6 - I really ran a fastest 39.4 second lap and some more mid 39s, but once Marc's TT1 C6 Z06 was around all of the drift cars he was clipping off 38 second laps and running me down. I could see him back there but wasn't worried, as we only had 5 laps and I had a healthy lead. I figured he'd only be on my bumper well after the 5th lap.

Turns out the evasive grass move on the first lap packed the lower grill opening's mesh guard with grass, once again, and the engine started running hot by about lap 4. Damn! I've got to get our crew to fab up something that doesn't pack up so easily. I started nursing the car a little on lap 5 but was still enough ahead of Marc to get the win. But... where's the damned checkered flag? I had my AiM SOLO lap timer on the wrong mode all day so I couldn't see predictive timing or the Lap Counter, which is normally visible on my preferred screen. With the red mist of an actual wheel to wheel race and the damned heat I lost track of the lap count pretty quickly. I was looking for a flag anywhere but never saw a thing. By lap 7 I was already using 5th gear on 2 sections to keep engine revs down, and that let Marc was able to catch up and get my tail as my temps were too hot to push. So I let him go by into Turn 5 on lap 7, and it was another 3 laps before somebody put the flag out to where someone on track could see it and cars started coming in.



By then I was cruising around running 42-44 second laps, trying to keep the engine cool. I didn't want to "pop" the radiator cap like I did at Hallett (also when I plugged the grill mesh with grass), so I was just glad to have held on for 2nd. I didn't realize until days later that I had the lead through laps 1-6, heh. Oh well, Marc was definitely faster and he deserved the win. The crowd was going NUTS when we came in (I edited out a lot of the "Awards ceremony" in the video above) but we all had a lot of fun. I left the engine running in the pits and as soon as I piled out of the car I removed fistfuls of grass from the grill mesh and the coolant cooled down quickly (the electric fan was whirring and finally had a supply of air to cool the thing down with).

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continued from above


Marc: "I'd like to thank biscuits and gravy, for giving me this sexy body. Cheap champagne and beer, and the crazy women who love fat boys!"

The top 3 finishers all got bottles of champagne and we sprayed everyone a bit, but I drank the better part of 2 bottles because I was so thirsty. Whoo! No food all day, hot and dehydrated, plus 2 bottles of ice cold champagne made me a little tipsy, heh. This is why there aren't a lot of road races in 100 degree weather - but we're a dealer for CoolShirt's products and I will add a cool suit to our next TT car, for sure. Even more people came by the trailer after the shootout and asked a million questions and took pictures of the car. I was glad that I didn't hurt the car, the event was a lot of fun, and seeing a cheering crowd was cool. We saw a lot of friends we hadn't seen in a while like Josh, James Evens, Ben Freedman, Derrick Rogers, Britney and Stephen, and other folks we hadn't seen in a while. I don't remember loading up our car or Marc's but we got out of there by about 1:45 pm with Amy driving the truck, went to lunch with Brad and Jen, and after a lot of water and some food we were in much better shape - and still had half the day to relax.



My biggest mistake at this event was the damned suit, once again. Marc was smart and brought a single layer suit, but my triple layer arctic rated suit was too much. I won't make that mistake again (I keep saying that, too). This would be our last track event for a couple of months, as Texas tends to take July and August off of track events due to the brutal summer heat. Oh well, we get to race in December and January, unlike a lot of the country, so it all evens out.

Cars & Coffee July

I drove the Mustang to Cars and Coffee Dallas the first Saturday in July and it was a beautiful day. There was quite a lot of people that came to check out the car, new aero, etc. Lots of fans of the Red Tank.

Gallery: https://www.facebook.com/terry.fair/media_set?set=a.10204141685692958.1073741836.1550367655&type=3

I don't have time to link to pictures in that Facebook gallery, but if you want to see a couple of shots of our Mustang and a LOT of Corvettes with giant American flags plastered all over them (it was around July 4th), click the gallery link above.

So I have been storing our TT3 Mustang at our home shop, along with a number of other project cars, until we get into our bigger shop space some time hopefully in October. We have a back log of customer project work about 2-3 months out lately and can barely take any "day work" at the moment, so to make room here I took the Mustang "off site".



A couple of days before the next event (autocross, below) I had to bring the Mustang to the shop for two reasons: 1) to prep it for this event and 2) to test fit some seats/brackets we were selling to a customer for his Mustang, who lived on the other side of the country. While the car was on Hoosier A6 tires it was only an 8 mile drive to work so I was just going to drive it there on a Thursday then load it into the trailer Friday for the tow to the autocross.



Of course the day I had planned to bring in the Mustang it was pouring raining, and a few inches came down that morning. Bald race tires, lots of rain, what could go wrong? Actually, it was pretty uneventful. These are "DOT tires" after all.

Texas Region SCCA at TMS Bus Lot, July 20th, 2014

I was actually pretty excited to go to this event, which would be our first on the 335/345 tire sizes. The last SCCA autocross we ran was on the 200 treadwear BFG Rivals so this would be a big step up in grip.

This event was being held at Texas Motor Speedway on their outside "bus lot", which is the best autocross site in Dallas and Ft. Worth. The sealed asphalt isn't super grippy but it is smooth, clean, flat and has a large enough space to make a decent sized course. We lost our bigger all-concrete event site earlier this year - a bank had sized it from the bankrupt owners, was still renting it to autocross clubs, but then sold it to a freagin junk yard and they abruptly deleted all previous scheduled event dates, ugh!

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So we had convinced some other friends to join us on this beautiful, cool sunny day in July. 175 entrants showed up, which was a big number. Amy and I signed up in Street Mod and were lucky enough to be running first and working third heat, so we could skip the 4th heat and head out early. We got the Mustang to grid and walked the course twice (walked once then jogged once). I have probably done 300 autocrosses and set up 50 course in my life and I am super-picky about course designs, visibility, safety and crossover potential. I have even be accused of "moving a cone or two" before, but this time... nah, it looked fine. Better than most course I've seen here, and I've been running events regularly at TMS for about 13 years. Had a good flow, visibility was excellent, no crossover potential (when you have 2 or more cars on course), and the finish was straight, after a tight 180 to slow drivers down, and had a whopping 260 feet of braking zone after the finish lights.



The junior karts started first, and they always run separately from the cars - usually at the beginning of the first run heat. We were running right after the karts, and our car was first in line so I was getting the car ready and then .... silence. There wasn't the normal sounds of cars running, the announcer yammering away on the PA, nothing. Must be a timer glitch...



By now many of you have heard the tragic news. Turns out there was an accident. A freak accident that took the life of a young racer. I prefer not to talk about it much, but long story short the kart didn't stop and the driver hit something and was killed. There's been an accident investigation and I'm not privy to all of the details, and while the SCCA will be racing again at TMS next month, there will no longer be a junior kart program in this region. Several other regions have followed suit, or made new technical requirements to add an engine "E-stop" switch to the steering wheel (most karts do not have this) to be able to run their events.

The event was stopped almost immediately after Life Flight left, as the place was crawling with ambulances, fire trucks, police cars and TV reporters. Not many people knew the extent of the driver's injuries at that point, but we knew it was bad. It was on the local TV news later that night and even national news later in the week. Tragic, freak accident and it hit all of us pretty hard. The memorial service the following weekend was one of the toughest I've ever attended, but it was packed with her friends, family, students and SCCA racers.



Personally, I would appreciate not seeing any armchair quarterback comments about this incident in this thread, please. Thank you.

To Paint or Not To Paint?

So we're gearing up for the SEMA show and the Optima Challenge in November, and I know we need to do something with the front flares. They look too homemade and we have our friends at Heritage working on a set of front composite flares for us. When they add those we will repaint some bits on the car, and the front bumper cover was on the list to be reshot.

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But... so many people have commented on the car's black (unpainted) front bumper cover, which we replaced after the crash... do we even reshoot it? Go over to Vorshlag's Facebook page and vote. Thanks!

What's Next?

There is a bit of a Summer Break now, which is nice. We're not going to NASA Nationals East (August 31st) but will be doing a number of events in September and October. We're probably moving into our new shop space in October as well, and then SEMA and the Optima Challenge is in early November.

+ August 15, 2014 - The Optima Challenge event we ran at TMS is being televised on MavTV (7 pm CST and re-airings all week). I've heard the first episode was... a lot of interviews? I hope the 2nd episode actually shows some racing. Tune in to see!

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+ Sept 20-21, 2014 - NASA @ NOLA. This is always a fun event and I'm fairly certain we're going to this one. Its a solid 9 hour tow but with the track being 20 minutes from the French Quarter... its hard to say no. My best lap last year (1:50.5) was OK but what can the car do now with real aero and much wider tires?



I know I'm just a hack autocrosser that is getting fairly lucky in NASA TT, with a car that exceed my talents, but I felt like my drive at NOLA last year was my personal best event of the year. The lap time I managed to snag was one of the fastest of the weekend, it matched the fastest predictive time the AiM Solo showed me, it was my biggest win in class and my biggest gap to AI's fastest lap of the year. It was also one of the most fun racing weekends I've ever had - both on track and off. I'm really hoping we make it back here, but with the shop moving and other big ticket purchases in the works for the new space, it might get postponed. I'll know more in the next few weeks.

+ Sept 28, 2014 - SCCA Autocross @ TMS Road Course. This is always THE most popular autocross in our region every year, not only because its the first event every year after the Solo Nationals and everyone is less stressed, but because we get to run the 1.1 mile TMS infield road course. Sure, they add some slalom cones and such, but its still a FAST autocross. Technically this was supposed to be on Sept 21st, but the date for the road course got bumped to the 28th. To keep it even more confusing, the SCCA is also having an autocross at the TMS Bus Lot on Sept 21st, on the old date. We'll be in NOLA that weekend but will make the 28th on the road course. Watch the video below to see how this course looks with a bunch of cones thrown in - and come join us!



There's so much going on in September and October (I have some commitment every single weekend) that I don't even want to list it out right now. I'll try to do an update soon with some more info about the various S197 Mustangs and Coyote swap cars we're working on, show the new shop as we begin construction next month, and of course any new race or product updates.

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Update for August 26th, 2014: We were fairly well caught up in the last post, which was a big one, so this one should be a quicker read. Only one competition event (SCCA autocross in August), and still no news on our 2015 Mustang (we have 2 on order, to try to get one quicker). The USCA/Optima event from March was televised, so I will cover that, and of course we have worked on a number of Mustangs at the shop that I'll show progress on - namely Jamie Beck's ST3 Mustang build. Shop Manager Brad Maxcy has stepped up and is taking some good photos of this project (and all others) and we share a LOT of tech along the way - namely, weights of every part removed or added during the NASA TT3/ST3 class prep. But first I'll briefly cover some new parts and statuses on popular Mustang bits.

New S197 Products + Lead Times

If you've been reading any of my online forum posts for the past 21 years, you know I love to measure, weigh and test things. The goal for all of this data is to make a car lighter, handle better, run cooler, or lower lap times. Sometimes I even follow my own advice.



One key piece of data gathering I learned this year from fellow NASA racer, former autocross co-driver of mine and long time friend Paul Costas was... Alcon caliper temperature strips. These little heat-activated, mark-and-hold data logging strips are applied directly to the brake caliper to measure maximum temps reached there - where the sensitive brake fluid is closest to the brake pad and rotor. Theoretically you look at the caliper temps, compare them to this chart, and take actions as needed. Well as you know I had been running front caliper temps in the 490°F range, which is past the 475°F peak "Danger Zone" recommended by Alcon. We know what happened when I ran out of these strips, ignored previous data, and ran a long stint at Road Atlanta (boiled brakes + crash). So now not only do I keep enough on hand for our own cars, we keep a LOT of them on hand to sell to other folks. $45 gets you 14 strips, which is enough for several race weekends. Cheap and easy way to know how hot the calipers are getting, and reading them is good insurance.

We have been selling the cost effective Vorshlag Bilstein "StreetPro" suspension kits (monotube inverted shocks + choice of FRPP springs + Vorshlag camber plates, all pre-assmebled and ready to install without re-using any OEM parts) like they are going out of style, and that has meant that we've bought the entire continent out of stock of the specific front strut we utilize - the one that fits the S197 but is 1.5" shorter than stock, to gain bump travel when lowered. Over the summer we bought out Bilstein USA and eventually scooped up all of the inventory of every distributor that held any stock during August, and Bilstein says they will have more in late September. The popularity of this one part caught Bilstein short during a peak in the popularity of this kit, but these dampers are made in Germany and they make them on their own schedule. What can we do?



Another part that has been in and out of stock is our own camber plates. After a key piece was finally delivered from a machine shop supplier our Vorshlag S197 camber plates went off of backorder in July and we fulfilled every single open order. There were a lot. Word got out that we had this camber plate in stock again, and in just a couple of weeks y'all had bought us out of another machined part needed for these, ugh! The volumes we are seeing lately are simply unprecedented. For a market that is price sensitive (Mustang), and an offering that is admittedly one of the higher cost options, we sure have trouble keeping them in stock.



Running out of machined parts has always been a struggle for a small niche suspension shop like us, as we have to depend on outside CNC shops to make many of our parts to our drawings and specs. But being an engineer and a racer myself, I'm very picky about our specs and who we allow to make our parts. After 10 years and about 15 different machine shops we still struggle with unpredictable lead times from outside vendors - and that's after weeding out more than dozen shops that couldn't meet our quality expectations, lead times, specified tolerances or shipping concerns. What used to take 2-4 weeks lately is taking 3-4 months, and that's with 100% domestic suppliers (we will NEVER have anything made overseas that has our name on it). A lot of this has to do with the economic downturn of 2008, when we lost a big chunk of the smaller CNC shops across the country. Now we're working on a brand new solution that we will implement to hopefully alleviate this problem, or tank my business completely, one or the other. No risk, no reward, right? I'm going to cover this big change for Vorshlag in detail soon, but until then please be patient while we push through these growing pains. If you have any doubts about any big ticket item you might want to purchase from us, feel free to call or email us to check inventory status or to place a phone order vs an online order. Thanks.

S197 Battery Tray + Mount Under Development

At long last, we're finally moving forward with an easy kit to install a 14 pound Odyssey PC680 in the S197 Mustang.



Many of you that have been reading this S197 Build Thread since 2010 might recognize the images above of the custom battery tray I made for my own 2011 GT to mount an Odyssey PC680. For many years I have preached the advantages of using low weight, high output AGM style batteries in place of old school wet lead acid batteries. Unless you need the ballast, a heavy lead-acid wet battery is just... weight.



I've put these lightweight AGM batteries in all of my own track/autocross/street cars over the past decade, and they each tend to work great for 3-4 years without complaint, even in daily driven cars in Texas heat. It is a great way to drop 20 pounds off the nose of an S197, and in some BMWs it can be a whopping 40 pound drop (the BMW E46 comes with a MEGA sized 54 pound battery!). And while the textbook response might be "move the weight to the trunk!" that comes with some added hassles and complications. First, you have to run (heavy and costly) larger gauge copper cable to the trunk, then make a whole new battery box back there, and do something about the power distribution block on the front of theS197. So instead I took the easy route and just plopped the 14 pound PC680 right where the stocker was (which was over 33 pounds).



Many of you have asked us over the past 3 years to make a production version of the replacement battery tray I made for my own car (detailed in this instruction gallery), and last week Jason sketched up some ideas and Olof started cutting aluminum plate to make a prototype for a reproducible version using Jerry Cecco's 2012 Boss302 Mustang as the test car. Jerry's OEM battery sort of exploded, so we supplied him with a PC680 and will have this production installation kit available soon.



There are some elaborate, heavy and complicated battery mounting brackets out there (see above, right) but what we're working on is a battery mount + replacement battery tray. The battery will stay in the same OEM location, so it is easy to access/charge/test, but it will just be a lot lighter. Look for more pics of this finished prototype in my next post.

Jamie Beck 2013 Mustang GT - ST3 Prep

Last time we showed this Mustang we were just beginning to make the main hoop in the roll cage, after removing the interior, dash and door guts. After about 50 hours of work by Ryan on the roll cage, that aspect of this project is almost complete. We also have weighed a lot of parts that some of you might be interested in. We took pictures and will share all of this with you as we go.

Jamie's Project Gallery (250+ pics): http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Projects/Jamie-Becks-S197-Mustang/



One step on almost all roll cage jobs includes removing the front and rear glass, so we called the pros at Titan Auto Glass to extract the windows. In this case the windshield was salvaged and will be reused, but Jamie had always planned on going Lexan on the rear and side quarter glass, so those were removed (intract) and thrown out.



The Windshield is going back in, and being that's its a multi-pane, laminated windshield there's no surprise that it weighs 29.0 pounds. Going Lexan here would save a few but having windshield wipers is a nice bonus with real glass (Lexan scratches fairly easily), not to mention the safety aspect of stronger OEM style windshield. The rear glass with integral defroster grid was still a hefty 24.3 pounds, and that is getting replaced with Lexan. I'll show the Lexan weights after they are trimmed, fitted, borders are painted, but before they go in for the last time.



The side, rear quarter glass is fairly light at only 3.0 pounds, but each one is relatively small. But we found some pounds in the A/C system removal, shown below...



To be honest, I thought the A/C compressor would weigh a good bit more, but it only tips the scales at 13.6 pounds. Likewise the condenser is a svelte 5.3, but removing this is more to help airflow to the radiator. We pulled the condenser off of my 2011 Mustang for similar reasons (and because it got busted at RA), but it will be reinstalled and functional for Optima event in Vegas. We gotta stay cool on the road rally, yo!



We had removed the guts from both doors when I wrote my last installment, but hadn't weighed all of it, which included: interior door panels, speakers, trim, weatherstripping, door glass, window motor, regulator/tracks, and inner door structure. As you can see it all weighs in at 67.2 pounds, but that doesn't include the door bars (which were left in place last time).



As you can see above left, the glass, regulators/tracks and motors alone were 34.2 pounds of that. And after the door bars were built it was shown that the OEM "crash bars" would be in the way, so 4 quick spot welds later those were both removed, for another 7.2 pounds of steel. All together, the door modifications for the roll cage installation have removed (67.2 + 7.2) 74.4 pounds. It is all adding up...

Cage Progress + Rules Interpretation

Whenever you build a roll cage for a given car for the first time, there are always some gray areas that pop up. In this case I wanted to use the Maximum Motorsports bolt-in angle brackets from their roll bar installation kits for this cage. Would this brace becoem a "roll cage mounting plate", and if so, would this be legal to use with the cage? Our hope was to remove the stamped steel OEM bracket at the B-pillar to rear seat bulkhead junction (shown below left in RED), replace them with raw steel MM brackets (shown below right in WHITE), weld the MM brackets to the chassis, then land the main roll hoop to this beefy support.



Ryan was skeptical of the allowance in ST, which uses the NASA CCR's 100 sq inch maximum plate rule for mounting plates for cage tubes. Sure enough, the MM bracket was much more than 100 sq inches on the outer surface and would seemingly violate that rule. Strangely enough the American Iron ruleset has an allowance that supersedes the CCR and does allow more than 100 sq inches, which is one of the only times the AI cage rules are more liberal than ST.



We were stuck, so I wrote a letter to the National ST series director for clarification and asked our local ST race director (Mike P) for his input. Mike seemed to think this "like for like" replacement would be legal, but we were still worried about the 100 sq inch rule if we welded it onto the chassis. Jason measured each face, input the many weird shapes into SolidWorks, and then had the software add up the surface area for one side of each external surface and it was over 188 sq inches, so it would easily violate this rule. After about a couple of emails, some input from other NASA directors, an official ruling came back a week later - this could be used, if it was bolted in. That... wasn't what we had wanted to do, as we'd always want to weld the mounting plates for cage tubes to the chassis, so we punted.

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continued from above



That's a shame, as this MM brace is a very nice piece. We could have probably gotten away with it, but to play it safe Ryan just built a flat plate (about 80 sq in) and will weld that in place of the corner brace, with the OEM bracket removed. Once we tie the hoop into the B-pillar it will be plenty strong. Using some high tech methods (measuring tape, sharpie, radius gauges, and patience) Ryan made the main hoop then started knocking out the other tubes in the back.




The only tube I saw Ryan do more than once was the front upper tube shown above. The first bar he made was straight, but the slightly curved version shown here allows for another 2 inches of fore-aft head room, and every little bit helps. He TIG welded each bar in place with a tack at this stage, as many of the tubes have to be removed for final welding (when there are multiple tube junctions at a single node).



Ryan is no stranger to roll cage fabrication, as he has worked on several Pro level teams from World Challenge to Daytona Prototypes. He also has Jason and my combined 55 years of racing experience to get additional input from, and another fabricator in house (Olof) who has built roll cages here at Vorshlag. But for most of this, Ryan was just jamming it out with a minimal amount of input from Jason and me. We wanted FIA crush bars, which he did beautifully. We asked for additional head room at the roof diagonal, so he tweaked the front inner structure of the upper windshield frame to allow for more clearance. And of course added gusset tubes at the upper corners.



In the two pictures above you can see why Ryan went ahead and cut out the OEM door bars, as the new "NASCAR" style door bars he added reach out and almost touch the outer door skin. The extra 2 inches of room added after removing the OEM beam allows for more space for the driver and more room for deflection in a side impact. The tan splotches on the insides of the doors are where the OEM beams were glued in place, by the way.



There are hundreds of ways to route the various tubes on a given car's cage, and our job is to make sure they meet the specifications of the rules and are made with the best fabrication techniques possible. The door bar routing used here was based partly on the 302-S cages, with a few tweaks we felt were worth adding.



After about 5 days of work he was wrapping up and starting final welding. The front plinth blocks were removed, the cage was tilted forward to drop it down, and he could then get to the upper tube junctions to make 360° welds. There are still a few tubes to add (harness bar, one more diagonal in the main hoop), some "taco" gussets, and A-pillar reinforcement plates going in, but those happen last.



I will show more of the cage in the next installment, after it is finished, painted, and back at our shop for final assembly. Oh yes, the lightweight defroster/heater core we added. Have had a lot of folks ask me about this ($145 from here).



Some lightweight aluminum mounting brackets were made to mount this box to the firewall, low on the driver's side. I will show all of the heater hose plumbing changes needed to utilize this in my next post, as well as the vent hoses going to the defroster outlet in the dash.

Wing Progress

During the same time period Ryan found time to mock-up the wing once again, this time with anodized and powder coated Vorshlag built wing mounting parts. This was to help design and measure the custom wing end plates we are adding to the AJ Hartman Racing carbon fiber rear wing.



The finished wing uprights and trunk mounting brackets fit perfectly and look better with durable black finishes. The end plates shown are still cardboard, and this is the 2nd design. Jason has some aero tweaks he wants to do, and since Super Touring doesn't limit end plate size or distance behind the car, they will get even bigger than this mock-up shown. Look for these to be cut from .063" aluminum sheet and the final versions will be painted body color white.

SCCA Autocross at TMS Bus Lot, August 17, 2014

Due to the extreme heat and humidity we see in the summers here in Texas, NASA and a lot of other track organizations take off the month of July and August, which we don't mind one bit. We race 12 months a year here, and this "summer break" from road course events was welcomed. But after a couple of months we were getting an itch to go run the Mustang again, so we signed up for the Texas Region SCCA's local autocross in mid-August. The weather looked a little sketchy the night before, and we loaded up tjhe Mustang in the rain, at our house...



Driving across town to get to the event site we went through some of the heaviest rainstorms I can ever remember. On a toll road marked as 70mph we slowed down to 35 mph more than once, wipers on high, just to be able to see. We should have turned around and gone right back to bed at 5 am, when it was raining steadily at the house before we left, but we're masochists.



It rained off and on all morning, but the forecast kept saying it would stop by 8 am. During the driver's meeting at about 8:30 it started to DOWN POUR. It was raining so hard that our Solo RE's paper notes disintegrated and he had to go over all of the safety items from memory. There were some safety improvements to the site, shown above right, but all Junior Karts entries are on permanent hiatus after the events in the prior month.

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Amy and I of course forgot all of our rain gear and had to borrow water proof jackets from friends. We still got SOAKED. She stuck with her original entry of Street Mod in the first run heat, and sloshed around in the rain on Hoosier A6 tires that were corded a bit from the Drift-vs-Grip thing I ran in at TMS in late June. I had really heat cycled out the tires at that event, and it was obvious to me later, after it dried out.

Vorshlag Event Photo Gallery: http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Racing-Events/SCCA-TMS-081714/



She tip-toed around on bald tires in standing water, and somehow still managed 2nd in SMod class. Kudos to her! I didn't have the patience to run on these hopeless tires in these sloppy conditions, so I stupidly moved my entry to the "X" (Pro) class, which ran in heat two.

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Every competitor got 5 runs that day, but in (only) X-class the first 3 are the only runs recorded. And while it dried out continually through this 2nd of 4 heats, it wasn't really dry until runs 4 and 5. So my official times were pretty bad, but by my 5th run it was drying and I posted a semi-fast time (8th quickest for the day). It was clean despite my wild sideways finish on that run (shown below).



By the 3rd heat the sun was out and it was not only dry but warming up, so tires were working better. By the 4th heat it was freagin hot! Our own order desk manager Jon Beaty beat all of the entrants in the large MAM class in his 3V 2006 GT, and dang near nipped the CAM winner Mike Dusold (Jon coned away the overall "American Muscle" win) in his twin turbo LSx powered 67 Camaro (Goodguys/Optima competitor). We need to at least get Jon some dang Vorshlag camber plates, sheesh!



Forgot to charge the vidcam so we got zero video. That's probably best, as it was a frustrating event for everyone in the first heat, who had times slowed way down by the wet. And even into heat 2, with mixed conditions, comparisons to other heats are pointless. We really should have been there on BFG Rivals testing for Vegas, but my replacement 18x12" front wheels (which I bent during my crash at Road Atlanta) were stuck at the powder coater so we just left the old (dead) Hoosiers on the car from before, which was a waste of time. But even a wet and soggy day autocrossing still beats a good day at work! :D

Where's Our 2015 GT?

This is the million dollar question - When will the 2015 Mustangs finally start hitting dealerships??? We've seen some Ecobomb pre-production "dealer trainer" Mustangs showing up locally, but not any normal production cars (Job 1 was August 15th), and no V8s. I want to weigh a V8 2015. Badly. Our dealer has two of the same car on order for us - one in "dealer stock" and one as a "custom order" - to try to get one early. The letter I read today is now pushing customer stock back unto late October/early November, which sucks. But hey, it is what it is. I have already sent in a letter requesting to purchase a 2015 Body in White as well, for another S550 build we'd like to build along-side our normal production 2015 GT Performance Pack car.

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We've been doing a lot of research and have found the 18x10" Forgestar CF5 (ninja edit!) will clear the Performance Pack's 15" (380mm) Brembo front brakes, which is a relief. Anyone with the 15" GT500 front brakes can benefit from this as well.



I ordered a demo / lobby CF5 18x10" S197 wheel to test on our first 2015 GT PP car, and I have a feeling we'll be running wider 18x11 or 18x12" CF5s on our S550 Mustang very soon. You can see the extra room in the "barrel" of the CF5 (black 5 spoke) vs the F14 (silver mesh wheel) sitting below it on our lobby display, in the pictures above. I'll save the rest of that for our upcoming S550 Build Thread, which I will launch right after the car arrives (and I'll link to it in this thread).

That's all for this week, see ya next time!
 

Vorshlag-Fair

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Project Update for October 10th, 2014: Yikes, got a little behind on this build thread, mostly due to the construction and build-out of our new shop space over the past month. Lots of Mustang service and fabrication work has been going on at our shop, even on our own 2011 Mustang - which is about to go to SEMA and compete in the Optima Ultimate Street Car shootout. Have news on the 2015 Mustang as well. First, let's cover two events we competed in and won in in the last month.

SCCA Solo at TMS Road Course, Sept 28, 2014

Once a year the Texas Region SCCA holds an autocross on the infield road course at Texas Motor Speedway. Most of their events are normally held on a parking lot outside the Speedway (aka: the Bus Lot), and they had one the weekend before right there. But this Sept 28th event was a higher speed, more flowing course that is always a lot of fun, essentially for autocrossers that have never done a track event before. They have requirements in place (3 prior events) to make sure that this is NEVER the first autocross someone enters, both to prove someone's driving experience as well as course working background.



Sure, they throw a LOT of cones onto the TMS 1.1 mile road course's turns, to keep speeds in check (top speed is probably under 80 mph), because as we've shown in our videos before this road course can be pretty quick (120+ mph) if you run it as it is laid out. This year's SCCA Road Course autocross was one of the best I've seen - I've run this event every year since about 2005. This time we got 5 runs, and I was entered in MAM class (Modern American Muscle). Our crew had mounted up the same set of 315/335 BFG Rivals we used way back in March at Goodguys, then at USCA, then at a few other autocross events in between. The rears were kind of chewed up so we mounted them inside-out, which doesn't seem to affect the Rivals one bit.


I spent Saturday at the Texas Defensive Shooting Academy, instead of doing construction at the new shop

I probably shouldn't have entered this event on that Sunday, as Amy was busy painting at the new shop and I felt guilty. To make matters worse I had spent the entire day Saturday out at a shooting range for a friend's bachelor party blasting hundreds of rounds through my Glock 34 as well as shooting FOUR different automatic rifles. I had so much fun that Saturday shooting with 12 college racing buddies, and everything turned into a competition: shooting steels on two lanes side by side, comparing groupings, shooting AR15s at tannerite explosives, and then the king of them all: the driving shooting course! The video below was my best "drive-by" round, where I blew through 6 magazines and hit a lot of steel targets.


Driving + Shooting = Crazy but Fun!

I'm not a "gun nut", but this is Texas and its like an unspoken law that everyone here has to show mastery with their firearms. What's the saying? "Never tell a man he can't shoot, drive or f*ck." ;) We all know I can't drive, and my shooting is marginal, but I'll skip that third one. This outing made for a really fun day, but I was wiped out from the sun (and too many drinks at dinner, and a stressful Texas A&M football game that they won in OT!) and then racing on Sunday, whew. Busy weekend during the middle of a shop construction thrash.



Anyway, so I was running this SCCA event without my normal sidekick Amy, for once, and that meant loading/unloading the trailer and working my assignment as announcer alone (Amy usually runs the computer), and I figured it would be boring. Wrong - there were 146 entrants at this event, 8 in MAM class, and the CAM class entrants were talking smack and challenged me to a bet (loser buys lunch): fastest MAM vs CAM class time!


Left: Mike and I parked our trailers side by side in the paddock. Right: Mike running his 67 Camaro at Goodguys the next week

Both of these classes (CAM and MAM) are very similar, and some SCCA regions merge them into one class (CAM). For once were running in the same heat, on the same style tires, so our times might actually correlate. Mike Dusold runs his twin turbo LS powered 67 Camaro in Goodguys events in the Pro class, and is once again going to Scottsdale for the annual Goodguys invitational shootout. We don't often meet up at the same autocrosses on the same street tires, so this would be fun. :)



My first run was pretty tame, as the layout had changed from previous years' courses (offsets and slaloms everywhere, but in new places). I liked the flow, but they managed to cone off all of my "green shortcuts" from the past, so there was no secret advantage to knowing this 1.1 mile road course layout, heh. I put in a timid first run that was clean and noted a half dozen places where I could go faster. One major slow-down was my 2-3 upshift, which didn't go at all smoothly, and I coasted for about a two count before I finally got it in gear. That cost me a LOT of time... and reoccurred on runs 2 and 3.

I was worried that I had messed something up, but after talking to several other S197 Mustang drivers in MAM, we were all having this issue. Turns out that the course layout was arranged just perfectly to load up the drivetrain in a high g lateral maneuver that is was not allowing the damned remote shifter to line up properly for the upshift. I've even got poly motor mounts and the trans bushing inserts, too. Literally everyone was missing the 2-3 here. One of our MAM class competitors and customer's partially exploded his pressure plate (locking the car with the clutch engaged all the time) trying to make that shift, and had to have it towed home (luckily it was still under warranty).


Slowing and pointing to a downed cone on an aborted run 4

So on runs 4 and 5 I short-shifted 3rd gear very early, but with the torque this Coyote 5.0 makes it didn't slow it down a bit, and in fact I dropped a lot of time by not coasting and cursing at the shifter. After installing one of these Blowfish Racing shifter "cages" in a customer's Boss302 earlier this week, I'm thinking this might be a good idea for ALL 2011-14 Mustangs with the Getrag MT-82 6-speed.


Left: We've done a lot of custom work on this green Boss302. Right: Installing the Blowfish Racing shifter cage was fairly easy.

Event photo and video gallery: http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Racing-Events/TX-Region-SCCA-Road-Course/ (most of these pictures were taken by Brad Maxcy)

My 4th run was my fastest, but we noted that there was a mystery cone that got called in but never announced. And after checking the printed times it turns out I had a cone on runs 2-5 and never knew it! The announcer wasn't calling out all of the cones, and the times were posted about a 1/2 mile away from the grid/paddock area, and without Amy there to help check times I was clueless.


In-car video from my 4th run, with the "mystery cone!"

The weather was beautiful all day and since we ran in heat 1, worked heat 3, that meant I could leave early (skipped watching heat 4) and get home to try to SLEEP (haven't done much of this lately). In the end my 4th run would have beat CAM, which would have put me in 4th for overall PAX placing, but that cone tho. GRRR!



I had to sit on my first freagin run, the recon lap where I coasted for seconds trying to get the car to upshift. That run ended up still winning MAM class by a second, but I lost to CAM, so I owe Mike lunch. Oh well, can't win em all! Kudos to Mike and his crew at Dusold Designs. :)



There's the Final class results above, and the PAX results below. Again, hitting that cone cost me 12 spots in the overall PAX results. Gotta do it clean!




Goodguys at TMS, Oct 5, 2014

This was the event I was really prepping for when we mounted up the street tires, the weekend before. Of course any practice on street tires will only help our chances at the Optima shootout after SEMA, which is our "Big Event" of 2014, but there are always great PRIZES on the line at Goodguys for winning the All American Sunday (AAS) class. I've done 2 of these events in the past, and won the Spring event here in Texas. I really should have been spending the day painting at the new shop, but instead I entered and ran the Goodguys Sunday autocross - I wanted that cheddar!

Event photo and video gallery: http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Racing-Events/Goodguys-TMS-100514/

These Goodguys autocross events are particularly tight and often require the use of 1st gear. The last 2 events in Texas used the same course, which was about 70 seconds long and you had to drive one particularly nasty section twice per run. This time they chopped off the extra lap, changed a few things up, and made a much more enjoyable, and quicker to run, 40 second autocross course. Yes, it was still tight, yes it still had a pirouette cone, but it wasn't so long that it made the runs drag on forever. The shorter course made for quicker running and instead of 3 or 4 laps like in the Spring, we got 6 or 7 runs (with a larger entry list) and were done sooner (they stopped adding times to the results sheet at 11:30 am).

Normally these guys start at about 9-9:30 am, so we got to the host hotel to check in (can't check in on site) at 7:45, unloaded the trailer at 8:15 am, and rolled up about 8:30... and they were about to start! Crap, no chance to walk the course, but it looked the same. As soon as I saw a car go through I realized it was a different layout and I'd have to learn it on the go. Finally got the car teched (missed my 1st run) and got in line to go. 30 feet into my first run I went the wrong way around a lane change and DNF'd. I figured it out as soon as I did it and rejoined the course for a look at speed.



Next time up I had watched a dozen runs and knew the proper route and knocked down a high 39 second run, plus one cone, which was about 3 seconds quicker than anyone else (cone only counts as one second). Blanton Payne was there in his LS1 swapped Genesis Coupe and he was the fast time to beat after first runs - he's a local autocrosser and has won the AAS event before in this car. He also runs the Friday-Saturday events in the FUN class in his vintage Mini cooper, and is always pretty quick in that tiny Mini.



By run 3 my lines were getting better and I had abandoned going down to 1st gear in a couple of sections. This was the first time I had done a Goodguys event here without using 1st gear, and I wasn't sure how it would work. Well once again the prodigious torque of the Coyote 5.0L proved up to the task and I dropped significant time and fell into the high 38s.


Run 5 was my quickest with a 38.5 second run

Runs 4 through 6 were more of the same - clean runs with 38 second times. My 5th run proved to be my best with a 38.5 second lap. The next closest time in AAS was a high 40, so I won this event by 2 seconds, just like back in the Spring. Of course the provisional results posted on Pro-Touring.com's forum are missing my times as well as about a half dozen others, but it seems like a glitch that will get fixed before the official results are put on the Goodguys website.



No matter - we got that stack of gift certificates and another free set of BFGoodrich tires for winning AAS, got to drive across the stage for the awards ceremony, and the whole nine yards. Josh Leisinger won the PRO class (Friday-Saturday pre-74 domestics) in a beautiful and nasty 800 hp 64 Corvette (see above). Robbie Unser (yes, of the Unser racing family) won the Street Machine (SM) class in his 64 Chevy II built by Speedway, and upon that win was bumped up to PRO class with Goodguys from now on. Both of those guys ran 2 days prior and were quicker than my runs, and 5 other Pro or SM cars beat my best time. That's frustrating, but with less than half the number of runs, and a car thats likely 600 pounds heavier than all of theirs (min weight in PRO and SM is 3000 pounds), I guess I should expect that.



For the 2015 season were building a lighter car that won't have to have these "its heavy" excuses any more. Honestly, the 3600 pound EVO X in the 2009 season and the 3600 pound Mustang from 2010-14 seasons were, by far, the heaviest cars I've ever raced. They were both great in many ways, and we developed a lot of good parts for both chassis, but I really miss racing in the car below...



Yes, I've showed this picture before. I really REALLY miss racing in a car like this!

After it was caged and had 2 seats, this BMW LS1 car tipped the scales at a whopping 2550 pounds. It made 490 whp with a mild LS2 based 7.0L, on 93 octane fuel. It had all of the factory metal and glass, save the door glass. THAT combination is what I miss, and I miss it dearly. I am building another for 2015 - a BMW E46 coupe with big LS V8 power, big aero, and big tires.

We learned a ton of tricks on this Mustang, but its time to try something else, and I have our red Mustang tentatively sold after SEMA. We will still get a LOT of S197 Mustangs in our shop every week and we will continue to develop products for these cars. Same goes for the S550 Mustang - its even heavier (3800 for the V8 car). Beautiful car, the new IRS should really help the ride/handling, and Ford is gonna sell a ton of these cars. Just not to me, at least not this year.

continued below
 

Vorshlag-Fair

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continued from above

Vorshlag Not Buying 2015 Mustang

Yes, I know I have one on order (actually 2), and I'm disappointed that they aren't here yet. If we could have gotten the 2015 GT at least 8 weeks before SEMA we would have bought it, made some mods, and taken it to compete in the Optima event. But these cars, as everyone knows, were delayed. And they are a good bit heavier than promised.

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Not gonna happen for 2014

For business reasons it just doesn't make sense for us to buy a 2015 Mustang right now - especially one that we aren't going to race. Spending $45K+ on a brand new car to then cut it up and ruin its value is nuts, but racing a 3800 pound car is equally as nuts, for us. We need an attention grabbing car to be campaigning, and the numbers just don't work for this new S550, for us. When the S550 "Body In White" is released, then we'll see. I also have a friend in the insurance business looking for a cheap 2015 Mustang for us - one with a front hit (I like the GT350 front bodywork better), a flood car or a "hard theft" recovery. This way we can MAKE IT LIGHTER without ruining the value of a $45,000 car.

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Yes, it sucks that we won't own one - but we will still develop parts for these!

Honestly, we just cannot afford to purchase and own every car we want to develop parts for, so we'll be using customers' and testers' cars to develop the suspension parts, brake cooling, wheel sizes, camber plates and other parts Vorshlag is known for. We do this on lots of chassis. Stay tuned to see what we do with the 2015 Mustangs when they arrive at our shop. They are just NOW starting to arrive around the country... but our orders aren't scheduled to be built for weeks yet. It would have arrived sometime in November, well past SEMA. Funk that.


Other Recent S197 Work at Vorshlag

We're making good headway on Jamie Beck's 2013 Mustang GT, turning it from a street car into a dedicated (and class legal) road race car. The cage was wrapped up about 2 weeks ago and then I took it to Sherman, Texas to have our friends at Heritage work their paint magic.



After picking it up at Heritage and unloading it outside in the bright Texas sun it was blindingly bright. They did an excellent job and used a GALLON of paint on the inside, and spent 4 days prepping and spraying the interior, cage and trunk lid. The trunk lid and wing end plates were shot in 2 stage, water based, OEM matching white and the interior was super hard single stage paint.



Ryan has spent several days reassembling the car then getting the wiring harness de-pinned, wrapped, routed, and adding the mil-spec connectors at the front and rear bulkheads.



The defroster/heater core went back in and then the dash itself was mounted to the brackets that were welded to the dash bar. The center stack panel was from Watson Racing and Ryan is wiring in systems to use the toggle switches Jemie provided as well.



We have the main fire bottle mounted with dual pulls, one at the cowl (corner worker) and another at the center stack (driver). There is an additional Halatron 2.5 pound hand held fire bottle also being mounted in the cabin, to put out brush fires or other small flame ups that don't warrant blowing the on-board full fire system.



Ryan has worked on pro race teams in World Challenge and Daytona Prototypes, and his expertise there shows. Jamie comes from the battery industry, too, and once he spoke with Ryan they went a little further than normal on the electrical rework. Instead of re-using the fuseable links the factory uses at the power block fromt he stock battery location, we now have high amp/resettable circuit breakers in the engine bay, and a trick solid-state main power disconnect (kill switch) with dual kill switches - at the cowl and center stack.

New Steel Front Flares for our 2011 Mustang

Its no secret that I've never really loved the plastic flares we made for the front of our Mustang in 2013. We rushed the front flare job before the 2013 NASA Nationals, and after we had Heritage make steel rear flares the fronts in the Spring the front looked even worse...



Then I crashed the car at Road Atlanta and destroyed the plastic flares, so we "patched" them with plastic race roll and they look even worse. The difference front to back is alarming.




With our placement in the SEMA show in Ford's 50th Anniversary of the Mustang booth area, we had to step up our game. I asked our fab guys what they needed to make these flares in steel, and to look better, and they told me to buy these tools: an English wheel and a shrinker/stretcher. We already had the bead roller and welders needed.



So those tools arrived this week and Ryan got to town. The old plastic bits were unbolted and then he made the vertical arch piece, shown above at right. The main flare sections are made in 2 pieces, to match the factory fender - just bigger. The lower crescent moon shape vertical piece is nearly identical to the factory fender, with a rolled lower lip for strength and to give it a smooth edge. The upper flare section is all rolled out on the English wheel to get the curve right.



Lots of cutting, fitting and rolling later, the flare looked like the above shots. Then the old fender was cleared of paint at the flare joint and he spent time merging the 2 flare pieces (and somehow adding a radius to that joint?) and then joining them to the car. He is remaking the front portion as well, after he finished the main flares that weld to the fenders on both sides. The front portion will mount the the bumper cover, and might look a bit different. This has all got to be painted as well, so its a time crunch.



They look amazing, and I'm only sad I didn't get to see these coming together. Shop Manager Brad and I have been working night and day for the last two weeks at the new shop, getting the build-out done. We're really close, and have to be moved in by Oct 31st. We need to have Jamie's car and our Mustang done by Oct 25th, where we'll be running them at the Five Star Ford ECR track day. Then we start the move on the next day, the 26th, and have to be moved and operational in about 2 days. Then loaded up and headed to Vegas for SEMA by Nov 1st. So its going to be frantic!

Look for my next update... maybe right before we head to Vegas? Or maybe after SEMA/Optima are done. Its going to be tight!

What's Next?

Oct 25, 2014: Five Star Ford track day at ECR. We will be there hopefully with the finished fenders and paint on our Mustang with Amy giving some ride-alongs. This might be our last ECR event in this car ever... Come join us. You can sign up and pay here: link. More info on the Facebook Event Page. We will have our crew there for trackside maintenance, and they just repaved a huge swath of the track (Turn 5 to Turn 6), which should smooth out the worst of the bumps.

Oct 26, 2014: Vorshlag moves to its new location at 1703 Capital Ave, Plano, TX 75074. Our number should stay the same. It might be frantic for a few days, so we might have limited phone coverage for a few days that week.

Nov 4-7, 2014: SEMA Show! Look for our car in the 50th Anniversary of the Mustang Exhibit. We will be down to about 2 folks at the shop that week, as most of our guys are going to the SEMA show and OUSCI event (a different group of us is going to the PRI show in December).

Nov 8-9, 2014: 2014 Optima Ultimate Street Car Invitational! Here is a breakdown with pictures and details about all of the USCA Drivers Invited to the 2014 OUSCI - link. Last time I looked we had 8:1 odds to win it all? I'm hoping to just finish in the top 10.

Until next time!
 

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November 11, 2014...

Just got back from 10 day trip to SEMA + OUSCI last night. We finished moving everything out of the old shop hours before we loaded up and headed out for SEMA. SO MUCH has happened since my last update here - the 2011 GT was painted, the buyer backed out unexpectedly, we stickered the car up, towed it 1200 miles to Vegas, parked for ONE DAY in the Ford area at SEMA, moved to Optima Alley for the rest of the week, raced at the Optima event for 2 days, drove down the entire length of the Vegas strip, raced on the 2.4 mile road course at LVMS, towed back to Dallas and unloaded at the new shop today.



Our 2015 GT we special ordered in April arrived while we were gone and our salesman Corey White brought it by today to tempt me. I drove it and we took a bunch of pics - frak me, its nice! We also test fit 18x10 Forgestar CF5 wheels over the front 15" 6 piston Brembos - fit perfectly on all 4 corners. Pics with wheels and mocked up rear wing coming soon. No need to stick with 19s, obviously.



Trying to unpack and organize the shop now, and trying NOT to work super late this week (after the last 7 weeks of 16-18 hour days doing construction and moving shops). Uploading THOUSANDS of pictures from SEMA from my phone right now (if you are FB friends with me you saw them posting live all week as I walked from booth to booth) and Brad took some really GOOD pics of the show and at OUSCI with his Canon gear. Please be patient as we get images cropped, uploaded, and I write ... 4 or 5 separate Mustang thread updates, including:

1. Fender flare finalized, new wing uprights added, car painted, shown at ECR track day + shop move + interviewed and car filmed in our shop by Optima TV folks
2. SEMA show pics + Ford 50th celebration aerial picture + Optima Alley + online haters + lots and lots of fans of this Mustang
3. OUSCI racing + results (still don't exist yet, no idea how we finished) + thoughts on this event + what will we race here next year?
4. 2011 GT For Sale add + text + pics + gotta sell this car to pay for the REAL reason why we moved shops....?!
5. More 2015 Mustang impressions + thoughts + images of 100s of S550s at SEMA + cool things learned from various vendors/suppliers about this chassis + will we really NOT buy one after it was in our shop today??



That and more coming soon....I have dozens of shop move emergencies and 10 days of work to catch up on, then I can write. :hi:
 

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Update for November 19th, 2014: This is part 1 of 3 of the latest work. This bit covers this car's development work leading up to SEMA + OUSCI (Optima's Ultimate Street Car Invitational). Apparently I got a royal ass whipping at OUSCI (21st out of 100?) and it was only today, TEN DAYS after the event, that the bulk of the times were posted. I've been upset about this for the past 12 days. Today I got a call from Jimi Day at USCA acknowledging everything that went wrong during the event (mostly with Timing and Scoring, plus numerous schedule changes and delays), he took responsibility for the mistakes, and promises to do better next year. They did such a good job at the USCA qualifiers but it just all went to Hell at the big OUSCI event - mostly because they tried to squeeze 100 cars into 5 events over 2 days. Even though we had some major issues with how the event was run, I won't get into all of that until my 3rd post in this series.


This picture above - with gravel strewn completely through a corner - summarizes OUSCI 2014 perfectly

Anyway, let's move on. It looks like my last post in this thread was October 10th, after we had entered and won with the 2011 GT in a couple of autocross events - SCCA in MAM class and Goodguys in AAS class. I ran both of those events on the old 200 treadwear BFG Rival tires, to practice for Optima's big event after SEMA (OUSCI). After those two events we decided to remake the front flares in steel and I showed some of that in my last post, but the finished result came out better than expected and pictures are shown in this post below.


The new Vorshlag shop (4 miles form our old place) is twice as big, to house more cars and equipment

We finished construction at the new shop space in 5 weeks, went to ECR for a track day to support customers, moved Vorshlag over the course of another week, was interviewed for a TV show (we will likely never see that clip now), stickered up the car a bit, then loaded the Mustang up and headed to Las Vegas. I will cover this sequence of events in this update, then cover the SEMA show itself in another post (huge show, I took over 700 pics), and finally the OUSCI event in the third post. Somewhere in there I will list our 2011 GT for sale - I have to sell this car to help pay for some things Vorshlag needs in order to grow. I have a smattering of S550 Mustang news to share along the way as well, which will be sprinkled throughout.

But First - More on the 2015 Mustang

I'm going to jump ahead of my timeline a bit to talk briefly about the 2015 Mustang GT that we tested with this week as well as some weights we took about 2 weeks ago. As you may know we had a Performance Pack GT 6-spd on order since April for development use, hoping it would show up in time to prep for some racing and then take to SEMA for Amy to compete in. The timelines slipped due to some issues at the factory (a catalyst was installed incorrectly on most of the Performance Pack 5.0s) and due to the delay and for some other reasons, we cancelled the order about a month ago. A couple of weeks ago the first 5.0 GTs arrived and we weighed the yellow 2015 Performance Pack 6-spd at Five Star Ford in Plano. You can read more about my impressions from that day here (since we weighed and and then I drove it).



Vorshlag will be developing parts for the S550, of course, but we won't necessarily be buying a brand new car for us to tear into on day one of this chassis launch. We're really waiting for a Body in White or a wrecked example to purchase instead (or maybe the GT350!) - so we can cut it up and get the some much needed weight out of this car. I personally feel that this chassis is a tick on the heavy side to compete with, and while it might still make a good TT3 platform we were really set on moving to TT2 or TT1 next season and don't feel we could get there in the S550, even with liberal use of a Sawsall and plasma cutter. It doesn't make much business sense to buy a $43,000 car that we then go cut up and ruin the value of, and just owning a Plain Jane 2015 GT street car isn't in the cards right now - I wish it was.

The red 2015 GT we ordered long ago (plus an identical twin) have since arrived - while we were at SEMA, where this was a hugely popular car - and our salesman Corey White brought this red GT to our new shop this week to tease me into hopefully buying one. It damn near worked! This was the '15 I ordered - Race Red, Premium, 5.0 6-spd, Performance Package (big brakes), touch screen NAV (only $700, why not?), and the leather Recaros (perfect!).



I drove it around and its very nice (even has Launch Control). While it was in the shop that day we shot some pictures, test fit some wheels, weighed a couple of things, and learned a little bit more. Please jump over to our S550 Development Thread to read more about that brief test session, and what we have in store next. What you are reading here is our S197 Development Thread and I don't want to cross-contaminate the two different chassis too much. ;)


Verifying the fit of the the Forgestar 18x10 CF5 over the 15" brakes + mocking up a wing for fun

Our friends at Dusold Designs just got their 2015 GT 5.0 this week and we are "borrowing" their S550 to develop the camber plates, MCS shocks, and some other bits for this chassis. We have equipment coming to help with that very soon and I want to see our production S550 camber plates as well as S550 MCS shocks shipping by at least December.

New Steel Front Flares + New Wing Uprights and Endplates

As you have seen over the past 4 years, each time we increased tire width on our 2011 GT the car "magically" became more competitive and our lap times dropped. Many people told us we were using too big of a tire, but the timers didn't agree. Even though we saw big lateral grip numbers on the 315mm Hoosier A6 tires (1.3-1.4g w/o aero) and saw similar data on the 335/345MM Hoosier A6 this year, our times kept dropping. Most of our 2013 TT3 lap records went down by 2-3 seconds in 2014 by simply moving up in tire width, and we also managed to make our short TT stints a bit longer, and increased tire life. My favorite adage "Bigger Is Better" paid off once again.


Here is a pair of the new 345/35/18 Hoosier A7 tires. The rear flares are made to fit more tire than this

Our friends at Heritage Collision in Sherman, TX made the rear flares in steel earlier this year and those now easily cover the 345mm DOT Hoosiers, which are nearly 14" wide. There's even room for a little more, as there is a 355mm Hoosier road racing slick I had my eye on back then. Both the 345 DOT and 355 Hoosier slick were pretty tall, so we had no plans to use either of those "rear" tires up front. Instead we built the old front flares to clear a 335/30/18 tire, in either Hoosier race rubber or BFGoodrich Rivals for street tire events.


The 315 front and 335 rear set-up worked well enough but we had set up the flares for a much wider front tire

Late in 2013 for Goodguys and earlier this year with USCA we ran on a 315mm front and 335mm rear Rival set-up, but that was only because BFG was out of 335mm tires and we could only horse trade our way into a single pair for the rear. I noticed that nobody else ran the 335mm Rival up front and some folks even said "it doesn't work well square", but I didn't put much stock into that. Most of the internet wisdom I have heard about tire width over the years has proven to be misguided or wrong. The plastic flares took a beating at Road Atlanta and looked terrible, and I asked our fabricator Ryan H to make us a new set in steel about 2 weeks before we left for SEMA.



He didn't disappoint. It took Ryan just 3 working days (our MyShopAssist time logging shows 23 hours and 29 minutes) to fabricate these flares from scratch. He used a shrinker, a stretcher, an English wheel, TIG welder, some hammers, and drills. I was totally blown away bu the fit and finish.



The front piece that integrates the flare into the bumper cover fits tight and bolts on. The flare extensions were welded to the fenders and needed almost no body filler. Almost all of this fab work happened during new shop construction so I was only seeing it at night, briefly, and snapped some pics with my phone. Once he was done with the steel work it was time for bodywork and paint.



I loaded the car up in our enclosed trailer and took it to Heritage Collision just a week before we were supposed to head to SEMA. They worked on the car for 3 days and bodyworked the front flares, fixed some rock chip damage to the rear flares, and repainted 80% of the car. They had to shoot the front and rear bumper covers and all 4 fenders anyway, so they went ahead and sprayed the doors as well, so it would all match for SEMA and the OUSCI judging.



Note - the car was already "sold" at this point, with a price agreed upon months earlier, so this extra work wouldn't benefit us in selling it - but we felt it was necessary for the judge portion of the OUSCI event. We did very well in that portion in March at the Texas round of USCA (4th overall) and it helped us with the win. I mean, this is a real street car with full interior, climate control, touch screen NAV and big strereo... that's what they are looking for in a well rounded "Ultimate Street Car", right? (note: the buyer backed out right before SEMA due to some family matters, so the car is back For Sale.)



The Heritage paint crew did an amazing job and the whole car looked better than it ever had. We got it back to the old shop and got to work on the rear wing.



I had taken some new plate aluminum to our friend's at Friction Circle Fab to use their CNC Plasma cutter a week earlier, and we cut out another pair of uprights using a similar shape to Jamie's ST3 wing. Ryan built the trunk mounting brackets to attach them and painted those black, but left the uprights raw (we ran out of time). Those have since been removed and are off to the plater to be black anodized this week.


Left: This set of S197 uprights is for sale, without the wing. Right: This set of uprights and APR wing is for sale here for only $900

Ryan added the bull nose on the leading edges and knife edges to the trailing edges again as well. The end plates were the same size as those we made for Jamie's car but in .080" aluminum this time (up from .065"). We had Heritage paint the end plates body color. All of this was added to the original trunk, which had been sitting in storage for 2+ years.



The paint on this original trunk is actually the proper shade of red and it also doesn't have all of the holes from the two previous wing mounts + spoiler mounts from previous seasons. We've already sold the old trunk along with the ESP legal rear spoiler but the APR wing, uprights and brackets are for sale (here), as are the spare set of trunk uprights made for this AJ Hartman wing (above left), once I find them after we moved.



Another pair of machined Delrin trunk bumpers replaced the rubber bits so that the trunk will not compress under aero load, and that's all we had time to do. Ryan is going to make the same tubular aluminum trunk reinforcement tubes for our car (this week) to match what he made on the ST2 Mustang, shown above. Those came in at only 11 ounces each, so it won't add much weight but will reinforce the trunk structure.



I'm glad we went ahead and made the new wing uprights and wing end plates. The uprights are lighter & look a lot better than the old bits, and the larger end plates should allow less air to bleed off the bottom edges of the wing. The original trunk also looks 10 times better than the junkyard-sourced 2010 trunk we had used for 2 years, which had a bunch of drilled holes for older set-ups.

More on Jamie's ST3 Mustang

In my last post we had just picked up Jamie's Mustang from paint (at Heritage) and the cage and trunk looked great. Ryan spent a week and a half reassembling the car and wrapping up a lot of odds and ends, namely with wiring.



The pictures from my last post were during mock-up but these are the completed, finished results. The interior was very clean, all business, and utilized the switches he provided us plus a lot of work in our shop.



The bulkhead connections for the main battery cable up front are shown above left. We custom ordered Joe's Racing fire-proof, "Carbon X" shift boot kit - which showed up the day Jamie was scheduled to pick up the car. Our guys unwrapped the package, got it fitted it to the tunnel and installed right before he got here. Worked out great.

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The glass guys that removed the old windshield reinstalled it again, then Ryan spent hours fitting the "pre-made" Lexan to the rear quarter windows and back window. The quarter windows were about 3/8" too large so those were trimmed, and the rear window's black painted border fell apart when the clear masking film was removed. Those were re-masked and re-painted, then all of the flush-mount stainless hardware was added. This consisted of M4 nutserts, countersunk stainless M4 bolts, and countersunk Tinnerman stainless washers. It makes for a clean, flush finish. Light aluminum square tube reinforcement strips were added to the back glass as well.



A torn grease retention boot in the one-piece aluminum driveshaft's CV was noted weeks earlier so a repair kit was sourced from the Driveshaft Shop and Olof pulled the CV apart to replace this. The grease was dried up and gritty so the whole CV was inspected, cleaned and re-greased (luckily it had no wear). The old 285mm RS3 Hankooks were replaced with wider 295/35/18 BFGoodrich Rival tires on the 18x11" Forgestar F14 wheels. This tire fit these wide wheels so much better and should provide more stick, but of course will be replaced with proper R-compound DOT rubber when he's ready to jump into TT or ST.



The Drake quick-release mount was once again used for mounting a separate, hand-held fire bottle. A 2.5 pound "Halotron" (the Halon replacement good through 2030) unit is what was spec'd and that little guy sure is handy when you have a small fire to put out and you don't want to blow the whole fire system (filling the car with foam). Times like when you have to pull off track (loss of power) and the grass is dry.... POOF! Dry grass can light off the exhaust in a hurry and ruin your whole day. That's when this little bottle is your best friend! Also shown above is the completed engine bay, with custom firewall electrics and heater hoses going to the low-mounted heater core inside.



For the center net we went with a Simpson and anchored it to the cage's dash bar. The rear mounted fire system (EFF) main bottle is shown attached to the aluminum rear bracket that Ryan made. You can also see the MIL-spec bulkhead connectors for the rear wiring and the main battery wire insulated bulkhead connector as well. All of the wiring and connectors came out super clean, robust and minimal - Ryan has wired up everything from WC and GA race cars to Daytona Prototypes, and it shows.



Jamie's 14 x 68" wide AJ Hartman wing is shown mounted with our custom CNC plasma cut wing uprights and trunk brackets. With the bracing underneath it is as good as mounted to the frame, in case you were wondering. The electric trunk release solenoid was removed (won't work if the main battery kill is off) so the factory trunk release cable was "repurposed". Ryan made a custom pull ring for the cable from some 1/8" steel rod, welded and shaped to look like something you'd buy. The cable is routed through the gas cap trim right through the "T" in GT.



We had a customer's 2014 Z/28 in the shop the day when Jamie was coming to pick up his car, and it was interesting seeing the two side by side. The Z/28 has an amazing motor (dry sump LS7) and ceramic brakes, but it tipped our scales at 3835 pounds. Jamie's race prepped, caged, W2W safe 2013 GT was nearly 500 pounds lighter - makes you think.



We added a pair of our new S197 rear tie-down hook kits to this car, which Jamie appreciated the next time he towed the car in his trailer. This is a big time saver every time you load and unload the car. The next picture is a shot of his lightweight exhaust we built using Magnaflow mufflers.



Last but not least - the weight. With both racing seats in the car it weighs in at 3351 pounds. That's almost exactly 200 pounds lighter than it was the last time we weighed it as a street/track car (3553), and it now has about 100 pounds of roll cage, safety nets, two fire systems, and a giant rear wing - full Wheel to Wheel safety prep. Not bad. If he wants to drop another 40 pounds it would be as easy as unbolting the passenger seat, brackets and racing harness, getting very close to 3300 pounds. The same level of lightening w/o the cage and safety gear would easily slip under 3200 pounds, too, but Jamie wanted SAFE and we cannot blame him one bit.

More pics of Z/28 - Know Thy Enemy!

I think it helps the S197 crowd to see what the competition is up to, right? So let's take a look at some of the features of Chevy's new track terror pony car: the $75,000 Camaro Z/28.



The Carbon Ceramic Brakes are the most outlandish thing on the Z/28 - and the most delicate. These massive yet lightweight carbon ceramic 2-piece rotors are mated with 6 piston front and 4 piston rear calipers and really can make this 2 ton terror slow down quickly (1.5g braking, as tested). But you have to be VERY careful around these rotors - one nick to these brittle beauties can damage them to the point of being ruined (if you don't catch it they can explode under heavy braking). We have to always take SPECIAL care around these rotors on ZR1s, when removing or installing wheels or working around them with metal tools.



The cost to replace all 4 rotors can nearly eclipse FIVE FIGURES ($1200-2400 each, depending on where you get them). And they WILL wear out eventually, and do so fairly quickly if you track these cars. After talking to the guys at AP brakes at SEMA, well... I won't be lusting after CCBs any longer. They have brisk sales of AP iron brakes to replace CCB systems on track driven Porsches and the like. Their main concern was maximum heat attainable - the CCB rotors can only reach 1600°F and then they stop shedding heat, after which they start to wear exponentially. Iron brakes can reach 1900°F and still be shedding heat. AP said they have had customers go through a set of CCB rotors in one track weekend.... ouch! Just be careful what you wish for. I'm glad that Ford eschewed CCB for the GT350.



The 505 horsepower aluminum LS7 motor in the Z/28 is my personal all time favorite factory engine. 7 liters of dry-sumped, aluminum V8 glory is the BEST part of this car, by far. These are dyno'ing in at 440-450 whp bone stock, and 500 whp with just full length headers - wow! This motor is what made the C6 Z06 so fast on track, but Chevy is ditching this titanium rod equipped, lightweight, 505hp beast in the C7 Z06 in favor of a damned supercharger. Blah! They just ruined the Z06, to me. Superchargers don't belong on tracked cars.



The suspension is pretty unique on the Z/28, as it is equipped with Multimatic designed magnetic shocks. These are super pricey, custom designed, dynamically tuned dampers that have hydraulic fluid filled with magnetically charged particles (that's the expensive part - the fluid). As conditions change an electric charge can be changed in each damper to alter the viscosity of the fluid - dramatically and quickly - which in turn changes the damper characteristics. Does it work? Yes. Does this apply to racing? Sadly, no.

These shocks are not user-tunable to any real degree, so you cannot affect front-to-rear handling changes like with a set of normal adjustable dampers. But they do ride well and can handle well, as long as you don't go jacking with things like spring rates and the like. Neat technology that is very expensive and has limited usefulness on a racing car...but works very well for a street car. The other picture above is the upper strut mount on the front - which needs a camber adjustment (but this car had fairly decent negative camber with the unique Z/28 spindles). We've got a Vorshlag adjustable camber plate for the 5th gen Camaro that is finally going into production in the next 2 months.



The weight is the main disappointment on the Z/28 - its not much lighter than a regular Camaro SS, which itself is very heavy compared to the S197 or even S550 Mustang chassis with V8s. This car had the optional radio and air con, and some fuel in the tank (as shown in the pic), but I was still hoping for a scale number closer to the sub-3600 pounds that my loaded 2011 GT was when new. They pulled every trick out of the bag to get it near 3800 pounds but it is still heavy. Luckily these cars come with some really wide wheels (19x11" front, 19x11.5" rear) and super sticky 305mm tires (60 treadwear - aka: race tires), so it makes big grip and makes for quick-ish lap times for the auto jounrtalists. It costs more than a Corvette, though, and is triple the cost of the V6 Camaro. Is it worth it? To the right buyer, yes it is. Can you make a Mustang much faster for far less? Yes again. The new GT350 might be a rival to this Z/28 - if Ford uses the "factory race tire" trick, and can keep the pounds down. We shall soon see lots of Z/28 vs GT350 comparisons...

New Shop for Vorshlag

Those of you that have friended me on Facebook saw the work that went into our new commercial space in October and into November. It was an epic amount of work and I am glad the bulk of that is finally over. Our company isn't huge (me + Amy + 6 others) and our race prep shop was backed up with orders and service/fab work during the time we were doing construction, so shop manager Brad and I would spend the mornings at the old shop then afternoons and all night working at the new shop to get it ready. After five weeks of 14-18 hours days, and help from both of our wives and even some friends, we were done and got the C.O. so we could move in. Here's a few pics to show the scale of work we tackled - too much!


Lobby construction.... Left: before. Right: Walls and ceiling demo


Lobby construction.... Left: Ceiling and interior walls gone, new drywall work. Right: Drywall textured and painted


Lobby construction.... Left: Hung ceiling grid going up. Right: Brad cutting a window opening


Lobby construction complete: hardwood floors + baseboard trim added, painted, lighted, and ready for more displays and framed pictures

We did similar re-work as in the Lobby to other areas, including the "machine" room, shop area, some offices, and the Order Build Room. It was all done to add more space to the rooms we needed and remove offices and hallways we didn't want - similar to what we did at our old shop three years ago, but on a larger scale. I don't want to do this again in three years, ugh. Cursed growth! Oh wait...



There was a small room/big closet in the shop area we demo'd and removed, then patched the walls at the junctions. We then massively enlarged the opening to the machine shop room, above. That was framed in 1x6" finished wood instead of drywall, to make room for the big toys going in here in the coming weeks. Just "waiting on electrical", which has been the story of the entire shop construction.



There's still some finish work left to do, but we were fully functional with lifts, light, air and welders by November 11th. The new space is twice as big as our old unit, and we needed the room to house all of the cars we're working on. We also have room for some new equipment which should help ease our supply problems, but I'll save that for another post.



This 5 weeks or construction work was followed by a week of moving equipment, desks, parts and supplies from the old shop to the new. We finished moving our last load of stuff by 11 am on Saturday the 1st, then went to the new shop to add decals to the Mustang and load it into the trailer for our trip to Vegas. After we got back from SEMA this past Tuesday we still had a lot of work to do to get fully operational, but Brad has been attacking tasks while Olof and Ryan wrench and fabricate on various customer cars and projects. Big steps were made on the Alpha LS1 Miata and Alpha LS1 FR-S this past week - look for updates on those two projects soon.

Like we have done every year for the past 3, we will have the Texas Region SCCA Solo Annual Tech and Vorshlag Open House in February, at which time we should be fully moved in and all of the equipment up and running. Our phone number stayed the same (972-422-7170) and our new address is on our contact page, with a map. Outside parking isn't great here but that's the only real down grade we made, and the doubling of space more than makes up for it.

Five Star Ford track day at ECR - Oct 25, 2014

We have been attending the FSF track days at ECR for 3 years. We worked with organizers Corey White and Jerry Cecco and they let us take over the ECR Tech Shed this time. This was better than working in a parking lot in the hot sun. When I got to the track at 7:15 am, after setting up a table with the donuts we brought, I immediately started teching cars that didn't get a chance to have their car inspected by one of the many track service shops around Dallas/Ft. Worth.

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During the day our crew was busy working on people's cars and supporting our customers who were in attendance. The tech shed stayed busy all day with brake fluid flushes, brake pads swaps, and other various repairs. Some of these were pre-scheduled jobs, but for the most part they were emergency "my brakes are done!" kind of jobs. Luckily we brought plenty of Motul brake fluid, Centric rotors and Carbotech brake pads this time.



This was the largest event that Five Star has ever sponsored at ECR, with over 65 cars. As usual, this event attracts a lot of Mustang owners, but also a smattering of "everything else" and we had a few NASA TT racers our there testing as well. I counted over 25 Vorshlag customers there that day, which is pretty cool - at our first FSF ECR event there were none, but we've been making some headway and have worked on a good chunk of these guys' cars.



We brought our 2011 GT out to the track to show off the new flares, wing uprights and paint, but sadly we couldn't run it on track. Why? The paint was less than 2 days old and too soft to take any grasshopper or tire clag hits. Shiloh would have blown a gasket if I would have brought the car back for paint repairs so soon! Ryan had also just finished the wing uprights the day before - picked the car up from paint Thursday night, wing uprights fabricated and installed Friday then loaded into the trailer for the trip to ECR Saturday, all while finishing construction. I had two Halloween parties that Saturday night (both good ones!), and we started moving the shop the very next morning on Sunday, so it was a busy weekend.

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Corey White was super busy, as he had TWO events going on at ECR that weekend. He also helped set-up a "Raptor Rampage" off road event. They had about 15 Raptors show up that took to a 4+ mile off road course that Corey helped create earlier this year. He took us to this site on the same grounds as ECR (its off South of Turn 6) and a few of us got to ride in some very tricked out Raptors. I rode in one with 24" of rear stroke on the dual remote reservoir, triple bypass shocks. The course was wicked and has trees, boulders, and even a big jump. I rode in a few trucks and each one was different, and each one was fun.



Jamie Beck brought his 2013 GT out to do some initial track testing before the NASA race weekend at ECR on the following weekend. The car worked flawlessly on track but had a weird issue when starting, which we had a work around for that day but got worse when he ran with NASA. The culprit was later traced to a faulty solid state battery disconnect unit, which has since been bypassed then replaced.



One of our customer's brought his 5.0 Coyote swapped BMW to this event for its first on-track shake-down runs, so we had a plan of attack and sent him out for some short test runs, then into the pits for temp checks and inspections. We had to replace one brake line early on, but after that it went smoothly on track for a couple of sessions. Until the water temps started to spike...



It was weird, because the radiator temps were low on an IR gun, so removed the thermostat, lots of things checked, and eventually realized that the coolant wasn't moving through the radiator fast enough. Looks like an old junkyard motor's water pump went bad during this event, which was a bit maddening to diagnose... but after other causes were ruled out it was the only one left. It was a part we hadn't installed or touched, but after the pump is replaced it should be ready for more on track action.



Did I mention we did a lot of brake jobs?? ECR is a brake eater and even though we caution everyone to get good fluid and pads before they come here, most folks don't expect it. We worked late into the day, then loaded and and were the last trailer to leave the track that day. Thanks to Tim, Olof, Brad and Amy of Vorshlag for spending their entire Saturday out here helping customers and track folks get through the day (and the next day Sunday moving to the new shop!). Next time we go to ECR will be the annual Toy Run in December, and we are all going to be DRIVING that day instead of wrenching. ;)



It physically pained me to be at a track I love after parts of it were just repaved with our car we race and NOT to drive it. I had hoped to hop in another car or two that day and at least get some laps, but with a steady stream of cars needing track side repairs I was too busy to break away all day. Lots of folks came by to admire the new front flares. I wish I could have put it out there - but even a simple off track excursion could have damaged the flares, paint or splitter only days before leaving for SEMA. The next weekend at ECR was the last NASA Texas event of the year, and I had to miss that one as well - that's when we were driving to Vegas. Missing this NASA ECR event hurt more than I like to admit, but at least we had nailed down the TT3 regional championship back in June... so missing TWS and ECR didn't hurt that. Now that we are back from the OUSCI event, I wish we hadn't skipped those two NASA Texas events or NASA Nats East, but hindsight is always 20/20. :(

Better Personal Safety Gear

I've gotten a some flak from other racers over the past 3 years for my safety gear use. We were running fairly quick times in TTS/TT3 trim for a while without any rollover protection, but after a discussion with our engineer we added the Maximum Motorsports 4-point roll bar. I've always been quick to upgrade to fixed back racing seats and 5+ point racing harnesses (for better control), but roll cages don't belong in street cars, and I resisted that in this car, since we do street drive it a good bit. I have also resisted the optional use of Head and Neck restraint systems, racing suits, and some other gear - but I have been re-thinking that lately.



I tried to use my old 3-layer Simpson racing suit at a few TT competitions this year, but its so heavy and bulky that it quickly made me overheat. This time I spent real money and bought an Alpinestar GP Pro Racing Suit. This SFI 3.2A Level 5 Nomex suit was lighter, made from a newer style fabric that breathes, and it fit me better. I went and tried on 5 different sizes until I realized a European size "58" fits me pretty well. It was painfully expensive, but what's it worth not to be bar-b-qued in a burning car, or worse - sweating so badly that I get heat exhaustion (much more likely)? In August I bought Amy and I both new pairs of Alpinestars Tech 1-ZX gloves as well, which have the seams run inside-out for better feel on the inside. I used my old gloves at all events (for better feel, both autocross and track) and wore holes in the fingertips, so it was time to upgrade.

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The various HANS devices I've tried always greatly limited my ability to turn my head. I have now tested 3 different designs: the HANS brand, the Simpson Hybrid, and then the NecksGen. Each of these required different helmet anchors, so I've got 3 sets of those for my helmet. I used the NecksGen at the SCCA Road Course autocross in September and it actually allowed me to turn my head enough - and as an autocrosser at heart, I am looking out the side windows a lot, aiming for the next corner. The other units restricted my head turning too much, but the NecksGen was tolerable. I borrowed this unit from my friend Ed for use at OUSCI, and I was determined to use it in every on-track session. After the wreck at Road Atlanta in May and the damage to my vertebrae, which may have been exacerbated by NOT having a HANS device, I wasn't going to track again without it.



Next year, whatever I run seriously will likely have a full roll cage - if its as fast or faster than this TT3 Mustang. I'm getting too old to bounce back quickly from a crash like the one I had in May, and if what we build over the winter is what I hope it to be, it will need a serious cage indeed. I've been pushing my luck on track for far too long - and probably setting a bad example. I cannot count how many W2W guys come by and look at our Mustang after they see the lap times we run and are then HORRIFIED that we don't have a cage in this car. I remind them that Time Trial shouldn't have any car-to-car contact, but the car-to-wall kind scares me enough to want to do the cage, nets, HANS and the rest.

Stickers + 335 Tires + Loading for Trip

The Mustang was almost ready for the OUSCI event after it got back from Heritage for paint, bit there were still a few things left to tidy up. Most of that got done at the old shop but we moved the day after ECR, so some happened at the new place - like the new tire mounting and decals. Olof mounted a brand new set of 335/30/18 BFG Rivals to all four 18x12 wheels. I wanted to race on "sticker" tires so we didn't do any testing on this new set-up with the wider 335 fronts - that was probably a mistake, but I just couldn't afford a second new set of 335 Rivals to test with.



On Thursday October 30th, Kevin Mooney with Mooney Productions stopped by on a tour of 3 shops in and around Dallas that had cars entered in the big OUSCI shootout. He is a camera man and on-air interviewer for their MavTV series and was also going to be shooting video all week at SEMA and of the cars in Optima alley. We had met at previous event and I liked Kevin's attitude about the event and the cars that are featured.



We had cleaned up the entire shop prior to him stopping by, as we were still in the middle of the shop move. He was cool and only shot part of the shop, which we had cleaned up the night before and added this massive decal to one wall of (see above). We had a couple of clean customer cars we had built on hand and one or two of those were in his shots, as well as our 2011 Mustang.



Again, as poorly as we apparently ended up at OUSCI, this footage is unlikely to be shown. Its a shame, as we had a fun interview that everyone here felt went really well. Them's the breaks - gotta place well or be a sponsor to get coverage on the show.

After Kevin left we cleaned up the car, detailed the interior and underhood, and then I fought with Amy about the decal package we would use for SEMA and OUSCI. She wanted to go with the loud WHITE stripes again, and even wanted to get a set of wheels done in white like last year. I reminded her that the white wheels only stayed white for about 2 track sessions, then looked gray forever. Also, the OUSCI series and TV show was supposed to emphasize STREET CARS, and as I was told by one USCA organizer, the stripes made the car "look too much like a race car", so Jason and I convinced her to go with a toned down livery instead, which Jason cut on our vinyl plotter that Thursday.



On Saturday, the last day of moving, we finally added the smaller "Vorshlag" stickers in black to the rear shoulders and small sponsor decals to our manufacturers of the parts we run along the sides, leaving ample room for the OPTIMA door decals and event sponsor stickers on the sides as well as to of the windshield. We didn't get in our request to USCA in time to get the event decals so we had to wait until Monday in Vegas during "load-in" to get them, but we assumed we could show up early and grab them in time for the big Ford 50th Anniversary picture shoot Monday afternoon at 3 pm (but that assumption was wrong). Brad, Jen and Amy hand cut the stripes for the hood and laid them down minutes before the car went into the trailer (they were still wet so we left the transfer paper in place).



I took a quick romp down the parking lot and made some Figure 8 turns to see if the 335s rubbed up front. Nope, all clear. Then we loaded up for the 22+ hour one-way tow to Las Vegas. We brought two mounted spares and one dismounted spare tire for the trailer, as we had too many blow-outs last year going to Utah for NASA Nationals and didn't want to take any chances.



After loading up at the shop we went to our house and loaded our clothes, food and other stuff for the TEN DAY trip. We had hoped to leave by noon but it was closer to 6 pm before we rolled out. Luckily we had an extra day padded into our time budget to get there, so we only lost 6 hours of the extra 24 we had budgeted. Off to Vegas we went, with high hopes! Jason was driving up the long way and planned on being at the show on Tuesday. Olof and Jon were leaving Tuesday in to arrive early on Wednesday, Brad was flying in Friday and even Costas was going to join us Friday through Sunday. We had a big, experienced and capable crew on hand to help me at the event, and also to talk to the various vendors we knew at the SEMA show.

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Just wanted to point out that while our shop was shut down for a couple of weeks during the move and SEMA (we turned away a lot of work and cleared the schedule), we're fully operational and have openings on the schedule now. Need some fabrication or race prep work? Suspension install? Have a heavy wallet that is weighting you down?? We can help. :)

Tune in next time for part 2 of 3 - the SEMA show!
 

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Project Update for December 2, 2014: This is part 2 of 3 of our "lead up" + SEMA2014 + OUSCI coverage. This segment is devoted to the SEMA show itself. We got to display our 2011 Mustang at the show (parked in two different places), but there were a few bumps along the way. I personally took over 700 pics at the show with my camera phone (that many dubbed the "Potato Cam" due to a few blurry pics) and posted them live on Facebook during the show. My focus was on cool cars that corner carvers might like, as well as the parts that interest us most. More from Vorshlag joined me - Jason was there by Tuesday, Olof and Jon arrived Wednesday, and Brad flew in on Friday took some great shots in the Central Hall with his Canon gear. We will discuss cars, new parts, and the various areas of the show. But first, let's get a piece of business out of the way...

Vorshlag TT3 prepped 2011 Mustang GT FOR SALE

Yes, it it has to be done - We are selling our red Mustang S197 development car (read more here). I'm not happy about it, and would much rather keep this car, but this car is a chunk of capital that I need to liquidate in order to help our business grow. Very soon some big changes we are making will become apparent, and this car will help pay for this expansion. Asking price is $48,500, and we have almost double that in it. Comes with your choice of tires (fresh 335/345 Hoosier A6s or fresh 335 Rivals), with or without the current livery, and more.


Click this picture to go to the FOR SALE page, which has dozens of pictures and lots of details


We had this car "sold" for several months, but right before SEMA the buyer flaked out. Oh well, what can you do? They aren't a "buyer" until the money arrives. Any of you reading this thread for a while will know about this car, which we've developed for over 4 years. I counted them up and this car has set 15 track records and has posted dozens of wins over the past 4 seasons, in Time Trial as well as autocross. It has been shown on TV shows 6 different times and the for sale page for this car was even linked in a recent Jalopnik article. Its "internet famous"! It is also a fully street legal car, with AC, Sat NAV, full interior, and all that. If you drive around on the street in this car you will get more attention than if you had a stripper dancing in the back of a convertible. It is also pretty quick on a race track, too. I feel the price is fair, but like everything, it is negotiable. This FOR SALE web page has all of the details you could ever want. If you have questions call Vorshlag and ask for Terry (me); the number is on that for sale page and all over our website.


This is the current look/decals/livery of the Mustang. Paint is less than a month old. Click for more details


And in case you were wondering - No, we're not building a 2015 Mustang to replace this one. With no Body In White program for the S550 for "at least a year" from Ford, building a 2015 Mustang race car requires buying a new car then cutting it up and throwing away a lot of stuff. So we'll wait for a BIY or until we can find a theft recovery/flood damages/front hit chassis to start with (I'd rather use the '16 GT350 front bits). Maybe 6-12 months from now these cars will become available in a cheaper form (used/crashed/BIY) and then we can hopefully build the crazy S550 race car that I have in my brain. Until then we have another race car build we are starting (for 2015 season) that isn't even a Ford at all (but will have a few Ford parts). I brought the chassis from my home shop (have 4 cars stashed there, waiting) to the Vorshlag shop this past weekend, so I will link to that build thread in my next S197 update. This S197 thread isn't going away - we have S197s in our shop every day and any development we do will still be chronicled here. In my next post I'll show some new S197 stuff we've been working on.

The Long Tow to Vegas

OK, back to the SEMA update. We had the car prepped and loaded last time, ready to head to Vegas. Getting from our shop in Dallas, Texas to Las Vegas, Nevada is a long, somewhat boring drive - mostly through Texas. Luckily it was uneventful, and we set-up the back seat of the crew cab F350 as a "sleeping cell", with Amy and I switching out every 2.5 hours to drive while the other caught up on sleep. With the previous 2 months being full of 7 day weeks with hectic 14-18 hour days, we both needed the rest between driving stints.



We had decent weather but hit some rain in the desert, which turned into heavy snow at higher altitudes. Luckily we didn't have to slow down much, and drove straight through in a little over 20 hours. Crossing two times zones and with daylight savings being undone during this day, we "found" 3 hours along the way, and ended up in Vegas mid day on Sunday.



Parking at our hotel was tight so we had to unload the Mustang down the street and park it in front of our room. The trailer and truck were stuck off site until Monday morning, then we were allowed to drop off the trailer for the week at a LVMS parking lot. This left us with the F350 to tool around town in, until our guys drove in Wednesday in Amy's BMW 740iL. The Mustang managed to get over the many speed bumps in the hotel parking lot as well as traverse the "above ground storm drainage" ditches along the many many secondary street intersections in Vegas. #BecauseStreetCar

Parking With "Ford out Front", aka: the Worst Parking Spot at SEMA

This next section is full of some bitching and moaning, so feel free to skip it. ;) There's more content again down at "Notable Cars of the Vegas 50".

SEMA is a huge show that continues to grow, and now it has spread into 3 main convention halls at the Las Vegas convention Center, covers three huge parking lots (both with open displays, active cars driving, and big air conditioned tents), alley ways, and there's even the AAPEX show (OEM parts and suppliers) that is inside another convention hall in the Sands hotel, around the corner. Its a huge freagin show. I haven't been to SEMA since 2010, and it has grown a lot since then, and changed in some fundamental ways. Many have said this was the best SEMA show they had ever seen, and I tend to agree.

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Ford Motor Company has had a BIG presence at SEMA for many years and they have spent a large budget to get your attention. Back in 2010 (the last time I was at SEMA) Ford was already renting the big parking lot in front of the main Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. This lot had barriers lined around the lot and they had set-up jumps in the middle to show off the new Raptor trucks' suspension. I remembered seeing people lined up to ride in a "jumping" Raptor back then, but I didn't pay it much attention. It was a side-show distraction, plus I worked a booth for 3 days that year and was rushed just getting away to see a few manufacturers we worked with then.

Well a lot has happened since 2010 - Vorshlag has gotten a lot bigger, we've been building some notable cars, I won the USCA qualifier so I was finally guaranteed a spot at the OUSCI (Optima Ultimate street Car Invitational), and we were even invited to park our car in the "special Ford area" to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Mustang. Two invites to SEMA in the same year? Craziness. Optima requires that your car is shown somewhere at SEMA for the full week, either in a booth or in their special "Optima Alley" parking area. When I had the choice of having our car park in a "special Ford area" out in front of the Central Hall versus a back alleyway with the Optima group, I chose FORD. Duh...


All 50 Mustangs were parked in front of the Central Hall, parked in the shape of "5.0"... for about 45 minutes, then shuffled away

There were all sorts of extras that went with the 50 cars picked to represent each year of the Mustang. "The Vegas 50", which had a special Facebook group and email list, got exclusive invites to a private Ford meet-and-greet event at the Ford booth on Monday (press day + load in), and we got Exhibitor badges from Ford that let us walk the show floor all day Monday - which I had never done. There was also an extra Exhibitor Party we got to go to, which sounded cool, and tons of free Mustang and Ford swag.


Our red Mustang was in the lower part of the "0", of the "50" picture

A lone Ford employee was trying to coordinate all of these activities: a parade of 50 Mustangs from some outlier lot to a special aerial photo shoot on Monday, then to the week long "special display area". Long story short, it ended up being a big hot mess, and a big waste of time. We stood around waiting for too many hours on Monday, the parade route was all of 200 yards long, and the aerial photo shoot (see above) took far longer than it should have. Then we got lined up to park... and it was immediately obvious that I had made a huge mistake.

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See the drifters spraying 50 Mustangs parked around the perimeter? That wasn't cool

We were corralled like cattle and parked two wide, bumper-to-bumper in between concrete barrier walls and a parallel ring of bike railing surrounding the Ford out Front DRIFTORO SPECTAKULARRRR!!! I was immediately leery of this "special Ford spot" when I saw a couple of trucks practicing drifting around the parking lot that Monday night, so when we pulled into place I quickly darted to the "outer ring" of the two wide parking sports - that move likely saved my car's paint job. I asked our Ford contact "Will there be drifting all day here, and won't that send lots of asphalt and crap onto our cars??" There were several rare and special six figure $$ cars in this line-up of 50 years of the Mustang, and I didn't want this to turn into a really bad place to be stuck all week. "Oh no, there won't be any problems! This is a GREAT spot with lots of visibility and foot traffic! We'll having someone come dust off the cars every morning!"


The DROFTORO SPECTAKULARRRRRRRR had just begun... and our car was parked right in the "spray"

We left the car with a bad feeling, then went and got some free food + beer at the party for Exhibitors on Monday, meeting up with our friends from EVO-Dynamics and MyShopAssist (exhibiting). Then we went inside and did the special Monday night deal at the Ford booth at 6:30 pm, which wasn't much but included more food and drinks.



The next morning, we entered the back of Central Hall and started walking the show. Pretty soon I was getting all sorts of texts and messages from some of the Vegas 50 folks, and it sounded BAD. We made it out front to take a look by 11 am and our cars were already COVERED in asphalt pebbles, tire junk, and various dust and debris. The cars looked like they had been parked in a bombed out ghetto all night once the DRIFTORO SPECTAKULARRRRRRRR!!!! was in full swing. They were drifting anything with four wheels: Raptors, Trophy Trucks, NASCAR Cup cars, New 2015 Mustangs, older S197 Mustangs, anything that could break the tires loose was flinging rocks and crap all over our cars. I was losing my MIND and was looking frantically for the Ford contact, but eventually we found her and she said that no matter what, we were stuck there for the rest of the day.



I won't get into too much more of what I said, other than to say I was less than pleased, and I wasn't alone. A guy from the Lucas Oil trailer out front brought over a gas powered leaf blower out of their trailer and blew the crap off most of the Mustangs at the end of the day of drifting, which got about 80% of the junk off. After waiting for 90 minutes later than promised, we were finally able to get our car out of that fiasco and move it to Optima Alley. Once parked there I used a California Duster thing and got even more crap off the paint, and Wednesday morning I went crazy with some Meguiars Quik Detail and finally got it clean. We weren't the only owner to move his car Tuesday night... by Wednesday the "Vegas 50" was the "Vegas 18".

Leaving the Ford out Front area Monday afternoon, Amy and I ran into the star of the TV show "Highway to Sell", Dennis Pittsenbarger (below). We know Dennis from Optima series events, and when he saw our Vorshlag jackets he grabbed us as we walked by. We caught up with Dennis about his the first season the show (he's hoping it gets picked up for season 2!), which we had both watched every episode of. He was also announcing all week at SEMA for a televised gig, then for the OUSCI event on Saturday and Sunday (he had lost most of his voice by then!).

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It's cool seeing folks you meet at racing events or through the car world that make a TV show, which usually becomes a big break in their career. I also ran into Kevin Byrd of Two Guys Garage during the SEMA show, who I have known for years (he built an LS1 BMW E30 that we chatted about numerous times). He was filming cars in Optima Alley for a show they are doing on SEMA 2014. We also bumped into Aaron from GMG on 4 different occasions, met the two Brits from Wheeler Dealer, and saw about a dozen other "cars and sparks" TV stars throughout the show.

Notable Cars of the Vegas 50

The 50 Mustangs that Ford picked to represent each year were mostly either almost completely stock or "modified show cars". I'm not really part of the "show car scene" but its all part of the car culture and I gotta respect that - these people like to show and shine, and that's cool. There were a couple of "racey" looking builds in this group, which I will point out below. There were a few others in the Vegas 50 that tracked their cars, but these two were the most epic builds.



The Creations n' Chrome built "Top Notch" fox Mustang was pretty wild. I had seen this in magazines but it looked even better in person. It had a supercharged Aluminator 5.0L, a tube frame chassis with a carbon fiber body, massive engine + driver set-back, along with wide wheels and flares. What's not to like?? I think this car got one of the Golden Ticket invites to OUSCI but I don't know if they could make it, and it was on the wrong type of tires to run that event? (200+ treadwear is required)



Another car that caught my eye was this dark blue Mustang II, which was damned cool. I have never said "Cool" and "Mustang II" in the same sentence in my life. A high school buddy had a 1978 "Cobra" Mustang and I had a 1972 Mustang, both with built 302s. Looking back at that time in my life, they really were both hideous cars, from the two worst generations of Mustangs ever made, and we kind of knew it. This blue car above redeemed the entire Mustang II generation of cars - but it had very little Mustang II left, of course.



A tube chassis build that was based loosely on a C5 Corvette platform, with the T56 rear transaxle and torque tube in place. A new floor and tunnel were fabricated, then the remainder of the Mustang II body was plopped on top. All new fenders and wheel arches were made to cover big meety wheels and tires on the C5's wheelbase, with a custom sheet metal front end based loosely off of the 2013 Boss302 LS. Crazy interior and engine bay work were also part of this build.

continued below
 

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continued from above



Under the hood was a big surprise - a Ford Triton V10 with a custom intake manifold, custom valve covers, and the throttle body hidden under the cowl. Took them 2 years to build this car and it won awards at two Autoramas. This car also got one of the Golden Ticket invites to OUSCI but I don't recall it making any runs? My memory of the OUSCI entries is a bit skewed, due to some strange event issues we ran into (which I will save for next time).

S550s parked in Ford Out Front + Ford Booth in Central Hall


Left: "Look, we can put a wing on a 2015 Mustang" Right: "That's cute." hehehe

This winged white S550 above (made by a shop called "FullRace") was parked in the Ford out Front area, along with some other quickly modified S550 Mustangs. These were 2015 Mustangs likely purchased ahead of production deliveries, usually for $1, which happens by a number of manufacturers every year for SEMA. We tried to get one, but we aren't a "style" shop, which is who gets almost all of these SEMA cars. :(


Left: The inevitable "so last year" flat black wrap. Right: Gold plated wheels were en vogue...

There were lots of these S550s out front and in the Ford booth. Some had quick paint jobs, stripes or wraps; a few had underhood mods, some with superchargers (at least one of which was fake); saw some hastily lowered suspensions, but no real shock offerings yet that we could see; and of course a lot of blinged-out wheels. Sure, there were a few S550s that had a tasteful mod here or there, but for the most part this group looked a bit rushed together for SEMA. In the coming months we will see real performance parts emerge for these cars, but its still a bit soon.


More of the Gold Plated fad was found inside. Oh, and over-the-top wide "lip" wheels won't go away

During the Gold Lot staging for the Vegas 50 Mustangs our Mustang were lined up next to the APR Wide Body S197, which was pretty ironic. Some said our car "out wide-bodied" APR? I don't know about that, but we definitely had a lot more tire under the fenders than any other S197 there.



That's the number one issue I have with the various flares and wide bodies made by some aftermarket companies - it seems that they do all of this work just for the look. Often they take only moderately wider wheels ans push them outboard without really adding any real width, or if they do its only on a show car with 24" diameter wheels that wold never see a track. Giant flares with 275mm tires just doesn't make any sense to me, ya know? The Shelby S197 wide body install costs $25,000, and I took a flier from their shop (we toured Saturday night) just to make sure I didn't read the number wrong. Wow...

Vorshlag SEMA Show Gallery: http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Car-Shows/2014-Sema-Optima/

There are many hundreds of pictures in that gallery above. I can only show a fraction of the cars and parts here, but feel free to look at more there.

Parking in Optima Alley

Optima had a rather large presence at SEMA this year, with the big Optima Prime trailer (below left) in a massive booth area inside Central Hall and two more trailers in Optima Alley (below right). This was a HUGE reserved area to park the Optima entries.



Most of the 100 cars invited to OUSCI were parked in Optima Alley, which was a road situated between the Registration building and the North Hall. On paper it looked like this was going to be a "low visibility" and low traffic area, but I was so wrong. There were several lunch trucks parked out there all week and the foot traffic consisting of newly registered attendees and hungry show folks was quite large - many thousands of people walked through this area, which ended up being a better spot for car visibility than the Ford out Front area. People could walk up to cars and look at them up close, with no bike railing or concrete walls in the way like our previous spot.



I started seeing our Mustang show up on social media - mostly with positive remarks, but a few "ricer" comments from the wing and splitter. There was actually a pretty good one on a "Mod Motor Mustang" page, with a lot of haters posting funny memes after someone put a picture from an unflattering angle of our car, covered in dust when we were parked with Ford. Luckily enough racers saw that and came to defend our honor, heh.



Since we only did the one USCA qualifier and don't have MavTV I never saw about 75 of the OUSCI entrants before, so I got to meet a lot of new faces and see a lot of crazy machinery in this area. Lots more late model sports cars than I expected (uh-oh), which was forewarning of things to come. It was in Optima Alley where I first saw then fell in LOVE with the LS1 powered Star-Quest of John Lazorack (below).



Look at this thing! Its just outrageous, with an 80s vibe, LSx V8 power, and a big dash of aero. Big, wide fender flares cover 315mm tires, which he made the himself. John is a designer at General Motors and used skills to scan/map the Conquest body, then designed new flares in 3D, then had molds made from his design. Fiberglass flares that bolt on are the result, and it looks killer. You can and should read more about this build in this article on Speed Academy.



After leaving the Ford out Front area Tuesday night, Optima Jim met me at the entrance to Optima Alley and we got parked and cleaned up that evening by 7pm. We were able to get our Optima event decals, credentials (a big carbon fiber badge), and a bunch more swag. Left that area and met one of our customers for a fancy sushi dinner at a swanky restaurant. We scored tickets from Optima folks to an exclusive Honda party late that night, but we got there too early and missed all of the Optima folks. Dancers in glass cages, dozens of escorts everywhere, it was off the HOOK. I saw Dennis there and he said "What the hell is going here on in here!?", heh. There were exhibitor parties like this every night of SEMA, if you have the stamina to party until 2 am and then be ready to work a booth by 8:30 am the next morning.



Another cool Optima entry I saw in the Alley was this purple E-body Chrysler. It had a big nasty LSx swap and TONS of custom touches. The flares are there if you know what to look for - allowing wider tires - but their placement really low on the body makes this car seem even lower than it really is. I had a 72 Challenger with a big block 440 in high school, among other Dodges, so I have a strange affinity for old Mopars - even one with LSx power. This builder had tightened up the bumpers, added a custom interior, great wheels and big Wilwood brakes. Amazing work - and there were probably 30 more cars just as well prepared at OUSCI!



If you are ever in Vegas for SEMA, plan on sticking around for Saturday and Sunday and spend the $30 for tickets to come see this OUSCI event. Even if you ignore the racing (which I should have done, ha!), just seeing the machinery there was worth the price of entry.



The C10 Truck (above left) had a tilt front end and all sorts of custom work, and was an OUSCI entry. This thing had active rear aero... on a truck! Craziness, but too cool. The Cuda (above right) built by the Roadster Shop was one of several amazing cars they had at the SEMA show, and it got one of the Optima Golden Ticket invites, and they ran this at OUSCI. I think it as boosted - you could hear the turbo(s?) spool on the road course. So sweet.



This Fuller built AWD 32 Roadster was originally built to compete in Optima events, but I think its just too damned nice to risk tearing it up at OUSCI. It has been under construction for 3 years and was being shown off in the Jet Hot booth at SEMA. Pushrod/inboard suspension, AWD, Boss429 power, big honkin tires at all 4 corners... what's not to like?! This thing is sick - and it makes the Ken Block "Hoonicorn" 65 Mustang look like it was only mildly modified. In person the craftsmanship was amazing on this 32.



This green 911 wasn't an Optima attendee, and it was a bit "hella flush" for my tastes, but it had a big LSx in the trunk. So that alone made it cool, in my book. A year ago we almost bought a Porsche Boxster that had a blown engine, for such a good price I couldn't pass it up. That would have been an LSx swap we tackled, but the seller flaked out after we had agreed upon a price, ugh. Someday...



Chevy had a decently sized and stocked display in the Central Hall. A partially completed 2015 COPO Camaro was there, with the windows covered up (probably wasn't finished inside). Biggest change was the switch to a supercharged powerplant. These drag-race COPOs are not that interesting to me, but folks were lined up to see it.



There was an orange 2015 Mustang in the HRE Wheels booth that Cortex had built, which got a Golden Ticket and ran at OUSCI. It was sporting what were supposed to be HRE's flow formed wheels, but I think there were pre-production CNC monoblock parts (long story). HRE has a new line of flow-formed wheels (like SSR, Kosei, D-Force, Forgestar, etc) that they are making now, but at nearly $700 each its a tough sell. We are set-up as a dealer, but with essentially the same offering from Forgestar costing about half ($350-360/each), I don't don't know how many we'll sell? If you love HRE this might be your solution, I guess.



Seemed like there were mechanical teething issues, and the poor driver couldn't find the autocross course to save his life, so this was one of the approx. 80 cars I actually beat at OUSCI. As with other Cortex cars, look for this one to be developed further, and it once it has a little more time to be tweaked, it should be fast.

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More Cars from Optima Alley + Optima Booth


Left: Olof and Jon arrived Wednesday and hit the show running. Right: Our spot in Optima Alley was excellent!

Moving to Optima Alley was a big improvement, and Jason and I would pop out there a couple of times a day to check on the car and ended up talking to dozens of people each time. The Mustang drew a crowd, which was astonishing considering the level of hardware it was parked next to. We even had an impromptu filming with Chad Reynolds and the MavTV film crew one time when we were there, which I think showed up on the last show? The MavTV coverage of the USCA series in 2014 has improved all season, and our car made it into both the "pre-OUSCI" episode as well as the OUSCI episode, which is always good for exposure. Both of these will continue to air, so check your cable/satellite provider to see if you have the MavTV channel.



I could write a huge post just about other cars that entered OUSCI, and it wouldn't be at all boring. But I didn't end up meeting a huge number of the entrants. Its been about 4 weeks after the event now and some of the screwed up things that went wrong with how the event was run are becoming less irksome now. I regret getting so spun-up about how the event was run and not meeting more of the drivers and builders during the 2 days we were at the track. As a competitor its hard to turn off that part of my brain, I guess. We don't know if we will "build" for OUSCI competition in the future, but we will surely enter the local USCA qualifiers - which themselves were a TON of fun - and see how it all adds up for OUSCI.



There were plenty of imports in Optima Alley, including these two below. The MINI was a bit outgunned on the horsepower front but the rear engined VW had some extra power in the back seat!



So there was a rumor of a few Race Cars sneaking into OUSCI, and there were a couple. The interior of the car below at left raised a few eyebrows, but apparently not as many people cared about that as our splitter and wing. So there's talk of a "Vorshlag Rule" to do away with splitters and wings. Which is ridiculous, as we can and do regularly street drive our car on the street. Apparently there's a lot of leeway in the definition of a street car. Our car has real Air Con, Sat Nav, power windows, full interior, but gutted and caged race cars are all good. ;) There was also a little bit of a thrash to install some parts in Optima Alley right before the SEMA parade. Looked like the intake was acquired at the last minute, and it was swapped in the parking lot. And it was swapped back about 2 miles into the parade when something went wrong, doh.



The Pro Touring Camaros were out in full force, with James Shipka's (below left) One Lap Camaro (OLC) and many others in attendance.



Mark Stiloh's latest 69 Camaro creation was called "Hellfire", and it was displayed all week in the Optima booth next to Hobaugh's Corvette. These red terrors were both amazing builds, and both fast on track (quicker than I was!)



Random SEMA Cars

There were hundreds of other cars I took pictures of at SEMA, both inside in booths and outside in show areas. I cannot hope to cover even a fraction of those - you can see some for yourself in the SEMA gallery - but here are a few.

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This DTM-prepped BMW was in the Akrapovic exhaust booth, and I got to take some close ups during Load In Day before it was moved behind ropes. Neat aero tricks abound, but you always have to remember - even DTM has rules restrictions, and some of the biggest design elements are compromised to fit within that series' rules. Still, very slick little tricks here and there (the side mirrors even had a wing!)



Other than the many fluff versions, there were some racey S550s in the Ford booth. The blue Roush car had some real track prep parts, and I hope they try to focus more on the handling/downforce/safety aspects than just superchargers and dress-up stuff. The Watson Racing S550 was a drag car, and it looked pretty solid, too.



Another amazing Roadster Shop build, this 2nd gen Camaro (below) had lots of "road race" inspired custom work. Was it a legit track car? I kind of doubt it, at the level of craftsmanship that was used, but who knows? They beat the heck out of that E-body Chrysler they built at OUSCI! There's a great article on MotoIQ covering SEMA (a Nerds Eye View: SEMA 2014) that has a lot more pictures and info on this Camaro below.



Turner Motorsports just came off a winning season in their Z4M Roadsters and they had one of the 2014 Season cars in the H&R booth in the South Hall. The car had some sexy curves (and no, I'm not talking about the Turner booth babes) and I took a bunch of pictures of the flares and aero. Why? Because we have a Z4 chassis sitting in my home shop awaiting its turn to become an LSx powered track beast. I saw Will Turner in that area and we chatted briefly a bit about the 2014 winning car as well as their 2015 season plans (they are building two more Z4Ms from new BMW Motorsports chassis).



Scion had a booth with several cars built for a Scion "retro" themed contest. The two I liked the most are shown below. The Toyota race team livery FR-S was a real hit, and won the overall award from Scion.



I've included these two FR-S cars for two reasons: first, this was the most popular car at SEMA, by far. While the S550 was the "Car of the Show", the FRS/BRZ 86 twins were more abundant, and after 3 years of production this is saying a lot. Second, they were both well made show car builds. And while not what a racer would probably own, they are part of the overall "car culture" and both examples here had many race-inspired parts and overall themes. Cool pair of cars.



Toyota commissioned somebody to make this "Camry" bodied race car with a flip-up body that looked surprisingly stock and steel. It was a tube frame chassis with a Toyota based V8 with a big honkin' supercharger on top. Why would Toyota want to build and show this car at SEMA? #BecauseRacecar



Another Ring Brothers creation graced the Barrett Jackson booth, this time a highly modified Pantera. It was a work of art. The ugliest car of the show has to go to the Ken Block "Hoonicorn" 65 Mustang, though. Yes, its an amazing creation that makes 845 hp, is AWD, uses a Sadev transaxle, and made for one wild ass Gymkhana video... but in person, the proportions were all wrong and it looked ridiculous. But "ridiculous" is kind of the Ken Block trademark... style and beauty often don't go hand-in-hand. ;)



Instead of going on and on about SEMA cars for days I leave you with a link to the Vorshlag SEMA 2014 Gallery as well as the MotoIQ coverage of the show. Enjoy!

Cool New Products

Of course we go to SEMA really to see new products being offered for the first time (ditto for the PRI show), and we found a lot of new items we're going to be selling at Vorshlag and/or using on our own race cars. Here's but a few...



So we've been working with Forgestar since 2012 and have really been moving a lot of their custom wheels to racers and street guys alike, especially in the Mustang crowd that wants 10" and wider wheels on both ends of the car. We hit a wall on their F14 series wheels at 18x12" - they don't offer anything wider, and to make an 18x13" would require a whole new set of tooling ($$$). Instead they have developed the M14 series 2-piece wheels using a version of the F14 center, shown above. Available in up to 18x15" widths in 1/4" increments, with light weights and BIG caliper/rotor clearance, and available in a large range of offsets, I think we've got the solution to our REALLY wide wheel problems! My next race car will have these M14's on both ends, sporting 18x12" up front and 18x14" out back. :)



With prices getter more competitive and programability getting easier, digital dash displays are starting to show up in more race cars (and even grassroots level stuff). Of course we saw the stuff from Racepak (above left), and we already sell AIM, but there was some really nice offerings from some new players, with more OEM-looking gauges. The VDO "Analog" gauge cluster (above right) was all digital, has flexible configurations, can be had for $700-900, and looked like it would fit in a typical BMW binnacle. There were also lots of "analog" style gauge cluster offerings from Dakota Digital that were showing up in many cars on the SEMA show floor.



Electrical wiring isn't glamorous but it is often necessary to re-wire a car when it becomes a race car. The OEM electrical connectors are designed to make 5-7 connections in a lifetime, and after a decade underhood they can often become brittle from heat and age, causing broken locking tabs and water leaks - which lead to electrical gremlins. We've seen that too many times! But race-quality electrical components are very different, and we've been using MIL-spec connectors and higher end solid-state electrical parts in race cars for years. We saw some cool new bits from a few manufacturers, and recognized a lot of things we had already been using. The "smart wiring" programmable CAN-BUS solutions are becoming more common as well, and everyone from Motec to Holley had something to show.

continued below
 

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continued from above



The folks at GM Performance are taking a page out of the Ford Racing playbook and are offering Z/28 and ZL1 Camaro upgrade parts for 5th gen Camaro SS and owners. The displays of the parts and of a car on the side with highlighted bits was identical to a Ford displays from years past, but like they say.... "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."



OS Giken had a damned nice display with a lot of parts, especially considering how small of a company they really are. They had good exploded views of their popular limited slip diffs, various versions of ramp angles, as well as examples of LSDs for the Ford 8.8" and Chevy 10-bolt. Good stuff, if a bit pricey.



Whiteline had an S550 in their booth and Jason and I chatted them up on 3 different occasions. It was nice to see our S197 in some of their literature as well as playing on their video monitors, ha! We met their head of domestic parts development Jan (shown below at left talking to our engineer Jason) and we picked his brain about what they have coming out for the S550.



What we didn't expect to see were so many new S197 parts! They have developed a "high angularity bushing" that is essentially a spherical bearing made of their hard elastomers, similar to a Johnny Joint or Del-Spehre. But unlike those two aftermarket offerings, the Whiteline "Max-C" bushing joint was easier to rotate through 2 axis, and their demo-part was right there to push on yourself.



They already had two brand new S197 lower rear control arm offerings (shown above) with this Max-C bushing, in fixed length and adjustable length. They hadn't decided to make a UCA using this bushing yet, but boy did we hound them to get to it! That's the one joint on this car that really NEEDS a bi-axis joint, and the Max-C looks like the perfect fix without adding the noise associated with Del-Sphere or all-metal spherical joints. Look for this part from Whiteline soon, hopefully in our hands for testing by the end of the year.



Mishimoto had a nice little booth at the show and we talked to their development folks for a bit. They had new S550 parts on display already, like this Ecoboost oil cooler kit. We've had great luck with their S197 aluminum radiator, slim-line electric fans, silicone hoses/bends, and some catch tanks and such. We tend to use their radiators in all of our LSx swaps in BMWs and the FRS/BRZ as well.



Speaking of S550 parts, Ford had many new offerings already on display, having found many weaknesses in the new chassis' independent rear suspension. Those 10 second quarter mile runs they've done on supercharged 5.0s? They had the aluminum subframe mount bushings and updated halfshafts, as shown above. The halfshafts use a low-cost variation of the 930 Porsche CVs, which are apparently stronger than the OEM S550 bits. Ford also had the new Mustang "tilted on the side" to show all sorts of silly things, like the "Trans Cooler Scoop" (aka: the gravel trap) and the Boss302 side exhaust (aka: silly and loud ballast). The real work seemed to be shown in the Ford Racing display out front, where a new "Ford" supercharger kit was being offered, as well as 2015 5.0L heads (which can be retrofit to the 2011-14 Coyotes for more flow).



With the good also comes the bad - at least a glimpse. There were a LOT of really ugly cars shown at SEMA, but I've kept them out of this write-up other than this 5th Gen Camaro on 34" rims (but you can see them all in the photo gallery!) There were really some goofy products as well. Most of the back half of the 1st floor in South Hall is where most of the worst displays are stuck at SEMA. Every Chinese tire manufacturer you never heard of and never will buy from is banished here, slinging 60" tall tractor tires and car tires in every color of the rainbow. Some of the company names are hilarious and do not translate well. Names like "Happy Luck Trustworthy Parts Co" (true story!) will make you smile... and pick up your walking pace.



Now this was an exception to the "funny name" rule, as this Vietnamese restaurant Pho Kim Long had excellent food. We noticed a LOT of Pho places that had goofy names in the same neighborhood, so I think this was intentional. Some days you need to venture away from the convention center for lunch at SEMA.

SEMA Ignited + Friday Parade

So the SEMA show was wrapping up Friday at 4:30 pm, and the plan was to have everyone meet at their cars in Optima Alley, roll out in one big group and join the hundreds of other SEMA display cars that would be parading to the SEMA Ignited event Friday evening. This was to be from about 5 pm until late that night, and every OUSCI entry was asked to be there with their car. This was one of the two parts of the "Road Rally", and counted for 5 of that 25 points towards the OUSCI champion, so we pretty much had to go. SEMA Ignited is open to the public (unlike the SEMA show itself), and showcases hundreds of the cars displayed at SEMA as well as many of the displays/trailers from a lot of the same sponsors that would be at OUSCI that weekend.



By Friday morning we had shop manager (and photographer) Brad on site, Paul Costas was here for another trade show starting Sunday, plus Amy and I, Jason, Jon and Olof. We all met up in Optima Alley for the driver's meeting before the Road Rally and got ready for the parade and SEMA Ignited. We had one checkpoint to meet up in the alley next to the Central Hall, then on to the SEMA Ignited parking, then we had to go to a restaurant to check in by a certain time to get our 5 points towards OUSCI.



The fuel level was pretty low when we loaded the car on the trailer back in Dallas a week earlier, and after driving around town a bit Monday, one parade to the Ford area, moving it to Optima Alley, and the Ignited parade it was getting dangerously close to running out of fuel. We rolled out and I held my breath hoping that the parade would run smoothly and without too much traffic.



Ha! When has a parade ever run smoothly?? It was bumper to bumper traffic that took 90 minutes to traverse about 4 miles. The indicated fuel range that started at "13 miles to empty" ended up at "zero" by the time we made it through the parade and into the SEMA Ignited parking area. There were a few cars that did run out of fuel, and a couple of other breakdowns along the way, including this famous rear end collision of a Liberty Walk Ferrari 458. Oops!



Once we were in the right parking area we were lined up two wide and bumper to bumper, almost all 100 OUSCI entries grouped together. Some cars parked on the show floor took a little longer to get there, but most made it. We got there right at dusk and night fell quickly - and our parking area got REALLY dark. We came back after dinner and there were portable lights set-up, which made car viewing a lot easier.



We had the Optima Umbrella Girls on hand at both ends of the parade, and they were handing out free OUSCI event T-shirts and trying to get spectators to show up Saturday and Sunday. A lot of the OUSCI competitors helped out and I ended up handing out 3 boxes worth of shirts and talking to people at SEMA Ignited for an hour or two. You know what makes you really popular? Even more popular than beautiful, leggy umbrella girls? FREE T-SHIRTS!

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Eventually I went and checked in at the Tilted Kilt (a popular "Breastaurant") and met up with some of the USCA competitors I knew personally or from forums/online, and we all had a bite to eat. Optima had some free drinks for us, and while we ate they had one of the USCA qualifier event TV shows playing on the bar's screens with the volume cranked to 11. After we ate and drank a bit I went back out to SEMA Ignited for a while longer, but by 9:30 I was bushed - and I needed to be at the track at 6:30 am the next morning (to walk the autocross and speed stop courses!). Jon and Olof were nice enough to stick around until 10 pm and when they could leave they took the Mustang to a gas station a block away to fuel up with the 91 octane Premium they have locally (we brought plenty of 93 octane from Texas, but it was in the trailer), enough to make it to the track (25 miles away) the next morning. So I walked across the street to our hotel (convenient!) and got some sleep...

Speedhunters?!

I'm jumping ahead to the Saturday night portion of the Road Rally from OUSCI (from LVMS to Shelby museum, all the way down the Vegas Strip - and worth another 20 points), but this is such a cool pic I had to share it here.



One of my all-time favorite automotive websites for beautiful pictures is Speedhunters, and one of their photographers shot a picture of our car cruising down the Vegas Strip. The photographer was riding in a Liberty Walk wide-bodied 911 Turbo, but he was hanging out for 4 city blocks trying to get a picture of our Mustang. We stopped at a light and he was giving compliments on our car. From a Speedhunters photographer. Riding in an epic 911. Craziness!

Eagles Canyon Toy Run 2014 -Saturday Dec 6, 2014

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I drove 5 different cars at the 2012 ECR Toy Run, including 3 of my own cars! All for FIFTY BUCKS!

Last bit here, then I am wrapping it up until the next segment, where I will talk about the OUSCI event itself. This Saturday here in Dallas we're going to take our red 2011 GT out to Eagles Canyon Raceway to the annual "Toy Run" event, December 6th. This is an annual event where the track massively discounts entries for a one-day track event... $50 + an unwrapped $10 toy + two canned goods is all it costs to run 4-5 sessions on this 2.5 mile road course.

Event Details: https://www.facebook.com/Eaglescanyontoyrun2014



The low price brings out lots of folks, but its always a good time. The weather can be iffy in December, but the forecast this time looks to be 63 degrees and clear. If you are in the Dallas/Ft.Worth area, or even within a couple of hours away, you should come check out this track. Never done an HPDE before? No worries - they will have instructors. Don't have track tires? No worries - there are no times taken, this is just for FUN and to bring in gifts and food for needy children in the area. The owner of ECR takes a hit, but it brings in so much charity and goodwill everyone feels good at the end of the day. And you get to race all day for $50!



This event brings in the most eclectic mix of street and race cars, noobies and veterans alike. Its a super low cost way to check out HPDE for the first time or a cheap way to get some testing done, too. This is an event where we've corrupted a lot of local SCCA autocrossers and introduced them to the high speed thrills of road courses. Our 2011 Mustang will be there just to be shown off, because it is For Sale and all.

Come join us! Spread the word!

What's Next?




The wrap up of this 3-part mega series of posts will be in my next post. This is where I will cover the two hectic days (and nights) of the OUSCI 2014 event itself, and explain what went wrong with our entry (21st place, arg!) and some things that the newly expanded event (100 cars!) didn't get exactly perfect. All in all it was worth it, now that I look back on it, but it was a bit stressful learning the ropes at our first big Optima Shootout. If you have never done OUSCI and want to, read my next post so you can learn what rules really matter and which ones apparently don't, what prep you should do and the mods that won't help. I will also talk about our next race car and what we plan on doing with it...

Until next time,
 

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Nov 13, 2014...

[B]dontlifttoshift[/B] said:
21st overall. For those who aren't impressed, you should be. The twenty cars that finished higher were either all wheel drive, way lighter, or carrying at least 200 more horsepower.....in at least one case, 500 more horsepower.

http://www.optimabatteries.com/index.php?cID=2952

Edit from 11/13/14: After seeing the results yesterday I was extremely displeased with my performance at this event and it shows in the tone of what I wrote below. I obviously drove poorly, but had no idea for much of the weekend how we were doing. Ending up 21st place was not where I thought we would have been ranked (I was hoping for a top 10), especially compared to many drivers we had beaten in this same car before at USCA and other events - or from looking at the very limited results we saw during the OUSCI. The last minute classing changes, fast and loose regard for their own rules, continual timing problems and delays, a dash of competitive deviousness, and inconsistent judging at this event only exacerbated this feeling.

-------

Those results are incomplete, and I'm not going to ease up until I see the actual run times. One competitor I know already fought one inaccuracy and it moved him up a dozen places yesterday. We STILL do not know any of our times from: Speed Stop, Left Side Autocross, Road Course, or how the S&D score was come up with. That will all come "later".

Live (or in some cases ANY) posting of competition times was a major problem at this event. They should have done a better job - you cannot work on your autocross runs if you have no idea what your times are or how you sit relative to others during the event. In 400+ competition events over the past 28 years I've never had NO clue about what my times were until OUSCI 2014. Its several days later and I still have no clue, other than I got about 5 points from my ranked placement of (?) place.

At one point I was 4th fastest in the autocross of half the entries on the only side that the timer display was working (2 courses, left and right, with times added together). The AWD cars all ran in another session and apparently their times were very good (have no idea what they might be) and it messed with the placements of the 2WD cars badly, both in the autocross and speed stop events.


The one copy of the track map they had on site (above) was wrong - this was the 2.7 mile course and we ran the 2.4

Our car felt "off" on the road course all day, and I kept getting caught in traffic from other cars + the gravel spray from the many cars going off course + getting blocked by the damned camera car (aka: rolling road block). My AIM Solo wasn't working and I couldn't get the start/finish marker set-up, so I had no lap times or predictive timer functions, and I've come to heavily really rely on that. With only 3-5 laps per session (truncated sessions due to the breakdowns, timing delays and technical problems) there just weren't enough laps for me to learn the 19 turns on this course, I guess. This course also had a lot of slow corners and long straights, which help powerful cars a lot. I cannot count how many times I was stuck going around corners behind slower cars that just put 100s of yards on me in the next straight. Cars and drivers I smoked in Texas placed well ahead of me (by how much I have no idea) here.

There were also some "competitive irregularities" I witnessed that were absurd. Rules that changed on the fly, seemingly automatic disqualifications that were overturned, hot lapping of autocross course at weird times, etc. It all affected the results. I am not too pleased about how some aspects were handled, but I'm starting to sound like sour grapes so I'll shut up now until I have more time to explain - and have had a chance to see some actual results with TIMES.

The OUSCI know how displeased some of us are, each of us from having spent a lot of time and money coming to their event, run in its 7th year but still looking like a rookie effort in many ways. Anyway, I'm going to leave it there for now before I'm banned for life from USCA/Optima events. ;) I did have "fun" but mixed with a healthy dose of frustration and facepalm.
 

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December 5, 2014....

[B]zquez[/B] said:
Those 5th gen camaros need all the help they can get don't they? If that's a "street" car then the Vorshlag car must be a garage queen.


From what I remember this car got all of the "street car points" (15 of the 25 points in the judged portion). The air conditioning was a racing cool suit, people were using iPods as car radios, see the snapped-in floor mats there? That's the interior. Get how this works now... ?

Yea, me too. I won't ever bring a street car to a gun fight again. :thumb:



Just like how we learned "what rules matter and what rules are absolutely ignored" in the GRM $20XX Challenge in 2010 (which we rectified completely by 2011 with the same car shown above - and won the whole freagin thing), we learned a lot of similar things about OUSCI going to the Vegas event. I will share that in my next write-up. :hi:
 

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Project Update for January 15th, 2014: This was supposed to be part 3 of 3 of our "lead up" + SEMA2014 + OUSCI coverage. This segment was going to be devoted to our coverage and personal impressions of the 2014 Optima Ultimate Street Car Invitational (OUSCI) event. I took audio notes each day there and I've been transcribing that and trying to write this for over 6 weeks, and its complete. It is huge, it is in depth, but its brutal and extremely negative. if I posted this it would only make a small percentage of entrants and the organizers very angry, so I'm not - I can't see what good will come of it. Long story short: OUSCI was very frustrating to our entire group that went, which were all racers.


I wrote 60,000 words about this event - that I will likely never publish

I've written bad reviews of events in the past: The 2012 ASCS event which was a joke. The dangerous way the track event for TX2K events was run. I've posted about or trials with pig headed rules makers in SCCA. Some of you get something from this, but mostly it makes me hated by more and more people. In the end, its bad for our business, and there are 7 other people that rely on Vorshlag for their income. Nobody wants to hear the truth (not my "no holds barred" version of it).

Instead this will be a short S197 project update, where I will show some newly finished work on our 2011 GT, which is still for sale (and I've lowered the price) with a new listing on eBay. At the end of this I will cover what we are racing in 2015, which is an all new race car build that we started working on only 8 days before it's first outing. All happy news, all the time.

Vorshlag TT3 Mustang : New Updates and Lower Price


This image is one of my favorite views of this car, and in original resolution is my current desktop background

Right before SEMA/OUSCI we made a lot of changes to our 2011 Mustang, most of which were cosmetic but they also included some real aero updates - like the rear new wing uprights and end plates shown in the image above. Normally we would have reinforced the trunk lid to take all of these new, bigger loads - but we ran out of time and went with it "unsupported" for the SEMA show and OUSCI. This is what we did on a similar AJ Hartman carbon fiber wing element we made uprights for on Jamie Beck's ST3 race car, shown below.



A couple of weeks after we got back from OUSCI in November I asked Ryan to duplicate the trunk reinforcements he made for Jamie's ST3 Mustang - to put on our car. He started with some aluminum plate reinforcements that bolt to the bottom side of the trunk (including some through-holes to the mounting uprights) attached with stainless M6 button head bolts, as shown below.



The round aluminum tube design used was the same as the previous versions on Jamie's car. Ryan added riv-nuts to the bottom side flat edge of the tube structures, then machined custom Delrin bushings on the lathe and bolted them to the flats at the base of the trunk tubes.



These hard bushings press the trunk lid down onto a strong, sheet metal structure of the back of the trunk surround. This way the aero loads push the trunk down, with loads passing through these aluminum tube reinforcements, that then pass to the chassis structure. It seems unusual, and on a pure race car the wing uprights often bolt through slotted holes in the trunk and down to the frame, but we've used this design in the past and it works.



The finished trunk reinforcements make the entire trunk / wing struture more rigid and it closes more easily now, too. We're going to leave the tubular reinforcements in raw silver on this car. Looks good and goes well with the red and black on the car for the trifecta of "Vorshlag colors" (red, black, silver)



These pre- and post-SEMA updates took some time and a bit of cash. Replicating these front flares and fresh paint would have been about $6000 to the normal guy. The custom wing uprights, larger end plates, and trunk reinforcement work would cost another $2000. With all of that included we felt like it justified the $48K price we were asking for the car. Well, the car hasn't sold so we're going to eat a lot the costs of these updates and lower the price to $44,500.

New eBay ad with buy it now price of $44,500: http://www.ebay.com/itm/321643064787

The purchase still comes with the buyer's choice of tires and wheels (we have two matching sets of Forgestar 18x12" wheels, one with a fresh set of 335mm BFG Rivals and the other with fresh 335/345mm Hoosier A6 tires), and of course Vorshlag set-up and parts support to the buyer. If you know of anyone that's looking for a unique, fast, well sorted, and beautiful Mustang like this, please send them our way. If this for sale page is still up, then the car is still for sale. We've stopped racing the car, it is now being stored in my home shop, but its ready to go for the 2015 racing season. If interested, call Vorshlag and ask for Terry... Thanks!

What's Next?

As much as I'd like to take the 2011 Mustang back to the USCA event in Texas in March, they have banned all of the things that made it fast. We've also proven all of the theories and parts we wanted to test on this chassis in NASA TT3 competition, so that car is in storage awaiting its sale. Again, check the For Sale page here or the eBay auction through Feb 4th. We kept this test mule for over 4 years, which is twice as long as we tend to keep any chassis here at Vorshlag.

Having this car for sale and no new race car ready for the 2015 NASA racing season left us with few options for this year. I was going to sit on the sidelines and watch until after the 2011 Mustang sells, then we could finally finish our LSx swap E46 BMW build that is started. That car is just at the point where it needs a five figure cash infusion, to pay for the motor, transmission, wheels and shocks, so its "on hold" until the Mustang sells.


In the last week of December a friend of mine made a change in his race car plans. He wanted to get out from under a C4 Corvette track build we had been brainstorming for the past 3 years and move to a newer chassis, with fewer hassles. Can't blame him but I also couldn't let him just part it out and get rid of it. He had already done so much work to this car that it would be a shame to let it go in pieces, and, it was the exact right year and model for where it was classed.

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So I bought this 1992 Corvette LT1 ZF6 car from him for a GOOD price and we put together a very low buck project plan with a very compressed time frame race prep. We had about 3 weeks to take it from a gutted interior car with no safety gear to a safe, reliable race car that could be competitive in a NASA TT class. We could have gone nuts with a TTB build but decided to keep it simple and build it for TTC, which is the base class for 1992-96 LT1 Corvettes. This project was initially announced on the forums as a "mystery chassis" and we had some hilarious guesses about what we were building, after giving about a dozen clues.



Today, as I write this post the Corvette has a custom roll bar, race seat, harnesses anchored, ballast box built, Hoosiers mounted, brakes upgraded, shocks replaced, it has lost 400 pounds, 150 pounds of ballast has gone back in (on the floor in the middle of the car), the car is at the tuner's geting dyno'd and some new livery decals are being cut. This was all done in a WEEK AND A HALF, 8 days at the shop, and our crew knocked it out of the park. We should just barely make the deadline for this weekend's NASA race at MSR-Houston, Jan 17-18th. We will continue to refine and tweak this project all season. Our class this weekend has a good variety (Mini Cooper S, Mazda RX8, and this 24 year old Corvette!) so I've got my fingers crossed that we can pull out a win and hopefully start the beginning of a string of new TTC track records. At the end of the season this car will (hopefully) be sold and help fund and finish our nasty TT1 V8 BMW monster for 2016. If a body in white S550 arrives soon enough that might change our plans, too.

Why a 24 year old Corvette, you ask? Well to start with its already 800 pounds lighter than the S197, when both are without ballast. It has a far superior OEM suspension set-up (forged aluminum A-arms, aluminum IRS), nearly perfect weight distribution (still 51%F/49%R with all of this weight removed), excellent brakes/ABS, and much less drag. We're racing it in a "lower" class and it won't put down the lap times the TT3 Mustang did, but its something new, something different, and we cannot afford to keep racing the same car year after year. Its bad for business.


We have torn this car apart, modeled all of the suspension bits, and measured for 18x11" wheels at both ends (see above right)

We also have been working on the new S550 chassis in earnest, measuring and modeling parts to help build new camber plates, shocks and wheels. We have already sold a bunch of 10" and 11" wheels for this chassis and the first set of prototype MCS TT2 shocks are due here in a few weeks and will go on the Dusold Designs 2015 Mustang shown above, who is helping us test these suspension goodies and wheel sizes. Look for more updates in our S550 thread located here.



Vorshlag is still working on a lot of S197 and Coyote powered cars, of course. With our new CNC machine room we have the ability to make more new products for this chassis, and there are many on the schedule already. I had planned on showing some new custom fabricated bits we have made recently for some customer S197s, but this post got out of control, so that will happen next time.

And don't worry - this "project build thread" will not go away. If we get another S197 chassis for a Vorshlag build, or do anything new to any S197, it will be featured here. Until then...

Cheers,
 

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January 15, 2015...

[B]dontlifttoshift[/B] said:
I am not going to pretend that you were the only racers there, but it is a street car event that was being run for the first time in a new venue. I have heard from a handful of regulars that things didn't run as smooth as they have in the past. I didn't go this year but have volunteered in the past and was pretty impressed with how things ran.....but I'm not a racer either.
It was so bad I can't even talk about it.

[B]dontlifttoshif[/B] said:
Actually, I do. Your ASCS review was spot on and that organization still can't seem to find its ass with both hands.
Yea, ASCS lost my business for life at that half-assed event.... more like quarter-assed. Optima wasn't that bad, of course, but it was still far from perfect. Far.

[B]dontlifttoshift[/B] said:
Technically, USCA didn't ban the wing, just its location, however it likely is ineffective mounted directly to the decklid. Throw the ESP spoiler back on and the S197 is legal, at least from what I can tell.
Well.... yea, they kind of did ban our wing and all effective wings... because the chord limit they specified (8" max) is itty bitty. The wings we've use (AJ Hartman carbon) have a 14" chord, which is SIX INCHES too deep. That's a big chunk.



I've owned and installed a lot of wings on a lot of cars, but never one that tiny. 8" chord is little eBay junk. Worthless. Effectively every single entrant that had an aftermarket wing now has to remove it. That was probably 30% of the field.

But they didn't ban anything meaningful, like.... here I go, falling into this trap again. NO. I'm not going to get dragged into it... :|
 

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