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Red Underwear, Cheap Fiats and Other Moto Stuff


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7 hours ago, sphinxsix said:

BTW do they already make driver shoes with carbon fiber laces.?

Laces??? Do you realize how much laces weigh???  We don’t need no stinkin’ laces!

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But seriously, race cars are often limited by class to specified minimum weights.  Low powered cars can benefit greatly from optimal distribution of that weight. So every 5 pounds in the right places can cut a few hundredths from lap times.  Sprung vs unsprung weight can affect handling. Lighter wheels and tires can help acceleration, as can a lightened flywheel.  As a result, many well engineered cars need ballast added to remain above their minimum weight.  Adding it to increase strength or otherwise improve performance is as much of an art as finding and removing weight that contributes nothing to performance or reliability.

 

I raced Formula Vee for many years in SCCA. The cars had to weigh at least 800 pounds with fluids, as I recall. With only about 65 hp, 5 extra pounds in the wrong place (eg the driver) could cost enough thousandths of a second per lap to hand a win to someone else of otherwise equal skill. Most FV and FFord winners in my day were on the small side.

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19 minutes ago, sphinxsix said:

What I know is that if one is thinking about getting rid of fillings in one's teeth to be 0.oooo3 sec faster during an amateur non-competition ride, things have probably gone too far.. 

Yes indeed! It’s like spending $10k on an external power supply to save those pesky peaks from the demon’s clippers 😝

 

I started racing in 1967 (1275 Austin Cooper S). We drove to the track, took off the hub caps, removed the loose bits, raced, and drove home.  An open trailer was a rare luxury in the pits at solo events and regional races. 
 

Within a few years, closed trailers were becoming common and the first big rigs started showing up at amateur meets. I got so frustrated that I quit - guys were spending tens of thousands a year to win cheap trophies.  There was no way for a medical student to even be safe among them, let alone keep up with them.

 

Once we had a house with a garage and shop, I got back into it and have done quite well. There are a few in my clubs and race groups who’ll spend and do anything to win.  I just let them pass me - and they often take out those poor saps who resist.  But after so many years of it, I got good enough to build and maintain my own cars, stay in the top 5, and beat many in identical cars on which the owners spent 5+ times what I had in mine.  At my wife’s urging, I did buy an enclosed trailer in 1987. But I still have all my fillings.

 

And there’s a Raspberry Pi running JRiver and Roon Bridge in almost every room of our apartment.  Wow - I think I see a pattern developing here.....

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6 hours ago, Confused said:

I love the GT40, although I suspect I might be too tall to comfortably drive one.

At 6’2”, 170 lbs (42 long, 33” waist, 36” sleeve length), I couldn’t comfortably drive the road version GT40.  Dan Gurney was 6’4” and did pretty well in his race car - but the interiors are entirely different. More accurately, the street version has an interior and the original race cars did not.
 

The street GT40 has 2 1/2” less headroom, 5 1/2” less shoulder room, and 9” less hip room than the Supra / Z4. Legroom’s within half an inch.

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1 hour ago, accwai said:

That was then, but this is now

I raced Formula Vee in SCCA for almost 20 years.  The first Vees were like Cadillacs compared to current ones.  At 6’2” with 36” arms, I had plenty of room in Formcars etc. By the time I got into FV from C sedan (1275 Cooper S), they’d already shrunk some - but I still fit into my Zink C4 once I made a custom seat to lower me and stretch me out a bit.  And I was consistently in the top 10 at regional races years after most Zinks were on Medicar.  

 

As I and my Zinc aged gracefully, the average driver shrunk to fit each new design because every advance in aerodynamics & suspension design left less cockpit room but cut lap times.  So successful drivers grew younger and smaller and I fell further back in the pack despite mods like zero-roll, aero and NACA scoops, and lower drag body panels.  I wear a 12A shoe, and there’s insufficient room to hold my feet straight up in many current FV (& FF) models. 

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4 hours ago, fas42 said:

To me, just stuffing an enormous engine pulled out of a vehicle into the frame of a motorcycle is not very interesting ... it's just a variation of what's been done forever - my father had one of these,

 

Aussie Original: The First Ute

 

and he built a very large caravan to live in, while working on properties in country NSW. The 4 cylinder engine didn't have the grunt to pull it, so he dropped a V8 in, which did the job nicely. The big downside was that the cooling system was not up to it, and there was an  ongoing need to give the vehicle a rest over hilly terrain; otherwise the radiator would boil over.

The owner of the tree service we used for decades was an old hot rodder (not old like me - old like Methuselah).  His biggest project was to stuff a rat motor into the back seat of a Renault R8, which he did "because I could".  He welded up a perimeter frame from 2x4 box tubing and fabricated an entire 4 corner independent suspension.  When his oldest child was approaching legal driving age, he cut it up into tiny pieces and never did it again.

 

My first hot rod project was stuffing a Volvo B18 drivetrain in an MG-TD when Iwas in high school (1962).  A good friend's older brother fancied himself an auto guru and started a few very nice projects, none of which he could complete.  He got the TD with a very crudely done Ford 60 flatty in it.  Whoever did it couldn't mate the TD radiator to the Ford, so he "secured" a bare Ford core in front of the stock radiator with clothes hangars.  When he pushed it into the backyard and moved on, I talked Billy's brother into giving it to us when we were 16 (a year before legal driving age in New Jersey).  We bought an old Volvo (444 or 544 - I don't remember which) for $100 from Stucker's junkyard on Staten Island. Billy's dad towed it back for us, and we managed to transplant the drive train and make it work. Neither of us had the equipment or experience to narrow the Volvo rear, so the back wheels protruded a bit.  So it looked a little funny, but it passed NJ inspection and ran great!  We sold it for enough to buy the parts we needed to make his brother's next abandoned project (an XK-120MC coupe) roadworthy enough to get him through 5 years of architecture school at MIT.

 

My biggest project to date has been a '48 Ford F1 street rod with a small block Chevy, an aluminum Powerglide, and a Jag XJ-S rear (for which I welded up a tube cage mounting system).   I wanted to rod the flathead that came with it, but it turned out to have a crack in the block.  I'd gotten a pair of 283 blocks and the P'glide for $100 from the local "recycling center" where I obtained most of my used parts.  I'd planned to stuff one into the MG-TD I eventually turned into a vintage racer (not the same one that got the B18), so I decided to use it in the F1 rather than spend thousands building up a flattie.

 

For me, the challenge in mating disparate assemblies like a V8 and a vintage car or bike are both exciting and stimulating.  I never would have figured out a lot of the engineering and fabrication techiniques I've developed over the years without those challenges.  For interest, here's the TD racer referred to above:

 

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