89 Cutlass Ciera Race Car Build

[lemons bob]

It was something I thought of after the race. It is something we wouldn't know until we do a few laps at a track though. THe north track we needed 3rd. The front straight we would shift to 3rd probably half way down the main straight

[lemons bob]

Looked at the front brakes. the outside pads were only backing plates and even those were warped. Pics on the face book site. Show the difference between the two autobahn tracks. The north we still had around half the pad life yet, the south no material at all. For next year we'll look for some real endurance race pads. I know portfield should be able to get me some since they make the standard race pads.

[jlattyak]

Here are the pictures,


IMG_20111015_110641 by j.lattyak, on Flickr


IMG_20111015_110614 by j.lattyak, on Flickr


IMG_20111015_115738 by j.lattyak, on Flickr


IMG_20111015_115758 by j.lattyak, on Flickr

[lemons bob]

Got the residual back from the orginazers. They gave said the car is worth $50. so that gives us $450 to spend. The upgraded brakes, wheels and tires are non budget items so thats a help. WHen I went to change the radiator it came out rust color and even when I put new in it had some red stuff floating in it after I reved the engine. so looks like the in radiator cooler got a leak ( I hope) so that mean new radiator for us. and since it has to be pulled means a good time to chuck all the air conditioning stuff. It works great but just extra weigh we don't need. the rest of the work we'll have to think about. I mentioned to the guy who gives the budget about the rear sway and he replied that front heavy cars, the rear sway makes them spin quicker, which kind of makes sense since the car does feel awful back light when you brake hard. So more thinking to do. Its getting cold so might have some time to think about it before we do much for a while.

[junkyarddog91]

is that the chump car racing series you race in???

[Duke George V]

Pretty sure they're racing in LeMons.

[lemons bob]

Yeah we've been doing LeMons, which if your familiar with chump its pretty much the same rules.

[junkyarddog91]

yea i used to work in a shop where the owner did miata spec racing and worked with chump car racing.... we had a chump car we worked on a few times( mazda protege)

[Duke George V]

Spec racing always sounded dreadfully boring to me. I know, when everyone drives identical cars, it comes down to driver skill. But the amount of ridiculous detail you have to pay attention to, especially for Miata and E30 Spec...

[lemons bob]

Spec Miata is mostly known for lots of crashes. Probably caused by a combination of the fact that they are short sprint races and that it is probably currently the easiest level to start at in scca racing. But even with it being a spec race I was listening to a couple racers complaining about how even spec miata is won by the teams with the most money to spend. Sure the cars are all supposed to be the same but if you have enough money to swap engines between practice, and qualifying and swap a 3rd engine in for the race you can tune it a lot more aggressively then the guys who have to keep the same engine all weekend, giving you more power and probably a top spot.

Thats really why I prefer the lemons/chump format (personally I prefer lemons if for no other reason that people some times assume you meant you race LeMans, while calling me a chump still seems like an insult). Car budgets are pretty strict for performance (saftey is unlimited) so it leaves it for the teams and the drivers to do the best they can with it. The endurance format tends to even the playing field cause there are alot of cars that are really fast for 2-3 hours and then blow up.

Lemons and chumps have their differences, chump is trying to be for the more serious racer, that is why it was created cause the guy who runs wanted something more serious and thought some things in lemons could be used to be unfair, although chump has some pretty big loopholes in the rules last I check and the guy running it has done made some bad PR moves.

Lemons is less serious, they are in it as much for the spectacle as the racing. The push cleverness innovation, and out right weirdness. This ended up having some pretty amazing cars like a geo run by motorcycle engine that one the chump race at leguna seca, or the model t gt which turned out better than the guy who built thought it would, if only he could get the ford manual transmission to not fall apart on him. In the midwest where I run next year we will have the return(hopefully) of the radial powered (ww2 era airplane engine) mr2 and the introduction of the subaru 360 with a honda 1200cc (I believe) motorcylce engine.

I'm not sure if its just because lemons was first or that people like the less seriousness of it, but Lemons events tend to have atleast twice as many cars at them. While some might complain about the traffic it does keep you on your toes and I prefer it. If you wanted to lap by yourself you'd just pay for a track day, not race.

[lemons bob]

Not much to update now.

Ordered replacement radiator, it came in but the little thing you attach the hose to overflow tank was broke off, so back it goes.
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As for races for next year we are still trying to figure out where and when but looks like we might get to race at Road America which is pretty awesome. For those not familiar with it, Road America is a track in Wisconsin that is one of the oldest Road Courses in America and is also still considered one of the best. It has some pretty long and fast straights so we should be able to see how fast we can get the Old Ciera going. It will be nice to say I got it into triple digits without anyone being able to say how I was wreckless and endangering innocent peoples lives.

[Duke George V]

I don't know if someone said anything about this, but I'm going to advise against getting a rear sway bar. You already have problems with the ass kicking out when braking in turns. A sway bar will make that even worse. Those wagon springs should be plenty.

How about tires? Are you gonna go up to 15"? Tire Rack has Dunlop Direzza DZ101 tires in 205-50-15 for $70. I know they're not the Z1 Star whatevers, but they might last a little longer too, with a 300 treadwear instead of 200.

And yeah, you'll hit triple digits easy with the long legs of the economy transmission. If my old Duke-powered 6000 could do 103, yours can.

[lemons bob]

we've already decided against the rear sway. Thinking a spoiler might help. Figure it could add a good five pounds of downforce on the back (figure 5lb seems a good approximation of its weight ). Hopefully dropping the weight of the airconditioning out of the front can help some too.

Someone tried running the dz101's and they didn't last long. From what I heard just about every gets 2 races out of 1 set of star specs, so 2 races opposed to 2 sets per race will actually make them cost 1/2 the price of what we've been doing. Just not sure if we are going to go up to 15's or not.

[lemons bob]

We finally started getting ready for this season. Looks like our plans are to wait for Road America, cause getting to run at Road America is pretty awesome. This means we won't race again until August though, so no really rush, but we wanted to get started.

Saturday with the weather not looking good we figured it would be best to look over and plan mainly. So we decided to look at the rear drums since we've never had it apart. We attempted once but it was pretty well stuck on. This time the left came right off, the right side needed to be persuaded a bit, but a few good hits with the rubber mallet and some aggresive wiggling and it came off too. All in all they still looked to be ok. Alot of brake dust but there seemed to be some decent material left and on the right side I can still read the part number so I'm guessing they weren't to bad. Not sure how thick the shoe was originally can't tell for sure, so we'll probably replace it and hold on to the old drums and shoes for spare. No idea how old these are since they came with the car.

Weather made it so we didn't want to start replacing the radiator, and flushing the transmission and removing the air conditioning. Although we didn't want to start it we figured we could atleast start pulling some of the airconditioning parts.



We may have only removed a couple things but the engine bay does look less cluttered. The heavy stuff (compressor and condensor) are still in but we have the replacement pully all set for when we have a nice day.

[Zaloryan]

Can you completely bypass the ac pulley and run a shorter belt? Every accessory pulley can rob up to 5-9 horsepower at WOT. I completely bypassed the A/C on my 3300. It cut out around 20 inches off the belt because of the routing with the A/C. Engine was a little bit peppier after that...