Everyday.  Stopped by Jason’s shop on Friday just to check and see the E30 since I hadn’t really looked at it since Roebling in May?  Anyway as this blurry and poor camera pic shows he had a Ferrari 456 sitting in the shop.  It was a 1995 with 23k miles and wouldn’t pass emissions.  A new catalytic converter costs $8000 from the dealer.  I ‘think’ this car cost maybe $225k when new?  Anyway I talked Jason into a ride around the block.   Lots of show, and no go.  Granted its more of a touring car but still not that impressive.  In typical Ferrari fashion the V12 exhaust did sound cool.  So Jason schooled me on crossplane vs. flatplane crankshafts.  The crossplane is a more ‘merican deal and gives the V8 its distinctive ‘burble’ sound or rumble.  The flatplane allows a V8 to rev higher and is more of a racing spec, used by the Europeans notably Ferrari and Lotus.  Ted also has a Testarossa in his shop waiting on a 160 hour ‘minor’ maintenance.  Divide 160 by a 40hr work week.  The lesson for today is – there is no such thing as a cheap Ferrari!

Clay called and said “We’re cutting the roof off this car, right?” I asked is that a statement or a question? Here it is minus roof and getting ready for some welding to start!!

In miracles?  Fresh from BW world HQ.  Don’t stop believin’….

The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.

This will be mostly a visual essay. Saturday proved to be a busy day at DTOM Racing world headquarters, we recently concluded a sale of the running gear from the wrecked e46 car, and struck a deal around the tub too.

So we dedicated the day to finally moving things “out” of Craig’s garage, much to his delight. Unfortunately most car parts don’t lend themselves to easy shipping being awkwardly shaped and heavy, or small and delicate. If you find yourself needing to ship a differential – that is basically a heavy lump of metal – The “tough box” was designed by the Steve Jobs of storage. It is made from super heavy plastic (rated at 400lbs), and it has pre-drilled holes for zip ties to secure the top. In short pure genius!

So now you’re saying “Wow is this what DTOM has come to? Stories about boxing sh!t up to mail. Very sad.”

How cynical you’ve all become, clearly you didn’t notice the quotes around “special” in the title. No, no, no – it certainly got more interesting. The 2nd part of our day involved putting the wrecked chassis sans wheels onto my trailer. As with most of our dicey propositions (or any involving potential heavy lifting) we made sure that reinforcements were present, so we waited for Ted and Brendan to arrive. Ted’s common sense observation that we really needed a winch or come-along to do this properly was duly noted, but we had to make lemonade with the cards that were dealt. This meant rigging up my shim shammy trailer to stand on its own, while I drug the car forcefully onto it. What could go wrong?

What could go wrong? This looks completely safe, but why the jack stands?

Here is why, the trailer jack that was going to support all the weight is only ’sort of’ welded together..

Surprisingly this all worked like a champ and we began our trip up to the car’s new home John Eversley’s shop, where we’d work out the next engineering problem for the day – How to get it off the trailer.

Step 1 – hook up to crazy electric pit buggy tug.

Step 2 – use landscape timber to lift while tug pulls it onto the trailer. Nothing to it.

Step 3 – enjoy crazy weird stuff at John’s farm / shop. Like ….

Smallest Horse in Georgia.

One of the three remaining cars used for Gone in 60 Seconds.

Did you know Vespa (the scooter people) made a car? Neither did we. You don’t buy parts for this, you make them.

In case you haven’t noticed its pretty hard to have a niche racing blog when you’re not really racing.

I get two questions so this is probably the shortest FAQ ever.

1. What is going on with the car?

I got an email from Clay the other night that read “You guys still building that CTC car?” This was concerning on a number of levels, not the least of which is the car is supposed to be at their shop. At last check the status I got was “it’s in the old shop”, that is akin to you putting something in your attic. How often do you go up in your attic? Exactly. So the truthful answer to this question is “Not much.” My personal gut feel for us making Daytona 2011 is at 50/50.

A) However, we’re not at a complete standstill. A Grand-Am Spec E90 Limited Slip Differential is en route from Diffsonline in MA. This is sort of like buying curtains before the house has a roof, but any forward progress at this point is good. Dan at Diffsonline or Diffy Dan as I call him can amaze you with some esoteric knowledge about things like ring and pinion, machining the carrier, and a bunch of other mumbo jumbo. Bottom line is he knows his shit about diffs and I expect this to be worth easily 10 seconds a lap. He said if you don’t see a 10 second a lap improvement with one of their diffs its probably driver error.

If you’re one of our 2 or 3 ‘non’ racing fans a good explanation of a limited slip differential can be found here.

If you know all about diffs check out Dan’s site at www.diffsonline.com or order through Clay and BW.

B) We’ve also made contact with an electronics guru. I have a rubbermaid container of wires, gizmos, and doo-dads that theoretically can make a car start and run. At least they made the wrecked E46 car start and run. So the trick is finding out a) if everything is there and b) how to plug it all together. We’re meeting with Eric at ElectronSpeed in the next week or so to keep this ball rolling.

C) More good news in that we managed to maybe sell some of the E46 parts, which should help fund A&B.

2. Whats the car going to look like? / What colors are you using on the car?

Great question. You’d think this was easy. Ever since DTOM started I’ve been abusing every designer I know for free work. I think everyone of them did a great job but nothing seemed to fit. I blame myself 100%, giving creative feedback is difficult and there is some code that designers speak that I don’t get. Certainly being a straight man doesn’t help the communication. Anyway Craig took the keys to the car on this one and told me to sit in the backseat and shut up. He worked with a Spec E30 buddy of ours Scott McMiniMe and came up with the little gem below. Its mostly just a logo right now. The car design is a WIP, its difficult to get a drawing of the E90 to work off of, Craig thought he found one on some weird European site for $25, but he probably just gave his credit card to identity thieves since the promised download never arrived.

Anyway without further adieu. We may do a t-shirt if anyone has clever slogans they’d like to submit (PG-13 please).

The colors will be black / silver (gray) / yellow, sort of like Clay’s GearWrench car from last year minus the cheesy ‘extreme’ skull and p!ss poor vinyl wrap application.