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.
