HorsePower Road Racer

Today. Horsepower unwraps buddy's almost road ready race car after the guys get it set up for its track debut and apply a little cool Camaro red. It's off to road Atlanta for a high speed shakedown T

and they head to Atlanta dragway for the ORSA year one shootout for heads up racing where there's always a new spin on excitement.

Hey, welcome to horsepower where we love high performance competition, whether it's on the straight and narrows of the drag strip

or making left hand turns lap after lap at the circle track.

But this Camaro is built for a style of racing that puts both the car and the driver to the ultimate test out on the road course.

Whether you're a professional or amateur road racing is a sport. Almost anybody can enjoy on almost any budget.

The amount of thrills are limited only by the driver's skill and the car he drives.

Well, you'll never guess who's been building and soon will be driving this car. An SCCA competition, our old buddy or should I call you speed racer?

Either one works. How long have you been doing this?

I've been racing since I was 10 years old and this car I was able to purchase and it came to me as a basket case because I need an engine.

But I, I went ahead and bought it because I knew the potential of the car.

But it had an older body on it, which was outdated for SCCA. So, what I did was I purchased a newer body

load it all up on the car, put some, uh, improvements in it.

What kind of improvements did you make under here?

Well, it was basically a 358 small block Chevy. It was actually a customer's engine. He left me at my shop.

So I figured I had the engine got the car might as well put them all together and we'll see how it runs. Yeah. Can you use just any kind of motor you want to in this kind of racing?

Yeah. As long as it's a specific engine for that type of body. Chevrolet body Chevrolet engine,

one of the interior improvements I did was I got rid of all those gauges and now I just have one electronic display

which has all the gauges in it. It's got oil pressure, water temp, battery voltage, fuel pressure and oil temp

also has an RPM and it has a shift light goes from green to red

and then it also has six different alarms you can put in it.

I kept my electronics simple with an ignition switch starter button,

fuel pump and fan,

I use a super T 10 4 speed instead of a five speed because I get a 75 pound weight break.

Now, I made this handle

in the shape of a shaft rather than a ball because the ball would have a tendency to give you a blister after shifting for so many times

instead of this shaft where you have more contact with your hand.

All right. Thanks for the tour buddy. But let's finish this thing up so we can take it out to the track later and see how he does.

Now. We need a rear window for this car. So we ordered this Lexan

piece and to make this easier, we're gonna take the old window,

use it as a template and kind of mark it up.

After we make a paper template,

we can cut around the contour of the top edge,

then lay the old window on top of the new larger Lexan

piece

and use a sharpie to mark an outline.

That way we can cut the new window out to the proper size

that is after some test fitting and trimming.

Well, next, some masking tape around the inside edge.

A

little bit of scuffing,

add some spray paint to create a black border just for good look. Get a nice finished look.

So

after drying, we drill some holes to insert some

Clios and

we're ready to rivet our new window into place, but not yet. And you'll see why in a few minutes.

Road race competition involves a lot of braking and a lot of braking creates a tremendous amount of heat. Now, even with four piston calipers and carbon metallic pads, too much heat can lead to a brake failure and put you out of the race. So we're installing a brake Duck cooling kit from Coleman that'll transfer air from the outside of the car straight into the front brakes.

First, we drill a couple of holes in the spindles

so we can mount up the brake ducks,

then we clamp the brake, duck, coast to the ducks and we can connect it to the nose after we get the car set up.

And for that, we move the car out,

set the scales and ramps in place,

move the car back onto the scales, wire them up and remove all the panels.

In order for a car to be set up for road racing, you gotta adjust the caster camper and tow it.

Now, sometimes those terms get a little vague. So here's an animated heads up to bring you up to speed.

Among the three most popular alignment terms is camber. The angle of the wheel when viewed from the front of the car.

If the top leans out from the center, the camera is positive in from the center and it's negative.

Now, castor is the angle of the steering pivot when viewed from the side.

If the top of the pivot leans toward the rear. The castor is positive toward the front. It's negative

tow in is the difference in the distance between the front and back of the tires measured in fractions of an inch

tow in means the front tires are actually closer to each other. Tow out means just the opposite.

We're using this intercom caster camera gauge mounted to the left front wheel hub and it's telling us we need to add some camera.

So with the weight off the front wheels, we can remove a bolt

and a few of these shins to get us in the ballpark

at a check for Castor. We use the same Intercom gauge.

Zero it up, turn the wheel about 20 degrees to the left

level it up again

and we got

0.7 which is ok for now. If we wanted to change it though, we'd add or subtract these shims from behind the A R

to check the tow in. We place the plates flush against each wheel and measure from front to front and back to back.

They're both about 80 inches. So by turning this tie rod adjustment counterclockwise, we decrease the rear measurement to 79 and seven eights giving us a total of an eight inch tow out.

So buddy, why would you want an eighth of an inch more in front? Well, your tow out helps settle the car down. High speeds, keeps it from wandering and also aids and turning, whether it be left or right. That makes sense. Well, next up something for safety, something for attitude,

then it's shake down time at one of America's premier road courses.

We are close to taking our Camaro road racer to the track.

But remember the old saying, safety first,

what would you do if you got a fuel leak? It hit the exhaust and started a big fire. Well, an onboard fire extinguisher just won't cut it. You would have to stop the car in a timely manner. Get out, grab the fire extinguisher and put the fire out. The car would be toasted. So, what we're gonna do today is install a fire suppression system from fire bottle racing. Now, this thing is an amount right over here on the pasture side of the car and it's filled with Dupont Fe 36 which is environmentally friendly.

The kit comes with a bracket and mounting hardware so we can secure it to the floor next to the driver's seat.

Next, we drill a hole in this bar so we can mount a bracket for the tea handle assembly

from the handle. This cable goes to the bottle head

and using a T fitting on the head, we can run one metal tube to the rear

mounted. So the spray will hit both the cell and the fuel pump.

Then another tube running from the T fitting to the engine.

Finally, we run a third tube that's directed toward the driver

of course, the cockpit might be filled with smoke by the time you can react. So here's an important fire drill. Ok, Mike hit the kill switches and put out the fire.

Yeah.

Now with the body back on, it's time to give this road race tomorrow an eye grabbing graphic statement.

We had the guys from betsy.net turn our design ideas into a computer generated vinyl wrap scheme.

I like it. Barry and Ed did an amazing job not only making the colorful rap but also getting it on the car in time for its road track debut.

Now as the final touch, you gotta have some of these headlight decals

from hair racing. 01 more thing. The scales. Now these intercom digital scales, of course, give us the total weight of the car plus weight at all four corners and

buddy says this is good enough for now. He's the driver. Let's get out of here.

Welcome back to horsepower and the annual year one experience

in addition to taking in the smoking car event,

we booked some after hours track time for buddy's Camaro.

Yeah, it's payoff time for this hopefully road ready race car

on the first lap. Buddy was basically just making sure nothing fell off the car

on the next lap though. He was ready to step it up

the buck. He's at home here now using all the track. That's great.

By now, the track officials wanted buddy to slow down, but hey, what they don't know, won't hurt him

here on the back stretch. He's doing about 100 and 40.

Seems like he's got a little issue with the oil pressure or lack of

the gauge only showed about 11 pounds, but after a quick check, no sign of leak. So he went back out

with one eye on the track and the other on that gauge

on the last lap, he took it pretty easy

after all. Who wants to spend the weekend picking up parts or cleaning up oil?

That was a whole lot of fun.

Well, first steak down did well.

Yeah,

cool. Yeah,

I'm happy with it.

You wanna take it out for dinner tonight?

Yeah.

Next we head to a different kind of racetrack for an outlaw competition. That'll never let you down when it comes to heads up excitement.

Hey, as you know, we're all about American horse power, whether it's making it in the shop or seeing it put to the ultimate test on an eight mile drag strip.

Now we're talking about heads up outlaw racing where it's all American iron. Right.

Well, almost, yeah, but check this out for the first time ever. An import has invaded limited street in

Orsa

and they may not have the cubic inches, but it makes up for that and the amount of boost they're putting through this in line six.

And this weekend we get to see if it can hang with the American bad boys, Chris Anderson and his Toyota Super won a Noy pro street championship recently.

But has he got what it takes to compete against the American big blocks?

We get quite a few looks, uh, especially when we pop the hood. We got 100 and 83 cubic engines. Uh, you know, we laugh because the turbo is almost as big as the motor.

But, uh, through a little bit of help with nitrous and a lot of boosts, we're able to, we're able to get about 14, 1500 horsepower of the motor.

I like the diversity of it and uh they can run with it. More power to

Anderson's teammate is Scott Cole who brought a beautiful 37 Chevy to his first horse to race. Now he's competing in the five second index class.

It's a fuller chassis. Uh The car has a 622 rear Morson motor in it. It's making 1190 horsepower at 7600 RPM. S

it's a power glide transmission, 456 rear gears.

Uh best quarter mile time so far it's been 760 about 186

and 48 in the eight mile. The car leaves nice and straight. It's a blast to drive. It's easy to drive and hope we can get a number on it and get it right around that 50, and see if we have something for him today.

A

typical

Orsa fashion qualifying rounds features spectacular close runs.

And a few unexpected surprises. This easy street mustang miraculously misses the wall.

Now, Anderson's limited street debut was even tougher than he expected.

His best qualifying run was only in the five eighties.

And here's his partner Scott running 16 hundreds over the five second index mark.

It's almost time for Sunday's eliminations and the R two B two boys will really have to step it up to stay in the running.

We changed some of the uh nitrous settings in the car and, uh, the way the boost is coming on and then uh a little bit of rebound on the shocks. And, uh,

so we think it's gonna do a lot better game plan going out today is we've got a mile tune in the car. We've got a RPM launch, lower it down, shift points, slow it down and we're hoping with the

cover the track bikes good, get a good 60 ft or get out there and hopefully run that 50

each round of eliminations is a race in itself. You either hook up and get there first or well, second best is also last.

Now the desire to win can produce some heart stopping race moments for the fans. Like when Danny Griffin's 89 mustang on the right proves a wheel stand that doesn't land straight and end in the wild ride to the wall.

Well, we're hooking,

hey, Danny, we're loving your gutsy positive attitude,

but things could have been more positive for Anderson and his import.

He learned a lot about outlaw racing this weekend but went out in round one.

The champs in the top three fastest classes this weekend were all first timers

first in Easy Street. It's Nick Yarber with a 518 et at 100 and 43 miles an hour.

Then in limited street it's Darren

Hole. No surprise against Jeff Paul who pulls a surprise win over the champ with a 484

man. We're just happy as hell

been working real hard trying to get this

thing rolling. Aaron

finally paid off.

Jersey. Joe Newsham

was the model of consistency beating Ken Rainwater in the final race of outlaw 10 5.

We had a little more power than he did today and luckily, you know,

car stuck and went down the track.

Well, the annual year one experience is also officially done with this finale of quick and super competitive heads up excitement.

They were always on the lookout for a good deal. And here's one we found in a battery from Autocraft. Their Titanium is the most powerful Autocraft battery yet. It's designed to be maintenance free

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What's in store for the next horsepower?

Well, it's a supercharged show that you don't want to miss.