Mustang Track Car on Course

It was made for the track and today it's back our 68 Mustang road course car that soon could be in your garage.

That's right. We're giving this car away at a special sweepstakes soon.

We'll tell you how to get your name in the hat later in the show right now though, we have some more tweaks to do to it before we take it to the National Super Speedway and put it through the curves. Now, before we get to work though, it's been quite a while since we teamed up with year one to announce this giveaway project. So here's all the highlights that got us to that stage

from the onset. Our goal is to build a just for fun track car custom made for the road course.

The engine came first, a 347 small block using top chef parts to give it plenty of power and durability. The Mustang is designed as a tribute to high performance icon, Vic Edelbrock.

All right. You ready for another one? You damn right. Bigger and better. So guess who got the man the

dyno controls during the engine's first powerful

baby

go

518 horsepower out of 347 inches.

Wait till 40 or so

for a body. We got one of dyno

Corn's 68 metal shells.

Then after test fitting all the drive train and suspension components,

everything had to come apart for the paint job.

Rick Bacon stepped up for this part of the project,

laying down a new industrial grade PPG, red paint that's thick enough to handle track abuse. A lot of red,

a

row cage came from auto power all prebent

with special sleeves to help keep it together

after it, we could bolt our Kirky seats to the frame

and after removing the hood and fenders, we had lots of room to reinstall our new global West stage five front suspension and well wood brakes

after a final bolt up of the rack and pinion steering set up from Flaming River.

We rode in the curry nine inch complete with leaf springs to bolt up and dropped in our jazz fuel cell.

The matching paint was an accident,

dropping the engine in the second time was even easier than before.

And this time, we followed up with an Edelbrock electric fuel pump, freighted fuel lines and a pressure regulator.

Then we neatly routed and secured our brake line.

We installed a Griffin radiator with twin fans held in place with a couple of brackets we

fed up ourselves.

Next, we mounted a race wiring kit from painless performance, made our own aluminum panel for the track cars, gauges that we got from Stewart Warner.

Finally, some outside help for this glass act

and finishing touches like the bumpers, trim pieces and Chris's homemade door panels.

The few things we have left to do to our track car are all about safety starting with the ever important harness. Now, needless to say this is one area you don't want to cut corners in. So we're using race quips new cam lock belt set. It's a six point configuration that meets or exceeds SF I rating. Now, they use a cool magnesium alloy cam buckle three inch proprietary web strapping and lightweight aluminum shoulder strap adjusters. Now, what makes this a six point design? Well, it's the number of mounting locations on the belts. You have two on the shoulders, two on the lap belts and two on the crotch strap for a total of six,

you should mount as much of the harness as possible to the chassis or roll cage using only grade eight bolts like the ones in our kit.

Also, the attachment points should provide the least amount of movement for the driver.

Here's a couple of things you need to keep in mind when mounting a set of harnesses like this.

The first one is the actual geometry of how they mount. Now, each manufacturer is gonna have their own recommendation and that needs to be followed to keep you safe even if it means adding an extra bar to the roll cage, so be it. Now, the shoulder and the lap belts are some of the most important. That's what's gonna keep your butt and your back position and squared up in the seat, the crotch strap is there to locate the lap belt and to keep you from sliding down upon an impact. Now, the shoulder straps also help from keeping your head from hitting the roof and getting a neck injury. Now, when you tighten the straps, you wanna make sure your shoulders stay against the seat, especially during an impact. Once you're comfortable and tighten the seat, take the car out on the track and burn some laps.

We're adding the sidebar to our roll cage for extra protection and to provide mounting locations for our next piece of safety gear,

which is the window net.

This is a piece of mandatory safety equipment that'll keep the driver's body parts inside the car in the bit of a rollover

and at the same time protecting from flying objects coming in from the outside,

the top bar is spring loaded on one end

with a handle on the other for quick release. In case you need to run

also for safety, we're closing up some holes in the firewall so it can live up to its name.

Now, we need to get the Mustang onto our intercom scales to check the weight at all four corners for road course use. We want the weight to be as neutral as possible.

Looks like our total weight is 2988 pounds.

The four numbers at the top of the screen represent each corner of the car. Now, our goal is to get it centered balance at 50 percent right here. Now, the first one we're gonna do is right side to left side, which comes in at 50.23. It doesn't get much better than that. Now, let's do a cross rate from the right front to the left rear. We're sitting at 49.93%. Now let's do just the opposite left front, right rear

and this thing's right on the money.

This set of Intercom scales is way more important than just getting a total weight on the car. Now that we have a so called driver that weighs about 100 and 80 pounds,

you can see that the left side weight has increased and so has the left to right side percentage.

Now, a lot of you may be thinking just add 100 and 80 pounds to the right side and that'll be corrected. Well, the answer is wrong because his weight is actually distributed to all four corners of the car right now. So all we need is about 80 pounds on the right side to correct that balance. And you can do that with any type of weight, you can actually secure in the car next up. We have a more critical set up we need to work on. We'll do that right after the break.

Is this car make my butt look big. Oh, yeah. Fingers and head too.

We're moments away from a road course payoff of our mustang track car.

Then it'll be time to give it away to some lucky gearhead. Maybe you.

Oh, but there's one more thing on our pre track to do list.

We got to ensure that the caster Camber and tow in aren't correct for the road. Course,

I tell you what those terms can be a little confusing, especially if you don't use them every day. So

here's a quick refresher course.

Among the three most popular alignment terms is camber, the angle of the wheel

and viewed from the front of the car.

If the top leans out from the center, the camera's 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, castor is positive toward the front, it's negative

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

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

We noticed a lot of negative camera after we bolted the front suspension together.

So we're gonna reposition the lower control arms to get rid of it

that involves moving around these plates at the bottom of the frame.

A little bit of negative camera improves handling in the corners. And our global West front suspension maximizes that.

That's a good starting point. But there's more later.

Now we're gonna set the toe. Our goal is 1/16 toe out

and we'll do that by measuring the distance from the front, 67 8 in the back of the tire, using these plates be towed in an inch and a half right now. You want out of 16. Yeah, I wanna go out. Now, after adjusting the tire rod sleeve evenly on both sides, we're able to get close to our mark,

still not quite there. So one more adjustment and we'll see what that does.

It looks like 69 and a quarter up front and 69 and 3/16 in the rear. Cool.

Just what we wanted.

Next is the camber and we're using a digital caster camera gauge from Intercom.

Now, we want to make sure it is level using the bubble gauge

with a negative camber reading of 1.2.

The cam plates we adjusted first was a good decision

with the gauge switch to the caster mode.

Now turn the wheel inboard 20 degrees,

zero out the gauge

and bring the wheel back to straight.

This shows we have two degrees of positive castor. We're good to go

hard to believe in a few months. This thing went from this

to this.

A cool fun machine. Ready for his farewell ride at the track.

This project really has been one of my highlights.

I mean, how often do you get to sit down with Vic Edelbrock at the dyno

or screw around with Rick and Tommy down in muscle car when they paint a project.

You know, I really hate to see this thing go,

but it's ready

a road course ready Mustang, specially built for the pure joy of cutting corners and sailing down the straightaway.

Now though, it's time to give it away.

So don't miss your chance. Go to Power Block tv.com. Click on the year. One track car giveaway box. Fill out the entry form,

click submit

and that's it.

So good luck. And we'll see you after the break.

I'm telling you once you get involved with a sport, once you get into it,

very few, get out

Greg Anderson and Summit racing teammate, Jason Lyon are truly two of a kind, both hard driven competitors in N hr A pro stock racing.

Both relentless workaholics between races.

Those two guys, they get along well. They work well together.

If you watch him work on something. It's, uh, it's like one guy with four arms.

The key championship work goes on here at Greg's KB racing shop.

He's assembled a dream team to build the best competitive engines and chassis possible.

Joe, this is our fab shop for the car guys. We, uh, we've got, you know, Welding benches and we've got LATS and Mills and metal brakes and shear and really anything you want to do with that, uh, race car you can build it for, build it for it right here. Weld it up, be done next day. Get over that racetrack. Work on it.

Yeah, of course, we can't show you exactly how they build the engines that go into these race cars. That's top secret stuff. But guess this, the whole race team hears into high performance daily drivers

and we're about to witness the build of a special engine that takes some of that pro stock technology right to the street.

That was the first time there was something wrong with me right there

ever since he learned to drive as a kid, Jason's had a weakness for wagons.

In fact, after the last race of 09 in Las Vegas, while other drivers headed to the airport,

Jason and two crew members headed home in his newest personal project car.

I love Camaros and Mustangs as much as anybody else. But, uh,

uh, when's the last time you saw a 68 this Game

wagon? So maybe there's a reason for that. I don't know. But, uh, I'm a muscle car lover. Anything with a big engine in it. Uh,

I just kinda, I'm drawn to that for whatever reason. I don't care what kind of car it is

there. She is. Jason even talked to boss into helping build a big block suitable for his gargantuan grocery G.

What's that little rascal we

uh weighs about 80 pounds. Your typical pro stock crank would be about 50.

Don't be scared.

It's just a little fine tuning. I think

you were a little

solid tap to the rear,

couple solid taps to the front that should have the rear main, perfectly centered on the thrust. Now, we can bolt that down and we should have a proper

thrust clearance. See, we, we had the uh the piston lateral gas ported here which uh for street engines find that uh

help us uh with ring seal and um it should definitely help us uh make a little more power. See comp

CS uh 264 duration at 50 on the intake, 270 at 50 on the exhaust. Uh solid roller looks just like our pro star camp, just a little bit smaller

bottom and complete.

We got it right. Hopefully

find out shortly. We will,

you know, our piston is about 5000 out of the hole

out of the hole positive. So we're gonna put a 51,000 head gasket in to get us back to 46 thousands total

deck clearance on our piston.

The trick glow heads are ready to use out of the box, but not when you're a pursuer of power like Mr Lyon here. Our motto is uh anything that's worth doing is worth over doing. So, uh so we, we probably did a little bit.

We basically just uh welded the floors up with the uh the intake runners and uh

raised the whole runner up. 100 and 50,000. We left the cross sectional area alone

and uh the head is still a 360 CC port and we also changed from a 45 degree uh valve seat to a 50 degree valve seat.

Jason, if I'm not mistaken, these Jessi Rocker fans bolt together.

They do normally bolt together. And the, the shaft mo rocker system that they make is uh is really second to none. It's a great system, but in typical pro stock fashion, we decided to kind of bring it to the next level and just add a little bit of rigidity to it.

Uh We welded them together, this is our trick flow manifold matches the cylinder head. It's a single plane manifold and uh we sent it off to uh Wilson who does uh

they do all of our pro stock stuff. They, they are the manifold experts and uh we laid out the manifold for them so they could uh match our port after we uh you know, raise the port up

and it uh it looks awesome. So I can't wait to see how it runs. Finally, the valve covers,

dude, we're about done here.

We're about to get started actually,

while the engine is getting set up on the

dyno,

let's check on the rest of Jason's ride.

Got the firewall smoothed out. Um,

so we got rid of all the dimples and the, the wrinkles that were in the firewalls. Jim Smith at Street Customs and restorations has the Biscayne body almost ready for paint.

It's got a nice little bit of metallic and, and not too heavy.

So it's got a really nice sparkle the rear doors.

These are just about ready. I think these have been uh 220.

These guys do amazing restoration work

and Jason's wagon is many parts and lots of labor away from the finish line,

but obviously in good talented hands.

Meanwhile, it's gonna take a lot of power to get that bulky grocery getter down the thorough pad.

726 ft pounds of torque at 4800,

812 horsepower at 65.

0,

you got a lot more than 800. Congratulations.

She's gonna,

she's gonna burn the tires. He definitely owes me after this. I'm gonna leave it at that Joe. He definitely owes me after this project.

You're watching Horsepower for a DVD copy of this episode. Just go to Power Block tv.com and order your copy for just 595 plus shipping and handling. Start your own horsepower collection delivered right to your door from the power block

for our first hot part today. Sometimes it's what you don't see in a street machine that really matters whether it's a hidden nitrous bottle or a secret audio SST kit

the main AMP receiver is compact enough to hide under the seat or behind the dash.

The L CD display is compact too. You can even attach this to your sun visor.

Now, it comes with provisions for your MP3 player USB port and

comes with this little flash drive that tells you all about the system. Now, you got connections for everything from your CD changer to satellite radio to even your ipod. The secret audio SST comes from custom auto sound with prices starting at 300 bucks

chasing down electrical problems is usually low on our like to do list. Thanks to all the tools you need like testers, meters indicators and so on. Not anymore though. Thanks to this, the power probe, 36 testers and one handy device

clips to your battery and you can check voltage and polarity or even find a bad ground. Even power up motors, relays and lights without jumper leads. It comes with a 20 ft extension lead so you can test the entire car without looking for ground hook ups to make the work even easier. It also comes with an led flashlight and audio alerts.

It's a handy multitasking tool that also comes with a handy case. Now, in case you were wondering the price is about 100 bucks.

You know, I've noticed that as the close up vision gets a little weaker.

Well, the numbers on my home toolbox sockets get a lot harder to read. Glasses will help. The first problem. Here's a solution for the sacket.

It's a find that tool marking system from urban gorilla tools and it consists of 84 easy to find, easy to read labels for metric and sae

just clean off the surface with a little rubbing alcohol like so

and then apply

the oil resistant

permanent label.

There it is.

The kid goes for five bucks a small price to pay for the end of eye strain and you can find them at the Gorilla tools.com website.

Well, thanks for sticking with us for the past 30 minutes.

We'll be available next week with more horsepower. See you then.