The Uberbird Readies for Flight

While our Corvair drivin’ man Jim slogs it out at Stafford (there’s no WiFi at the track, so hit Jalopnik for what few updates there are), we were getting our slog on at Der Science Haus. Actually, the day got started with a visit to the Early Rodders with our man in Washington, Alex Kierstein, but due to a freak forgot-to-grab-my-camera-batter-off-the-charger accident, there will be no pictures.  Anyway, on to the wrenching: our last work weekend turned into a bit of a bust due to some wrong parts showing up, this time around, it was us who managed to get a few things wrong.

Here’s my dad in action doing the first of what would turn out to be three guibo installs. A comedy of errors involving bolts that were too long, or had too short of threads meant it came in and out a few times. We’ll just consider it good practice for race day.

This time around the guibo’s a more likely to stay intact (we still have spares), because this time we’ve actually got a once piece transmission mount. Here you can see the mount from the last two races, in the same condition (and number of pieces) it was pulled from the car in. For the record, correct part looks like this.

Having finally welded the exhaust up in a way that it might actually stay on the whole race, the next issue was the leaking exhaust manifold gaskets. The new ones went in, but a cockeyed install on the #6 cylinder (see the shot on the right) meant it was a 2x job.

Next up, we had to replace some CV boots. Unfortunately, despite ordering four of the exact same boot replacement kits, two were wrong. Beck Arnley, you’ve failed me for the last time. Aside from sending me wrong guibos twice, you’ve now screwed me with incorrect CV boots. We’re done. As a result of this nonsense, we have one good CV axle and two half-good ones. Luckily, our buddy Jack has a pair for us, along with a huge pile of miscellaneous spare parts. Even if he didn’t we’d still look for an excuse to head over to his place.

In our first race, the self-disassembling, 3″ too tall suspension, combined with general incompetence on-track really held us back. For the second race, we fixed the suspension, dialed the incompetence back from 11, and  quickly realized our Westlake all-season tires weren’t helping us much on-track. Thankfully they were pretty much destroyed after the last Thunderhill, so we’ve upgraded to significantly stickier and slightly wider Dunlop Direzza Star Spec rubber. Assuming they hold up all right, that’ll probably shift us back into the role of weakest link.

We’ll be up at the Arse-Sweat-palooza at Thunderhill Raceway August 6-8. It’s within easy striking distance Northern California (or the Sacramento airport) or Southern Oregon, do what you can to come on down.