Well I want to present the newest Fiero Chump car. Just picked her up today. I will be racing with Justin and Team Pontiaxed here in Portland.
Everything is falling into place, my father in law and I will be racing with Rick, creator of the fantastic projector retrofit headlight kits.
We will build the car fairly slowly but hope to be on track within the year!
It is a 1986 Fiero SE V6 4 speed. Perfect doner for us. It has a new clutch and runs quite well, the interior and body are rough but it has ALL the options, even rear defrost! The car has 124000 miles on it.
The clutch was just replaced a couple years ago when a drunk driver went off the road and took off the rear bumper literally the day after the clutch was replaced. It has sat since. We picked it up for 450, I am very pleased to say the least!
Ill keep everyone informed as we build this car up.
I have not run chump yet. My car would have way to many penalty laps accessed. But I do run LeMons and we have a great deal of fun and success with the Fiero. Good Luck with your build and racing. I will keep up with you build thread.
Yeah, it's probably been a while. Maybe last year's Lititz?
I'm doing pretty well and really trying to keep on top of things, but I've always been mostly a lurker. I missed Carlisle this year and I'm not sure if I'm going to make it to Lititz. If I miss Lititz, it will be the first ever. I've been to all of them so far.
I'm going to post over in the Lititz thread so we don't hijack this guys Chump Car thread (any more than we already have)
Well I have done some tinkering this week. The real work starts this weekend. The whole team should be here all weekend and we will get the car torn down and start making some plans.
The two sisters seem to be getting along well!
The car had two different plugs in it. The firewall side had the autolites and the trunk side had the Bosch double platinums. It got a shiny new set of NGK's as well as a cap and rotor.
Justin got me a matching rear bumper, along with all the related parts at pick n pull. An hour or so with a hammer and pry bars and the car almost looks complete!
Justin also pointed out that the car has four different tires on it. All of them raised white letter tires but all different brands. I have to say that is a first for me!
This last weekend much progress was made! The team got together to discuss our strategy and begin teardown.
We ate some pizza and decided what theme we were going with. Since we will be racing with team PontiAxed we wanted to build another tribute car. So many of the chumpcar teams have ridiculous themes and I wanted a car I would be proud to show off and have in my shop. We all decided we will be building a tribute of the #4 Valvoline car.
I know the real car is a fastback and ours is a notchie, its chumpcar... deal with it!
Then we settled into the shop and started teardown!
We started removing anything that is not necessary, AC, interior, accessories, soundsystem everything! You can how high it is sitting in the front. I will not be weighing every individual part but my friend has a very similarly optioned 86 SE and when the car is done we will be comparing the two to find out how the race prep effected the weight.
I also installed new spark plug wires and a new fuelpump and filter. Car is running better but I will put some fresh gas in it today and keep tracing issues. There are many exhaust leaks, that will be a project getting the exhaust all sorted!
[This message has been edited by thedrue (edited 10-13-2012).]
Well Things have been moving on slowly but surely.
Here is a very big reason I moved forward with this racecar, It just so happens that there was a cage built for a fiero available in the area. This cage is very nicely built and will give us a real head start on the build. It was in a chump car a few years ago, that car was in a fairly big front end wreck so they cut the cage out before scrapping the car. The team built a new cage for their new car so this has been lying around. Should work very nicely!
I just finished installing the battery tray/box. It is very solid and the tray can be removed with 4 bolts from the bottom.
These rims came from a friend. Unless we find something better we will use these for now. Wrapped in some star specs they should work great and give us plenty of room to upgrade the brakes...
Thats all for now.
[This message has been edited by thedrue (edited 11-29-2012).]
As we move closer to installing the cage there is still lots of little things that need to happen.
We pulled the doors off, removed the roof panel and have taken all the glass out.
First things first. I want to be able to remove the roof panels and part of the rear clip easily so there is better access to the engine and other parts on track.
We laid out where we were going to cut and carefully separated the top of the clip from the bottom.
Now we can remove just the top of the clip without undoing everything else. This gave us access to the rear glass to remove it and should allow us to get to key parts of the car easier if needed.
I have a hard tim throwing things away, and although we broke the front glass out I did not want to do that with the rear defrost glass. Windshields are easy to get ahold of, rear defrost glass is not. I hope one day I can make someones day by providing them with a replacement in the off chance their rear glass is broken.
THats all for now, I will just weld in some temporary door braces and then it will be time to cut the top off and get the cage installed! Stay tuned for more.
We have been busy at Donesky Racing International...
What is this? Main structural components? Don't need that crap!
After cutting the top off we test fitted the cage. After measuring for the spacers needed it fits very tightly under the vehicle skin.
I am not too good at taking pictures during projects but we started building boxes for the cage to mount to and welded those bad boys in. Ended up lifting the rear of the cage 2 inches and the front 1.5 inches. This gave us maximum headroom without the roof of the space frame.
After the cage was tacked in we fabbed up the backstays and finalized the seat mount. We used a universal adjustable seat slider so the seat can be moved forward for shorter drivers.
I do not weld enough, but a friend let me borrow his equipment and I am very happy with the results!
Messy shop after a long weekend.
Just tonight I finished welding in the A-pillers and started on the belt routing. I can use the stock lower belt attachment for the lap belt. I still need to mount the anti-submarine straps, but that will wait for another day. Waiting for a slightly warmer day before painting the cage/interior.
Well, long time no post! It has been a busy few months but progress is being made and we are well on our way to racing at the end of October.
After the cage was finished I got tired of looking at the gold car so I broke out the rattle cans and went to work.
My father in law is not one to do things part way and he started working on the dash... it got a little out of control but its very functional and works very well.
Doggy Approved!
Panels are slowly being reattached
I built a plug and play switch panel. The center of the dash swings forward for ease access to the electricals if I need to fix or diagnose anything at the track.
Just the sisters hanging out.
Couple of chumps in the shop.
working on mounting the top. The top and rear hoop can be pulled off as a unit.
before...
after... Next I started on the brakes. I am not a fan of the fiero parts so I installed corvette parts. They just fit within the 2 times rule and will really open up our pad selection on race day.
Our wheels. 16 inch VW steelies. Picked them up from a friend for 50 bucks for all 4. Perfect and I think they look great, clean them up and stick some sticky rubber on them and well be good to go.
Just another day at Donesky Racing International
Just a couple shots of my front brake system. This has no interference issues and maintains the stock steering stops. This is the exact same system I have on my red car and have been very happy.
Installed the windshield. I wrapped the edges in wax paper so It would not stick to the urethane. It will be clipped in but I wanted the cured urethane to create a perfect sealing surface to support the glass. Seems to work well!
After a looooong weekend of wrenching we managed to get the car ready enough for its inaugural autocross. It ran awesome and was a very encouraging step in the right direction.
Tucked the girls in for the night, its definitely time for some shut eye.
Well nothing too new to report, we will be working on the car this weekend but I did take it out last sunday to the charity autocross at the PIR Historic Races.
My wife had her first autocross experience and so far so good, I am pleased that seemed to enjoy herself. I am optimistic that she may join me in the future and perhaps even make it a habit!
She was pretty nervous but she quickly got over that, I must say seeing my lovely lady behind the wheel of the race car is a wonderful thing! She makes the car look quite good!
Thanks guys. It's nice to have almost a year to build the car. October is coming up fast though!
We will be doing some rake cooling. Probably just the basic drier duct zip tied to the swaybar. Similar to what pontiaxed did. No to cool the rear brakes at this time. If you have any things up your sleeve double c we would love to try them out!
Projector retrofit is hard at work developing a race spec headlight for us but I can't say too much. Ill wait till its done and he can unvail the new lights. There is a set on a car that will be racing te Spokane 36 this weekend so well know more next week.
Well its been a while since I have updated this thread. Never fear! The car is coming along nicely!
The next step was preparing for Fierofest. We were still not sure if we wanted to take the car on a 600 mile road trip but I started working out some of the details. This started with installing a rear window.
It took quite a bit of trial and error to get it in and fitting well. I also mounted and wired our new LED aux. brake lights. These will ensure that if the car gets hit in the rear and the brake lights get wiped out we are still legal to keep racing.
I really could get behind a targa Fiero!
At least my dog knows where to hang out.
After much debate and research we decided to go with Dunlop Direzza ZII tire in 225 50 r 16. We will not know how they work out till the end of October but I think this tire is one of the best available at the moment for what we want to do.
Just a comparison between the old Dunlop Direzza Z1 that I have been autocrossing with my red car.
First time on the new shoes. She looks good!
With the rear window in and the new rubber on the ground we decided there was nothing stopping us from going to Fierofest. We had an uneventful trip, massive exhaust leaks and original radiator hoses and all.
Just playing with the Pontiaxed car on the ride out.
Emergency alternator replacement. Justin just got that car running at around 7 in the morning just a few hours before after pulling an allnighter getting the engine buttoned up. Truly a heroic effort and it was fun to cruise with the #50 car.
Full house
Just the local crew at Fiero fest.
My 2 cars looking good
My wife was an aweful good sport helping drive the cars out with the group. She sure puts up with a lot. No AC, a hot race car, Id say shes a keeper!
The cars tucked in safe and sound after a long weekend.
I finally got around to getting that stupid wall torn out of my shop. It really maximizes the useful space.
Finally I can pull a car all the way in. The racecar makes a nice addition to my mancave if I do say so myself!
I tried to avoid it but I did a quick cradledrop to fix all the exhaust leaks, had to extract 2 broken studs. I also replaced all the radiator/heater hoses, the alternator belt and the cradle bushings. I removed all the insulation as well as a few extra brackets and stuff we do not need.
I had the engine back in the car and running less than 48 hours after I removed it.
My greatgrandma came to visit, of course she needed a ride in the race car!
As raceday approaches I got around to installing the window net.
Not a bad office!
All that brings us to this last weekend. My father in law made so killer tow points so we welded those bad boys in.
There is also one on the right rear cage kicker above the shock tower.
Next we worked on the brake cooling ducts. We pieced them together out of various HVAC and drainage parts from Home Depot. They turned out really nice and I know they will be super effective.
Well that pretty much covers it. We need to get our lights done, finish the rest of the livery and mount the fire extinguisher as well as radios. The car is very close to being race ready!
With only a few weeks to go before race day I have been feverishly trying to get more done on the car. Unfortunately I lost a couple weekends to a family emergency but I have been plugging away on the details during the week.
I bought a harbor freight portable garage to use in our pit. It should work just dandy!
One thing I have needed to deal with is setting up the radio system. I bought a couple 35 mile Motorola 2 way radios and wired them into the car so we can trigger the push to talk with the left hand on the steering wheel and plug our helmets into the dash for the mic and headset. The radios are battery powered allowing them to work regardless of the health of the car. I used an old phone charger chord for the curly bit. Works great behind the steering wheel and does not get in the way at all. Allows the wheel to be placed on the dash or roof without unplugging it, of course if needed it unplugs easily as well.
Luna, my helpers favorite spot!
My loving mother sewed up a shift boot for us, it should keep crap out of the gaping hole and ensure we have no issues with our shift linkage during long weekends of racing. I used 4 snaps to hold it down, can be removed in a matter of seconds for service or inspection.
I had to warranty my favorite ratchet after it locked up on me. Years of abuse have taken its tole...
Its just like Christmas! Racing equipment rolls in every other day it seems!
Next week Rick will be here from Projector Retrofit to install our lighting as well as get all the vinyl installed, car should start to really come together early next week. Stay tuned!
lol i kid... good luck with it...
