…more or less. In motorsports, the rules must change in order to fine tune the competitive atmosphere and make sure everyone gets a fair chance at the glory that is winning. If change turns against you it might feel like a cold, cruel, sideways rain on your team’s fantasy-of-winning parade. At Autosport Labs it feels like… another work party! Thanks to a rules change in the Chumpcar World Series, Labrat 1, our oil-burning, tirewalled, salvaged-titled, hack-turbo’d, 1990 Miata might now be a little too fancy to pass inspection. So,… with the help of some sound advice from the powers-that-be at Chump Central, we have begun the de-evolution of the rat. No more fancy $30 Ebay intercooler. Filling that void is a dented $10 Craigslist unit (yes, we over paid).
No longer will the Labrat sport cheaty, Aluminum intercooler tubing. Narrow and rusty-steel exhaust tubing will have to do.
Forget about those awesome, 100,000-miles-young, Koni yellows and Eibach Sport springs.
We’ve regressed to very experienced OEM shocks and springs with handy shopvac-hose dust boots.
What about the wing and the Wiz Bar you ask? Surely we aren’t removing those?! Sorry folks, they’re gone with the wind.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by John Kimball, Brent Picasso. Brent Picasso said: The de-evolution of our LabRat1 #chumpcar racer required some… unnatural acts… (new blog) http://bit.ly/bDV7rL […]
Wiz bar…..say it ain’t so. That wiz bar is the only thing that was there for me during my stint through the rain and fog. Say it ain’t so!
I see one problem with the careful reconstruction of scrap metal and the gawd-aweful intercooler/residential radiator thingy….You will need to raise the seat up a few inches for me to see over it and that will throw the Pythagorean and Euclidean corner weighting calculation way off……I protest!
Anthony
Trust me when I say that geometric calculations and being able to see the track clearly will not be your only concerns while touring PIR this Halloween. One of your fellow team mates and me had to take a crowbar to the right front suspension in order to disassemble it enough to liberate the shock. Seems a previous accident, possibly the reason it needed a salvage title, has rendered that corner… shall we say…less valuable. But not less so than the currently crushed and unrepaired left corner.