Part XV

1989 RS Camaro

After getting the engine up and running, we still have our share of things to do. One that we took care of this past weekend was getting the front end of the car down out of the air. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of the car before we did the work, but once we had the car down on it's tires we were a bit surprised to see that the front end was sitting up like an old gasser type car - way up in the air. It really looked bad, plus the left front corner of the car was sitting higher than the right; looked like it was launching itself sitting still.

When we put the front end together, way back in Part IV, we cut off one coil on the Moroso Trick Springs on the advice of people running this type of car in Stock and Super Stock. Well, weight has a lot to do with how far these springs get compressed and it was pretty obvious that we didn't have enough of it. Remember, we have lightened this car in just about every direction that you could short of a full fiberglas body. So, the springs had to come out again and we cut another full coil off of them. And this time we made sure we had the bottom of the spring sitting in the spring pocket correctly, the last time we think we might have been off by an inch or so on the left spring. How did we decide to take off another coil? Guess work and hoping that we weren't taking too much off and ruining the springs. There really is no formula for figuring it out, most people well tell you to take a bit off, try them and then repeat it if needed. This car was sitting so high, that I really had no fear of taking another coil off and it was the right call too. The car sits perfect now, with just a bit of downward rake to keep the nose out of the air.

We are now down to finishing the rear area with a piece of aluminum to isolate the driver from the fuel and batteries, installing two additional Dzus fasteners for the front end of the hood, making a carburetor to hood isolator and then the next big thing - body work and paint.

We keep saying we're almost there. And we really truly are, in fact we plan on taking the car (hopefully in fresh primer) to a test and tune session at VMP in October. We expect to have some decent numbers and assuming that all goes well, the car's first major race will be the Winterfest @ Kingston, NC just after New Year's in 2007. And coincidentally that will be exactly one year from the day that we started this project - not bad for a couple of guys in their garage.

on to chapter XVI