Thumbs up from someone who knows more than we do….

This evening, we had Yves from Historic Race Car come over and check out the [near] finished product… Yves clearly knows his stuff…and actually checked out the car a few months ago when it was in, uhm, lessar-quality-condition.

Today we finished putting the gearbox back together, reattached the suspension components we removed last night to clean and paint, measured rear-suspension hardware and ordered all new stuff, and cleaned off all the yellow spray paint that Don tinted the car with last night (one could argue that Don and the beer tinted the car).

After Yves performed seemingly (relative to the last 2 months) easy chores, but things we never knew about, on the car – timing, adjusting values, pointing out what we need to replace and what we should/should-not do – I took the car around our ‘practice race track’ (which consists of 4 blind corners, 2 entrances for vehicle traffic, lots of kids riding bikes thru the area, and a lonely law enforcement officer every once in a while) to get the car up to speed and let Yves hear how it sounds.

It only took me 4 laps to actually floor the silly thing and get it over 6k RPM. I kept shifting early as I thought I needed to, only to find out that I wasn’t even in the car’s power band. Once I kept my foot to the floor in 1st gear, then into 2nd (thank you, no clutch shifting) I realized that this car is scary fast. I was only brought back to reality by the fire-pin I left in place gouging into my knee cap as I slammed on the brakes. Note: next time, buckle the belts and avoid slamming into small metal protrusions when braking while wearing shorts.

Bottom line: the car seems good. Sounds good. Looks much better than January. Is much safer (new fuel cell, new hardware, better harness mountings, etc).. and should be faster (that’s driver-dependent, so that might not be true as I have to drive it).

Today is a turning point in this whole adventure: Don and I feel like this weekend might actually happen. So, in predictable fashion, we drank all the beer we had at the shop, then went out and drank more beer. Then we ice cream sandwiches, complained about being tired, and went to bed. This…must…stop. Next week, of course.