continued from above
Once the front body panels were picked up we started to quickly reassemble the front of the car. This happened on Monday - Labor Day - and we spent the entire day getting it all put together. The splitter and lower fascia had to go back onto the bumper cover, the fenders had to go on and be aligned, the hood had to go back on and be aligned, and the Aerolatches had to be reinstalled.
Once the fenders and front bumper cover were on we could finally install the flares, which we built while the fenders were being painted. The flares turned out pretty well for a first effort, but we will definitely make some improvements. We added a cut at the bumper cover to fender parting line, so we can pull the front bumper cover and splitter off to make it easier to roll the car into the trailer.
You can see the side mirror block off plates that Olof built, for both door mirrors. This was "the drag racer" Ed's idea, to reduce drag on the higher speed Miller track; I'll talk about how
fun it is to drive the car with huge blind spots, down in my event write-up. Once the flares were trimmed and bolted on Amy and Jason started on graphics, while Ryan was corner weighing the car (came in the first time at a 49.8% cross - good enough!).
We went ahead and kept the quickly built aluminum grill block off plate, which I degreased, taped off and painted semi-flat black. Then the sticker crew added a white Vorshlag graphic, the NASA graphics, and fresh rear flank Vorshlag graphics.
The white wheels had some scrub A6 tires mounted, as the sticker set we had ordered a week before was delayed by UPS. I was freaking out, but luckily our friends from Maxcyspeed were able to swing by and grab the 4 new tires as well as two new front calipers after we had left, then trucked them 25 hours across country and brought them to us in Salt Lake City.
Whew!
You can see the hood stripes in many pictures from the event, which are similar to the previous version. These go down into hood duct openings so they are a bit wider in some areas, and we capped the front with a big NASA decal we made. There are also new decals for Whiteline, Maxcyspeed, MagnaFlow, Hoosier and others that were on the front half of the car. We added more contingency decals at the NASA Miller event for GoPro, MCS, Royal Purple and the required NASA Nationals event decals.
These two pictures above, from the Miller event, show how the entire splitter, bumper cover and grill come off as a unit. This makes it easy to load and unload the car from the trailer. It takes about six minutes to remove and 15 minutes to install the front of the car, with various bolted fasteners and the splitter support struts.
continued below