continued from above
Sam Pack 24th Dallas Spring Nationals Car Show, May 3, 2014
And this is the event we missed the ProSolo for, held on the Saturday following the ProSolo Welcome Party. Seems a little nuts to miss a ProSolo for a car show, but I had ulterior motives: they had a pre-production 2015 Mustang on display, and I was hoping to both weigh and drive this car, or at least measure a few things and sit inside of it. Corey White from Five Star Ford convinced me to enter and even sponsor this car show, so we showed off our TT3 prepped Mustang that day.
Photo gallery: http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Car-Show...arshow-050314/
We got there around 8 am and set-up our trailer then unloaded the Mustang, just as it was prepped after the TWS event. I cleaned it up a bit on site and then set up our tables and some demo parts. We talked to about 60-70 people that day, which is good for a typical car show, I guess. Saw several of our customers there, but many of them didn't show up until after 10:30 am as there was a Cars & Coffee event that morning (these events are HUGE and draw in 1200+ cars and thousands of spectators). Having this car show on the same day as C&C was a bit odd, but hey, its not my event.
There were some beautiful cars at this car show, like the various C2 Corvettes above. And the typical, garish, silly car show stuff... loads of chrome ding-dongs and add-ons, little turntables with model cars under hood, every other car had a supercharger, etc.
I have to admit, this is not my scene. At. All. But we were there for a better reason than entering a car show... to see another pre-production 2015 Mustang and hopefully measure, weigh and drive this thing.
This pre-production vehicle was locked up all day and nobody could find the handler that Ford sent with this car to get us inside it, to ask if we could weigh it, or drive it. Aaron Sockwell from Dusold Designs and I took matters into our own hands and just went over and measured a few things...
We crawled under the car and snapped a few pictures of front and rear suspension, but they show little more than we already knew. I did manage to snap a pic of the front strut to inner wheel distance, but it wasn't much. Discouraging.
We measured outside track widths and the front was over 2.25" narrower than the rear outside track measurement on this car, which was equipped with
255/40/ZR19 tires at both ends. That's likely going to make the car understeer more, of course. Staggered track width or tire width set-ups are almost always done by OEMs to "insure understeer". Oh well, one more thing for us to fix.
Corey called in some excellent food trucks and we tried a little bit of food from all 3 of them, including some amazing ice cream from the truck at left. The wood fired pizza truck was a huge hit as well. We killed most of the day waiting to try to get inside this car, hoping to weigh and drive it, and saw some neat stuff in Sam Pack's personal collection with the included museum ticket that all car show entries got.
I Look Inisde The 2015 Mustang - Video!
Finally, at around 5:30 pm, the Ford handler showed up to load the Mustang onto his trailer, and we were waiting for him. There were about 6 of us hounding the guy and we got to at least look inside the car's interior and trunk. I brought our Sony 1080P vidcam and we shot about 8 minutes worth of video, linked below. He wouldn't open the hood for us (in fact the hood latch was
disabled) and refused to let us weigh the car (we can probably guess why). It was a pre-production and "very early build" car show model at that, so it had extra welding and bondo to smooth all sorts of sheet metal seams in the door jambs and trunk that would never be done on a production car. Turns out it was a 4 banger, which sounded like a vacuum cleaner when revved up, which we heard when Corey got in for a few seconds as well as when the Ford guy drove it away.
In the ~8 minute video above, Jason and I walked around the car discussing several items on the S550 chassis, and were actually pretty impressed with some of the aero and drag reduction tricks they have done. Sure, it might gain some weight, but it will likely be the most fuel efficient Mustang ever built (esp. the turbo 4) and a lot of that is due to the hard work of a lot of body and aero designers at Ford. The clean trim work, tight body lines, divorced mirrors and some other tricks will also benefit racers like us as well. The interior room was remarkably bigger, and 6'6" Corey White fit well, and even had to move the seat up a notch. I did my "helmet test", and at 6'3" I fit easily with my full face helmet on and sitting comfortably upright.
Sure, I was pretty bummed about the lack of a weighing or test drive, but what do you do? Ford is being pretty sly with this one, and could be covering up a whole pack of lies (weight claims) or... maybe they just want to save the surprise for when these are released. Who knows? We will see soon enough.
Kind of wished I would have entered that ProSolo, though.
By the end of this very long day they had awards to present for "class winners", and we won a 3 foot tall trophy - along with about 1/3rd of the attendees. I guess you could call it an attendance award.
What's Next?
- GTA @ Road Atlanta - May 9-10th, 2014. This is where I crashed hard on Day 1, broke my back and damaged the car. That really sucked.
- NASA @ Hallett June 21-22, 2014 - Hopefully I will be cleared by the doctors to race at this event, and I'm really looking forward to that!
That's all for this installation of the S197 build thread. I'll cover the GTA event at Road Atlanta in my next post, hopefully later this week, as well as more of my thoughts on the upcoming S550 Mustang and the rumors of it weighing "XXX" pounds over the S197 model. I won't bet the farm on the weight claims just yet - not until I see one or more of these cars on my scales with my own eyes.
Thanks for reading!