Project Update for Feb 6th, 2013: Its been over a month since my last post in this thread but so much has been going on I cannot hope to cover all of it. In the red 2011 Mustang alone we've done a track test/TV shoot at ECR (Dec 28th), rebuilt the front splitter mounts, made an all new exhaust system, ran in the 2014 season opening NASA Texas Time Trial at MSR-Houston (Jan 18-19), then the following weekend we ran the car in SCCA Club Trials at the the Polar Grand Prix race weekend at MSR-Cresson (Jan 25). And the next weekend we drove it out to Cars & Coffee (Feb 1). Somehow this became my largest EVER single forum post, took a week to write, and I had to break into 5 parts due to post length limits (and up to 10 parts on some forums).
Left: The first mock-ups of the 2013 FR-S LSx look good. Right: Cage wrapping up on this C4 Corvette
And that was with
just one car of many we are working on... Something has been going on every single weekend since my last post - looks like we won't get a "winter break" from racing this year. I won't go into the Scion FR-S LSx swap we're knee deep into, or the Corvette race car build that consuming lots of time, or the half dozen other cars we've been working on. Or the fact that we just broke a monthly sales record for the 10 year history of the business... in a January (traditionally our slowest month of the year). Everything feels like its going by at 1,000 miles an hour lately.
See, we're not "just a Mustang shop", or "not just a suspension shop" as we work on a lot of BMWs, Subarus (including a '95 Impreza with an '07 STi swap, above left), Miatas (including the LS1 Alpha). And we're doing a lot more than suspensions - like seat and harness installs (above right), chassis work, roll cages and roll bars, brake upgrades, wheel and tire fitments, and more.
But yes, we're knee deep in Mustangs. I just bought another one, the former stage rally SN95 Mustang shown above left. We have some fun ideas about what to do with this car that involve a big motor, rallycross and a lot of hoonage. So I've really got to get rid of one of our two S197 Mustangs, and I've slashed the price on the
2013 Mustang GT to
$25K. That's an amount I've had and turned down more than once for this car, but all of the other higher priced offers went "poof" and the buyers flaked out. So if you wanted to see me bleed with this car, mission successful. I don't think it can last long at that price, but I've said that before, too.
Check the ad and give me a call if you are interested.
We should have a new 2011-14 5.0L external oil cooler kit available very soon. We developed this on a 2013 Boss302 that was seeing some very high oil temps at the track. We junked the factory Boss/Track Pack "oil heater" system (that uses hot radiator coolant to "cool" the oil) and replaced it with a big Mocal heat exchanger, custom bolt-on mount, BMRS lines, a Canton oil filter sandwich adapter with thermostatic control. This same car has also received a Mishimoto radiator, customized Maximum Motorsports 4-point roll bar, Schroth Profi 2 harnesses with customized anti-sub belts, front brake cooling, a customized set of auxiliary gauges in a Ford Racing 3 gauge pod, and a custom built front tow hook. This Gotta Have It Green Boss is turning into one slick track toy.
So that was some of what's been going on in January - a small slice of the craziness that Vorshlag has become. I've also been looking at larger commercial properties to move the business into, as we've completely run out of room with our company's growth. I hope that by October we will be somewhere new, so I need to finalize the deal on the new place by about June... we looked at 15 properties last Saturday, after Cars & Coffee.
Let's back up and cover the S197 Mustang development for the past 5 weeks....
Track Test & TV Shoot @ ECR, December 28th, 2013
There is a new "car guy" TV show that has been created and been filming in the Dallas area for a few months. This show is supposed to debut in March 2014 (don't know what channel or markets yet) and while I don't know much about the show, I
do know a lot of the folks involved. They are all track folks, and we go to a lot of track events so we have run with all of them many times. So when I got a call about being part of a TV shoot for a sketch about a "street car vs. race car" track segment, I was on board in an instant. The only question was... did they consider our Mustang the street car or the race car??
Yep, our big red 3770 pound Pony was going to be the race car. Uh-oh. Sure, while our street legal Mustang can be quick, there are some still "street cars" that would give us fits on track. I've run against some C6 ZR1s and Z06s that were fookin FAST. So I asked what we'd be running against? Turns out it was to be C6 Corvette. Uh-oh, those can be fast. But luckily it wasn't a Z06 and it was "a nearly stock 6-speed manual convertible", whew. But the driver was pretty good and he was going to be running "slicks". The car had a mix of 305 Pirelli P-zero racing slicks up front and 345 Hoosier A6s out back. That could be pretty fast, if the two compounds worked together. Oh well, we would find out later in the day when we did some head-to-head stuff...
320mm Continental Rolex Race Tire vs 315mm Hoosier A6 Track Test
Before the filming began we used much of this day at ECR to test some tires on the Mustang and some shocks we're developing for another chassis.
Some of you that have been following this thread for a while remember the big gaggle of Continental slicks I purchased at the end of last season. Got a bunch of
305/650/18 and
320/650/18 Contis for a good price and we stuck them on our clearance page.
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