TARP Blog

Jesse drove over with the car trailer on Saturday morning to retrieve the TARP Special and take it out to the barn/shop out at his farm/ranch in Granbury, which is anywhere from a 90 minute to 2 hour drive from my house. By mere coincidence, the farm isn’t far from Motorsport Ranch, which is a fairly new road race course. We are endeavoring to find out how we can get some track time out there before going down to Houston. I have a friend of a friend who is supposedly a member there, so I’m going to try to work that connection.

Jesse’s farm is a very special place. As you can see from the photo below, he’s collecting quite a few different vehicles on site. I think my favorite was the 1946 Chevrolet truck that he has out back. It looks a lot like a train from the front, but has a huge wooden box bed. Pretty cool looking truck. Hit the jump to see photos of the ranch and the truck, plus more action photos of the TARP team hard at work:

Here’s the front patio of the shop:

And here’s the Chevy. I think this would be a great chuckwagon for us at the LeMons race, but I think that maybe it would take more time/work than we have to give it right now to make it work in that function. But talk about a great race truck, nobody would have anything close to this at the race:

I learned to drive when I was 13 or 14 on a Chevy not too different from this one. Although, come to htink of it, this one might actually be in better condition than that beater that I learned to drive on.

Anyway, on with the story. We got the car there, rolled it into the shop, and got it up on the stands. Since Grayson wasn’t able to make it out, we weren’t able to get any work done on the rollcage. There was some thought about starting to bend the conduit that we’re going to use as a template for the bends on the steel for the rollcage, but without the perches in place inside the car, we didn’t even have a very good starting point for that part of the project. One good thing about having a list as long as your arm is that there was plenty for us to work on.

Dave and Jesse did yoeman’s work getting the brake lines bled of air. Somehow someone got a ton of air into the system and it was a pain in the rear to get it all out. But now the brake system has been flushed and is full of new, clean synthetic brake fluid.  It’s a good thing that Dave does a lot of running because I thought that he was going to drop from all that brake pumping.

While Jesse and Dave got the brakes bled, I worked on getting the old exhaust system off. Gotta love it when heat and water combine to make rust! Even better, you gotta love air tools. Jesse has a massive compressor out there (did I mention that a shop like this is like a slice of heaven to me?) and so the air impact hammer did its work on all those frozen exhaust system bolts. Next time we’ll get the Cherry Bomb exhaust welded on and then this thing will really sound like a race car.

While Jesse and I were working on getting the inner door skins cut free from the doors, Dave went to work on the firewall insulation with the air chisel. The MR2 has about a quarter-inch thick layer of what seems to be some sort of asphalt-based noise-reducer on the passenger compartment side of the firewall. Now if we were driving this MR2 to work every day, that stuff would probably be really appreciated, but since we’re driving it to race, it’s just unnecessary weight. Dave was a machine with the air chisel. I think that he got it all off and I’d bet that alone weighed 10-15 lbs. He got a bunch of it off the floor, too. In the photo below, the shiny area on the upper half of the firewall is where Dave has already cleaned off the gunk. You can see a bunch of it still on the lower half of the firewall, it looks sort of like blue-painted cottage cheese:

As you know, dedicated reader of the TARP Blog, one of my abiding passions with this car is reducing all the weight we can get off of it (yeah, irony of ironies, I know). But we also want to make the car super-safe in the event of a collision or other driving incident. One way to do that whenfabricating the roll cage is to create a Nascar-style door bar.  The door bar is the bar on the roll cage that runs from the main hoop (the one that goes over the driver’s head) to the front hoop (the one that goes above and behind the windshield), in between the driver’s seat and the door to the car. Many cages use straight bars there ,but a Nascar-style bar bends out into the hollow, curved part of the door. This has two advantages. The first is that in the event of a side-impact, the other car impacts the MR2 further away from the driver than if the door bar were straight and therefore closer to the driver. The second advantage is that it gives the driver slightly more room inside the car.

In order to put Nascar-style door bars on the car, we needed to gut (or “skin”) our doors. This also has the advantage of eliminating the inner door panel, thus adding lightness to the car. Jesse hauled out the oxy-acetylene rig and after a few minutes with the torch, we had the inner panels off the doors. Here’s Jesse in action:

When it was all said and done, my guess is that we probably dropped out another 12 pounds or so of unnecessary steel. Here you can see the skinned doors standing up, while the scrapped steel is lying flat on the ground. We cut out slightly less on the driver’s door than on the passenger door because we need for the door latch on the driver’s door to remain operational for the race. Once we finish the cage, we don’t need the passenger door to be operational after that so we’ll either bolt it or weld it onto the car.

I know that we did some other stuff too but part of the time was rolling in the car and getting it up on the jacks and part of the time was just figuring out the layout of their shop. We had to leave early in the evening for a prior engagement, but I’m hoping that next time we can make it a longer stay. We still have a lot to do to get this car ready to race and it occurs to me that we only have 6 weekends before the race. As my wife’s granddad says, tempest is a fugitin’.

MR2, Race Prep Author: Pat