At 04:44 AM 12/8/98 -0500, you wrote:
>
>
>Brian
>
>You seem firm on a specialist racing car. Could you share the appeal with the
>rest of us?
>
I'd be happy to! I started in Vintage racing in 1988 building a Cooper S.
Doing all my own work, it cost me about $10K US by the time I was happy with
it, which spread over about five years wasn't too bad ($10K is the
incremental cost of the parts, not by any means the total!) At the end of
it, I had a car which was starting to get un-reliable, by my standards,
since it had a 13:1 engine etc. - it was hard on tires, suspension,
transmissions, and generally was starting to annoy me, particularly because
there were a number of guys who put what I had in my car in each of their
engines, of which they had several, and so had far more power than I did,
and so I was unhappy. Not to mention the (not to say *cheating*) variations
in how the VARAC preparation rules were interpreted. (I always thought "no
Heim joints" meant no Heim joints, for example).
So I built a 1961 Midget. Same basic car (engine and transmission wise) but
in-line powertrain improves the reliability to no end! (no DNF's in three
years, and none this year for the new owner). I liked this car alot, but I
was limited, by VARAC rules, to the 948 engine and the Dunlop L series
tires. The 948 I could live with, although I really enjoyed the 1275cc
engine while I had it in the car and was running with HSR, being PO'd with
VARAC for a while, and having the ready to travel to Savannah, Atlanta,
Mid-Ohio, etc. But I really didn't like being forced to run the L-series
tires as I just didn't like them compared to the F. Ford front tires I ran
with other clubs than VARAC.
So SWMBO said, one day, that to her it was obvious that my real issue was
that I couldn't build the production type cars the way I wanted to. Or that
I wouldn't break or bend the rules of our club while others seemed quite
willing to, and that when I ran with other clubs I was limited by the tires
I had (the Dunlop L-series hard compound tires are "entertaining", but so is
doing donuts in a parking lot with the first snowfall, and you have about as
much grip with either) so that I was overdriving the car to compensate for
it's un-competitiveness. And that taking 35 and 40 year old stuff and
making it race-worthy was tending to cost a lot of money, when it came to
buying all new parts because the stuff on the car was old enough to be
questionable.
So she said "why not buy a car that was built as a race car in the first
place? Then, you can just prepare it the way it would have been raced in
the period, and it will actually perform as a race car should, rather than
like a hopped up street car. Plus, the bits to keep a race car going are
cheaper than the bits to hop up a street car, and if you get one that's a
bit unique, then you won't have to compare yourself to all the other "XXXX"
cars and drivers, so you won't get PO'd when they show up with 1380cc motors
in Bugeye Sprites, nor will you care when you hear them shift four times on
the straight instead of twice, and the Hoosier "slicks with two grooves for
treads that get worn off on the warm up lap" won't bother you either."
So I called up Oliver Clubine and asked about the Merlyn MK6A that he had
been advertising for the past two years or so in the club newsletter. I had
no idea what a Merlyn MK6A was, let alone what it looked like, but I went
over and he pointed at a chassis, a body standing against a wall, the back
of his Lotus 22 where he assured me there lived a transmission that belonged
to the car, and pointed at more than several large boxes of stuff that he
said contained most of the rest of the car. So I bought the car, paid for
it some time later, got it home sometime after that, and built it up. The
joy that it has brought to several people has been more than heartwarming,
it handles and responds the way a racecar should, so far parts and
maintenance have been minimal, and it's probably going to actually retain,
if not increase, its value over time, which I assure you the production cars
did not. I sold each of the Cooper S and the Midget for about $0.50 on the
dollar of the cost of the parts in them, not counting my time and labour to
build them at all.
So that's why I like purpose built race cars better than modified production
cars.
Cheers, Brian
Brian Evans
Director, Carrier Sales
UUNET, an MCI WorldCom Company
(416) 216 5111
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