So last evening, the car emerged from his Winter hibernation in the basement. This past week has been very busy with late nights after work ticking over into the wee morning hours. Sleep? – who needs it! Anyway, my wonderfully supportive wife helped me ease the car out of the 6ft wide basement door and took a ride up to the driveway with me. I loved her comment as we were pushing it outside. She said [referring to the black wheels] “this thing looks mean….like it should growl at you or something…” I LOL’d a bit at that. So here it is:
So this morning after a quick 4.5hr rest, I decided to drive it to work since it’s such a nice day here in the Northeast. My drive is 45mi one way and the car felt fantastic. The Mickey Thompson Sportsman S/T tires feel very responsive and “hooked up” in the bends with good lateral stability and grip. The Sparco 375 steering wheel feels great in the hand and the Sweet Manufacturing steering wheel disconnect has negligible play if any. I’m very pleased.
You can see from the rear shot above that I removed the split trunk lid prototype parts and put the FIA trunk back on. After the auto-x this weekend I’ll remove the Lemans top and work on the split trunk a bit more to finalize fit and sort out the hinging and latching.
The late nights this week have been largely due to my scratch fabrication of a set of side curtains. The profile of the side window opening is different enough that a set of soft top curtains can’t be used. I’ll document the fabrication of these in a future post and explain some of the differences, but for now, the status of the curtains are as shown. The concept I followed is as found on some GT40s and Daytona coupes and one that is reasonably simple to make with common hand tools, but more on this later.
- Allen.