ITS Ford Mustang(s) Build - Stripper Stang Part II

[lateapex911]

Good update, and great thorough work! Andy is right, best build thread here.

[Ron Earp]

Another Stangwerks Update

Both Mustangs made the recent races at CMP and for the most part a good time was had by all. Jeff G ran the red car for the test day on Friday and we incrementally improved our laptimes each session. One of our biggest issues was tires, or lack thereof, as we were trying to use old tires for the testing thus saving the new tires for the racing. That isn’t a good idea because at a tight track like CMP suspension changes can be masked by crappy tires. Anyhow, we got the car down to some high 50s and figured new tires would improve upon those times.

Test Day Arrival


The weather at CMP was quite nice, 60s in the day and while it was cold at night this took care of that problem.

Fire


We had a couple of enjoyable night sitting around the fire, BSing with friends, and having a few adult beverages. Good times were had by all, even our large furry friend decided to take it easy and not bite Steve Parrish’s leg off and take the beer.



Saturday was race day and the Mustangs were entered in the Carolina Cup at the SARRC race. Given that we had practice sessions for the races, plus qualifying, it was a busy morning and afternoon with little down time considering we had a few unplanned maintenance activities pop up. The morning sessions were cool but both Mustangs were fueling correctly and hitting a reasonable A/F target. Qualfiying came and went, and I was pretty happy with the results. There were not too many ITS cars entered in the CCPS and I was able to get the Mustang on the overall pole for that race with a 1:49.999, the fastest time I’ve ever turned at CMP. The SARRC qualifying was tight with two cars in the 48s and two in the 49s. I managed a 1:49.564 which became my best ever CMP time and put me fourth in ITS.

Steve E was getting it done with a 48, and Ron Munnerlyn gets my go-fast award by driving the damn wheels off his Miata. We all know the ITS Miata doesn't have class-leading horsepower by a long shot but if the car is driven expertly then it can do the job.



The Mustang was pretty easy to drive at CMP but in retrospect we wish we had done more to tune the car for that track. We made changes to the front roll bar, front compression and rebound, and changed the rear roll center as well as rear rebound settings. But I wish we’d have swapped in our softer springs too. Both cars were manageable and very predictable, but were looser than we would have liked and our ability to apply the go fast pedal was limited.

[Ron Earp]

The CCPS race was a lot of fun. It is the first race that I’ve started and following a pace car around with an Easter Bunny in the passenger seat was entertaining. Since I was starting I held speeds way down, or shall I say, held speeds down so that I was turning over about 2.8k in third gear, in the meat of my torque band and giving me the broadest RPM range to my 51-5200 RPM shift point. When the green dropped I was able to get the drop and get out ahead of the field. A fast SRF was directly on me though and a couple of laps in I waved him around. He and I weren’t racing and were just going to slow each other up.

The 45 min race went by quickly and I had some good times racing with Rickey T in his BMW and Ron M. in his Miata. Ron was in first place at one point and ended up breaking, so I got the lead and the ITS win for the day. Good times by all and a clean race. Back in the pits and through impound left us little time to prepare for the SARRC. I rotated the tires and did a bit of other car work, finishing just in time to make the grid for the SARRC race, rolling in under the five whistle.

On the grid ahead of Jeff!


The SARRC was fast and hairy. I got off to a poor start and made a number of mistakes in lap one, something not allowed in a sprint. Steve E took off like a rabbit on the green and quickly set a fast pace for the race. Rickey T went off in turn eight of lap one making that a bit exciting. I should have blocked #59 Tim J into turn twelve but I didn’t and he got around me. Once he was past he and I had to dice for position while the leaders, Steve E, Ron M, and Jeff Y. ran off into the distance. Laps four through seven or eight have us going back and forth three or four times for position. Good stuff. I eventually got around Tim and made it stick, leaving him to dice it up with Russ B., but by then a top three finish was out of the question. Or was it….




[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toGQFkwdxfw[/ame]

At some point I come rolling out of T14 and find Steve E on the side of the track with smoke coming out of the hood. Turned out he had an electrical issue and had to retire for the weekend. And, coming into T7 I run up on a green British car traveling quite slowly, which isn’t the norm for the TR8. It pulled off to the side and had to retire as well, having let out all the Lucas Electrical Smoke it could no longer run. That left Ron M in the lead who won the race putting me in a distant second. Again, Ron gets my Go-Fast award by driving the heck of his Miata. Steve E and Jeff Yound both led the SARRC race, but Ron M. was never more than a couple of car lengths behind. Way to go!

Ron M, Ron E, and TimJ


So the Mustangs had a pretty good showing for the weekend, collecting a couple of pieces of wood for the garage wall. Next time around, in May, we'll be faster. I'm pretty sure we have a good baseline setup and can improve upon it. We'll also be lighter too as some of our new parts to save weight will be in use by then.



Next races are at Roebling Road and I'm looking forward to seeing how we shake out there. We have a decent setup for RRR that netted some 22s back at the SIC and I am pretty sure we can improve upon that for April 2013.

[Ron Earp]

Things have been busy at the Stangwerks but unfortunately it hasn’t been all fun and games. On the good news, I got a set of heads back from Hoffman machine and he has made some improvements in the flow numbers. Nice new heads, all cleaned up and re-machined for the correct 9.5:1 compression ratio, new valves, valve job, and ready to go on my new motor.



And here are some shots of the different head types that we have to use on the Mustangs. There are a few, and Len has another set of Mustang heads, different castings, that he’s going to flow and work up for us as well. Maybe we’ll be able to pick some winners from our collection. While some of the heads, for example the N39 and N42 castings, look identical and have similar combustion chamber shapes, the E series do not. However, even among ones that look the same, the N heads, there are definitely winners and losers.



I’m not sure why Ford changed castings so often, but if one thing is certain to anyone who is a Ford enthusiast, Ford is synonymous with Change. Len at Hoffman heads has been great to work with and I look forward to seeing what data he can provide to help with the development of the motor.

[Ron Earp]

Work has been progressing on my new engine and now that the heads are here we'll quickly progress on that front.



This engine is the same as Jeff's new motor and has the same improvements over his original motor. My original motor is still going strong, knock on wood, but it has always been my intention to have a spare motor at all times so once this one is finish it'll replace the unit in the car and the old one will be rebuilt to the new specs.

Progress has occurred on other fronts as well, Jeff finished up the bench top Ford EEC-V programmer and it has been successfully used at the track a couple of times. This allows us to program an ECU without the car being present, which is useful for setting up multiple ECUs to be swapped in in dire situations.



But the big news is that Jeff's new motor, with less than ten hours of racing on the clock, decided to shit the bed. Yep, it's done and we're now in the middle of a rebuild on it.

Jeff's car did fine at CMP, raced all the entered races and seemed to be doing what it was supposed to do. Loaded on the trailer, loaded off the trailer, nary a sign of trouble. We parked the car at my house while we finished up the cam swap on the Torino, which by the way took way longer than expected. Anyhow, ten days later we go to put Jeff's stang on the scales and there is a puddle of oil under it just where the bellhousing and engine block are mated together. No big deal we figure, we'll put it up in the air, drop the tranny, and fix that rear main seal.

Nope. When we got the tranny out and drove a new rear seal in we noticed this:



And then a few hours and beers of work later we saw this:



Bummer. So we had to have a beer of sorrow. Then a smoke of sorrow. Then another beer of sorrow. After that we said enough and got our asses to work and tore the motor down completely.

[Ron Earp]

And another:





The engine has since been completely torn down, with a lot of swearing and cussing, and I dropped the block and crank off with the machine shop this morning. We hope to get the newly line bored block back tomorrow and reassemble the engine Thursday night.

What happened?

We don't know. I called the Ford V6 specialists, Jeff called Ford and Dave Brown, and we talked with the shop. Nobody has ever seen a rear main cap failure on a Ford 3.8L V6. It happens on Ford 302s pretty frequently but only if they are making a lot of power and turned up to a lot of RPM, neither of which apply here. The data doesn't show any over revs, oil pressure issues, or anything that would be indicative of this type of failure.

The engine is relatively un-stressed, doesn't turn a lot of RPM, and all the parts removed from the engine look great. The bearings look like normal bearings with a bit of wear, I'd have no problem using them again. The engine even ran and behaved normally, mostly, although now we know that something was up with it I suspect one could detect an issue. Rods good, the crank is straight (checked this morning), pistons all good, we're a bit perplexed but as we develop theories and test them out we'll sort through it.

Anyhow, our goal is to have the engine back in the car and running this weekend for the RRR race. The removal and installation of this V6 into the Mustang sort of sucks. The old Datsun inline six was so much easier. Unfortunately we're stuck at around 2-3 hours for a removal just because so much has to be unhooked and access is limited around a vee engine in a small engine compartment. Hopefully we'll make.

[joeg]

YIKES!!!

From the Internet:

"A cap broken/cracked in a block --it can be any number of things. A lot of times it can be tracked back to how the cap was installed in the first place in torqueing the caps down. Was that cap checked for cracks before installation? If so,...was it also checked inside the bolt hole?"

[Ron Earp]

For what it is worth, we now have a third Mustang build on the go and it's detailed on another forum.

What is the "other forum"

Steve

The third Mustang is very near completion lacking only graphics to be checked off.



The ITS Mustang team did well this year being first and second in SARRC points, up until a week or so before the SIC where a FL based fellow took the lead. We didn't attend the SIC because we calculated that the chances of finishing enough spots in front of the leader for the series win, given the double points situation, wouldn't be possible.

The 2015 season at VIR kicked off with a bang with Jeff G losing his and me putting myself into the wall at T3 and earning a concussion to boot. We've got a lot of work to do.

[Steve35]

OH NO! Is it fixable?

Steve

[Ron Earp]

OH NO! Is it fixable?

Steve

Sure. The chassis is still square, but the tires dented every panel on the driver's side of the car. Beats a solid wall though.

[StephenB]

Ugggg. Sorry to see this, I am sure you guys will have it fixed just like new :-) keep us updated this season!

[joeg]

Quarter and wheelhouse OEM NOS search a problem? Doors and fenders should be EZ (maybe consider pre-painting spares).

[Matt93SE]

Boooo! Unlike!