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

[Ron Earp]

The schedule is awesome to run SARRC/ECR/TCPS1. Sat morning will bit a busy with ECR Qual group 1, ITS SARRC 3 and TCPS1 5, but otherwise is good. 3 races and done by lunch on Sunday, win!

That does sound like a good schedule. Is registration open?

I'm sure there will be plenty of the Pushrod Posse there to play with. Mr. Young is reported to have improvements for 2013 and is planning on being there. Ron Munnerlyn has some engine improvements for his ITS Miata and maybe Neil Harrison is going to make true on his threat to race the 240sx in ITS.

[Ron Earp]

Finally a lot of long awaited parts are here. The pistons are here as well as lots of other engine bits such as valve springs. Thirty six springs to be checked out for one set of heads, we'll sort through them and bin them up. Thirty six more should be in shortly from another source for comparison purposes, although I suspect they are all the same just packed in different boxes. And 18 were shipped down to another shop prepping a set of heads. Good thing they are cheap, about $2.50 a spring.



It'll be interesting to see if the springs really very that much in open/closed pressure. Jeff Gs engine assembly should be getting underway this weekend with any luck from the machine shop. I hope this multiple iron in the fire approach will pay off well.

[SPiFF]

That does sound like a good schedule. Is registration open?

Open.

http://www.ncrscca.com/events/2013/03/march-memories

[Ron Earp]

Team stang has been very busy over the last few weeks. For various reasons, Jeff G’s Mustang needed a new motor. We have come to the conclusion that his old motor was just not assembled and built well. Now, considering both my car and his car had the same builder that doesn’t bode well for Sleestak, but Sleestak is still running so we’ll stick with it.

We finally got all the parts together for Jeff’s new motor build and knocked it out in a weekend. We ran into a few snags though and learned, the hard way, that Ford really like to change things often with respect to fasteners, part numbers, and these changes generally make life more difficult.

One of the biggest issue we had was the block. We got a block out of our stock pile and had it bored 0.040” over with our torque plate. Line bore checked, decked, etc. everything made just perfect. But when we went to assemble the bottom end we found we couldn’t bolt on our windage tray because the main cap bolts that would be used to do that job wouldn’t fit in this block. Turned out that somewhere in 1995 Ford decided to put smaller main cap bolts in the engine. Our block had the large main cap bolts, so the bolts we were going to use with studs for the windage tray wouldn’t fit. Doh. Out comes the TIG and we took care of business at the cost of a couple of hours.

Anyhow, we got the bottom end together and all was good.







But, snag two appeared when we tried to fit out IJ crank scraper. We got it trimmed up to fit as in the picture above, but, when we went to put the oil pan on the damn bolts that hold the piece together fouled on the oil pan. Hmmmmm, turns out Ford in their infinite wisdom have a few different castings of oil pans, although they all look the same, and all four of the ones we had laying around were the same "no fit" variety.

[Ron Earp]

So that was a bag of yay. To make a long story short the motor didn't get the crank scraper.



On with the heads and everything went smoothly here.



The heads are new, that is to say, Jeff's old heads were no longer serviceable due to some cracks. So these heads were choosen from a stock pile:



And yep, there are vast differences in the types of heads used on the cars. Minor differences, but minor differences add up. The heads got the standard IT treatment - decked for compression, valve job, an port matched 1" in to the intake gaskets. The picture makes the port matching look useful but it really isn't. The modern gasket fits that head wonderfully so nothing more than making the head shiny was done.

[Ron Earp]

Oh, and I forgot installing the cam, that was done too. A cam is useful to make the motor run.



Completed short block, well mostly.



The rest of the dress out went smoothly and the engine was installed into the car.



The install didn't go well though because the old headers no longer fit the engine. The car got a different subframe as mentioned in a previous post, but, things were just enough different that the header pipes fouled on the steering shaft. They touched before, but now there was a 1/4" of interference and, given the old exhaust was crappy, it was time to have a new one built.

[Ron Earp]

So we went from bare block to this:



In somewhere around 30 hours or so, roughly. Actually, that is a bit long. Of course there was some beer drinking in there somewhere, got to have time for social activities.

After consulting with all the exhaust gurus we settled on a new exhaust design. It was fabbed up by R&J in Apex NC and we painted, baked, wrapped, and installed it last night. It has proper sized primaries, collectors, and merges unlike the old one that was a hodge podge of design and off the shelf parts. The best thing is that it is 18 lbs lighter than the old design. Always look for places to get some weight off. I'll try to get some pictures of that up later.

I summary, the red car has a new motor to try out at VIR and I'm sure it'll be better than the last one. The old motor didn't have a 0.5 compression hike, was 4 oz out of balance, had an imbalanced drive shaft, had inferior rings, and probably wasn't torque plate bored although it was supposed to have been.

[Ron Earp]

Another update from the Stangwerks….

We got Jeff’s new motor in the car and running without incident. And, we headed out to VIR for the March Memories race and test day early Friday morning. On the initial session a problem reared its head, one that we’d experienced before – a driveline vibration. Jeff reported it was very bad and since the motor was new, and we knew it was properly assembled, we immediately figured it was the driveshaft. So we swapped the driveshaft from the green car, which has never had a problem, and put it into the red car for testing. Next session out the problem was entirely eliminated and the car ran well. Smooth, powerful, good water temps and oil pressure, so all was good with the motor.

So Friday noon I took the old drive shaft down to Russell at Triangle Driveshaft in Durham and they fixed it while I waited. It was horribly out of balance due to a poor balance job at a shop in Raleigh from Fleetpride. Anyhow, Russell fixed it up and I returned to VIR to install it into my car. A couple more sessions out in the red car for the test day, some adjustments to rear roll center and shock dampening, and we decided we were on for the weekend.

Saturday morning came a bit too early but we were ready for qualifying. The ECR group qualified first with Zsolt’s Acura Integra taking the ITS pole. The Mustangs were not far behind though in second and third, although the field was a bit light. The SARRC qualifying order was a bit different with Jeff G. putting the Mustang on the pole I think, but I can’t remember the rest of the field. I think I started third. Anyhow, we were pretty happy with the results although again, the field was pretty light on strong ITS competition. Jeff Young had a problem with a front wheel hub disintegrating and got no good time, Chuck Hines was not racing on competitive rubber and wasn’t running as fast as normal, and a few others had dropped out.

The ECR on Saturday was a lot of fun. Jeff G and I were in the red Mustang, Robert Mitchell and Jeff Young in the green Mustang. Zsolt’s co-driver Trevor set a strong of smoking laps at the start of the ECR. Not one, but five or six 2:14s and I think one of them was a 2:14.0 according to my RaceMonitor app. Smoking, and says a few of things – prep matters, driver matters, and FWD can flat out get it done – kudos to them for building such a fast car and driving the hell out of it. The ECR progressed with the red stang second, the green one third, and then Zolt’s Acura had a hub failure and was retired from the race. That left the Mustangs with a one-two ECR finish, but I can definitely say if Zsolt hadn’t had the wheel failure they would have won the race as we were tuning no higher than 18/19/20 in ECR trim. Also in there was a smoking fast ITA Ford Focus by Mike Sperber so the Fords had a pretty good showing in the ECR.



After the ECR we retired to the paddock to work on the TR8 which was still laid up with a bad hub. We also worked on Chris Dercole’s Mustang and trying to help him sort his oil control problem, however, it was pretty reasonably clear he had bad rings and no amount of work was going to help. Car work done we retired to the Tavern with the crew and had a bonfire party later that evening. Unfortunately we forgot about the time change and Sunday morning came quick. Ow.

The SARRC came and went pretty quickly. A sprint race ain’t no ECR and it was over too fast. At the green it was Jeff G, Ron E, Chuck H, and Russ B., but at T1 Chuck got a clean pass in T1 on me and assumed second place. Later that lap or the next, Chuck passed Jeff G and was in the lead, Jeff G second, Ron E third, and Russ fourth. However, I could tell that Russ had more power than me and was gaining on the back straight so I figured it was a matter of time before he got me. Mustangs have good brakes, great midrange, but on the top end the RX7, TR8, Acura, etc. seem to do better. Russ got by a few laps in and it was Chuck, Jeff, Russ, Ron with me dropping.

Five or six laps into the race we were all coming into Hogs Pen and someone had tracked mud and straw all across the track. It had just happened and was in a place you couldn’t see well, therefore, Chuck had no choice but to hit it first and he went off track. The other cars managed to stay on track but the mud reduced everyone’s speed through that corner for a couple of laps. The race finished Jeff, Russ, Ron – first SARRC race win for a Mustang, although not for Jeff G since he’s been racing for 10+ years. We didn’t have the fastest cars on track for that weekend by a long shot but it was reliable and most importantly fun. And, as mentioned, we were missing a lot of regulars with two of them at the track, Zsolt and Jeff Young, not being able to race because of broken or wrecked cars.



Now, what was fast was the Mazda MX5s – have a look at those times, they were running 2:12, 2:13s, 2:14s all weekend, fantastic. Now the track was fast for the March VIR race, but those cars are getting it done. At the start of the SARRC they blew away the field. Jeff and I were right behind the two MX5s when the green flag dropped. I thought for sure I'd pass one on the start because they wouldn't have power. Nope. They dropped the stangs like a bad habit and gapped us all the way to the braking zone. We managed to follow them around but they moved out on the straights.

[Ron Earp]

Development heavily continues over in camp stang. The new rear end geometry is working out extremely well and along with our properly re-valved shocks, plus a lot of testing, we’ve really improved our cornering and corner exits. We’re learning that the car is more sensitive to ride height than we initially thought. It is more complicated that stated, but it is sort of where 11-12mm in ride height can make the difference between a properly handling car and one with understeer. When it is spot on though the car handles precisely, with a slight tendency to oversteer, and is a great point and squirt machine.

Over the past couple of months we’ve been working with Burns Stainless and a header builder, Calvin Elston. We knew that our exhaust had some shortcomings and Calvin and Vince have conspired to design a system that would be our final exhaust design. So, after one of our race weekends I dropped the car off at the shop and waited about four weeks for the final product, and wow is that a nice exhaust system he put together. Exhaust V3.0 is really well done from flanges to tail pipe. There are a number of aspects about it that are greatly improved over the earlier headers; water jet flanges that precisely match the ports, lots of upper roof port flow, equal length to within 0.5", three newly sized collectors, newly sized primaries and steps, anti-reversion collector for the final section, and all made out of stainless that might also drop some weight.










It's hard to see from the pictures, but they are elegantly done although the equal length requirement means it's really tight in the engine bay now. There's a damn good reason why most header systems for vee motors, or long inline six engines, aren't equal length. The pipes just take up too much underhood real estate and are hard to manage.

It'll be dynoed to determine improvements, but out of the box one thing that is very noticeable is the sound. The motor sounds much smoother, crisper, with a higher pitched exhaust note. Greatly diminished is the rumpty rumble low pitch frequency exhaust noise that very much characterized the engine from the get go. It's not the kick ass sound of an inline six Z or BMW, but it closer to that and much more of a smoother wail at RPM.