Wednesday, May 30, 2007

You better wake up boy!



Building a race car is an amazing process of planning, ordering parts, coordinating the entire project and more but the dream of all of the above rules out over all. Speaking of dreams, last night I dreamed I had forgotten a very important part of the build process on my car. In the dream I found myself in Mexico with a car that wouldn't handle properly and no matter what I did something was wrong. When I woke up I was trying to recall what it was in the dream that was wrong. Not being one that believes that dreams are anything to be concerned about I just laughed it off. But as I was having my morning cup of coffee all of a sudden it hit me... I FORGOT TO RELOCATE THE UPPER CONTROL ARMS!!! I couldn't believe it. Relocating the upper control arms on a Shelby race car is just about as important as putting fuel in the Space Shuttle.

It's a well known fact that possibly the single most important modification Shelby did to the 1965 GT350 was relocating the upper control arms. The overall result was one of fantastic results. Actually Shelby wasn't responsible for the design but in fact Klaus Arning, a Ford Suspension engineer designed the 427 Cobra and GT40 suspensions to be used in unison with a four-link independent rear suspension. It turned out they decided not to use the independent rear suspension but the design was then turned over to Carroll Shelby who put it to good use. To this day many Shelby enthusiast are under the belief that all Sheblys used this modification which is far from correct. Another falsehood is that more is better so many made the modification using various dimensions but the correct measurement is extremely important to the driver that knows how to achieve optimum performance.

Like I said, I don't believe in mysterious or complex reasons as to interpretations of dreams. On the other hand I do believe that somewhere in my sub-conscious my brain was saying something like, "Hey stupid... wake up, have some coffee and get your butt down to the shop and fix your screw up. After all, we're not driving a Chevy." LOL.

So today I was able to remove the upper control arms and make the correct modifications and then reassemble them to the correct location.

More good news is that a special parts delivery arrived yesterday which was the original Shelby dash panel and lights that will handle all the new gauges that will be here later this week. That will make it possible for me to get a major amount of work completed on the dash instrumentation.

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