A team with no name goes racing.

Last Saturday Justin and I had a mini wrench day. I had taken apart the front suspension in preparation for upgrading to mk3 stuff. Bigger bearing, bigger rotor, slightly more available parts. (And provisions for ABS, which I have a spare mk60 setup that I keep pushing). I had been waiting for some parts from Ground Control that almost showed up once.

After another attempt, I received new ball seat washers for the camber plates and a top spring perch as the one that was in there was mangled to hell after bouncing around on top of an unbolted mac strut.

In a crazy hodgepodge of parts we now have a decently setup suspension;

Mk1 control arms with mk3 ball joints

Mk3 knuckles/hubs/bearings from a 2.0 4 lug car

mk2 early strut housings (the later cars used full assemblies) w/ KONI Race inserts and ebay threaded spring perches

I let Justin do the math for how low we were, how much travel we'd need/use and all the other fun junk that I am too ADD for. We're real close to the bumpstop on compression but we're also real close to fender contact. We've taken the assumption that the bumpstops will now be a consumable. Hopefully a rare consumable.

The old nonadjustable stuff and severely worn konis;

We then did a VERY rough corner weighting. As we can only adjust the front that's what we did. Again, Justin did the math because he's got the engineer brain.

I'm pretty sure that was before adjusting, didn't get a picture of after.

Then we got to the brakes. The mk3 knuckle has wider caliper mounting bosses so our adapter for the wilwoods won't work anymore. Justin did more more and he's going to draw up a bracket for me to 3d print and then we can worry about how to get a more metallic version. But we're on the right track! I have some bract ducts to route and then it can go back on the ground to see what condition the engine is in and hopefully get some seat time before the end of the year. Not race time but even autox or commandeering a costco parking lot late at night.

Not sure why that first drop onto the scales was ~15 lb lighter, but the weights eventually settled pretty consistently around 2305 lb. This is all with a little under 200 pound driver and not-full (1/2-ish?) tank. While we said we weren't going to chase 'perfect', where we stopped turned out we were within 1 lb of 'ideal' on each corner.

730      660

478      436

If we really wanted to get crazy, I think we could probably bump the left spring rates up (or rights down) by 50F/25R and balance out the L/R roll control.

And that is it. This past weekend Lucky Dog finished out it's Pacific Northwest Championship series at the Ridge and we... were not there.

It was just a lousy weekend schedule wise for all of us. One of our drivers got married (congrats) another of our drivers was officiating that wedding (congrats... I guess) and I was moving house. With the car's suspension upgrades not completed we decided the best course of action was to sit this one put.

There were 4 events with a total of 8 races. We managed to compete in 3 of those races. 4 of those races we chose not to enter and one of them we retired prior to starting because of mechanical issues.

Of the 199 cars eligible for the PNW Championship, we finished in 121st place.

Butt weight... their's more.

3 of our team couldn't make it to the last race, but we have four drivers. A few weeks back I found a team looking for drivers for the ridge. They had an 80's Rabbit, a similar enough car. I got in touch with them and referred our drivers. A deal was struck and Henry would join team Hello Kitty for this race.

You know what they say, whenever one door closes another one opens, other than that it's a pretty good car.

We are eagerly awaiting the release of the 2025 schedule and rulebook.

Will our team of intrepid heros finally finish the Zippy Zonda or will they face another season in Shelly the Scirocco?

Place your bets now.