Well finally took the car to Fort Wayne the last two days. It's running on the 650cc's, but not very well right now. I know the plugs are fouled to all heck and back, so I swapped those out. I'm sure it still needs some work on the fuel system, but my batteries died again on the logger (I hate that thing) so I'm just going by seat of the pants right now. She's breaking up pretty bad above 5psi or wot, I'm thinking a combination of boost leaks, bad plugs, and bad tuning caused it. Before long the tranny's coming back out and I'll be sending the ecu to Steve in Chicago anyways to have him do some repairs and do a full eprom chip for it. Full correctoin for the 650cc injectors, a 4000rpm launch rpm, and revised rev limiter and fuel cut delete. I can't wait.

   The new Corbeau seat is unbelievably comfy, although not so much with a coat on. I'm guessing that's because I'm close to the size limit for it. 36 in. waist is reccomended and I come in at 34 in. I tried running the harnesses to the stock locations but it just doesn't work there as far as the angles are concerned, it's just too steep to be safe and I feel better with them back on the strut tower bar.

   I attended a SCCA SOLO meeting for our local club at the director's house. Real cool guy and we've got alot of cool things planned for the upcoming year. We've got a new trailer coming to keep our scoring and timing in. This will be really nice since we lost a laptop to rain at the next to last event last year. We're also doing this team concept where we'll have team leaders who will try to keep our enrollment numbers up and provide for bigger and better events. Of course the more people we have signed up, the more money we make to run bigger and better events. I'm really looking forward to this year in racing, hard to believe its all only a couple 3 months away right now. Gotta get cracking on these last minute mods and repairs. 

   Wow, been a busy couple of weeks here. Within the past few weeks Kendal had her surgery done, we went to about a thousand christmases it seems, and unfortunately we lost my Great Uncle only a few short days before christmas which put a damper on the whole mood of things. He will be missed.

   On the topic of the car though I got some new toys and fixed some old problems. I finally got a decent driver's seat. My fiancee and father went in on a Corbeau Forza seat in black and her parents bought me a new helmet that matches the car. I also picked up a new nomex two piece driving setup, which I'll be sporting at events to make me look cooler . I finally picked up the welder and got practicing then set about fixing the exhaust systems holes and putting a protective layer or two of paint over it to help it last a little longer.

   I'll be proposing my sponsorship next week for our dealership, we just picked up a new catalog for our parts department that's over 1000 pages. My car is sporting parts from at least 20 of the manufacturers we now sell and hopefully will soon be sporting more with their approval.

   Well, just a little update today, I gotta get back to work so I don't get fired. Pics of the welding, seat, and other stuff to come.

   Well that's it for now. The next chapter will cover some of the destruction going on inside the car as I remove the sound deadening from it.

   Well as I mentioned in the last chapter I'm back to being able to work on the talon every night as opposed to having to make a 45 minute round trip to get anything done on it. Thanks to this new found freedom I have begun work on my first of many projects I've wanted to do for awhile now. After having seen some various ideas from other DSM owners across the nation and other race cars in general I was able to finalize my idea for utilizing a spare headlight as an air scoop for my air filter. Of course the goal was to feed the filter with as much cold air as possible and I'd been removing the headlight completely to do this. The only problem was that this let the air go pretty much wherever it wanted including down and out from under the front bumper which of course wasn't helping the air intake any at all really. The idea was to form a tube to make sure that the air got within mere inches of the filter so that it had the best chance possible of staying cool.

   Of course the first step was to begin taking apart the headlight to see what exactly I had to work with here. Now the headlight is of course held together with the metal snaps around the lens but also by the glue that seals the lens to the headlight bucket as well. Once you've removed as much as you can from the back of the headlight such as the bulbs and bracing,  you'll want to throw the headlight into the oven. Now you only want it in there for a short period of time to help heat the glue and make it possible to separate it. I used about 5 minutes at 350 degrees. The headlights are pretty tough so unless you forget about them in the oven you won't burn them or ruin your oven either. Once the lens was separated I simply turned the adjustment screws to their maximum while also loosening the bolts holding the refractors in place. This takes a little time as there is some tension on them. After the refractors are out you should have something similar to this looking back at you.

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   I then cut off the bolts with a dremel and began cutting out the area between the two circles as this is the basis for the pathway. Now you could just leave it like this, but I also cut out the face of the lens as well to make sure I was feeding as much air as possible into the area. Now you'll also want to start cutting out the webbing of the chassis by the air filter to make sure you have room for your air to get back to the air filter. Here's a picture of what my cutout area looks like. You can also sort of see what the headlight bucket looks like after I cut it out and started fiberglassing. 

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    After that its time to begin fiberglassing. Now you can do this many different ways. Some prefer to setup a mold, others like to freehand it all, in the end I chose to do a little bit of both on this project. The headlight bucket itself was pretty close to the right shape in the first place, but it needed to be smoothed out some in order to get it to flow the way I wanted. I ended up just cutting up the glass in to strips and laying it over the plastic. Now one big problem with fiberglass is that it's not a big fan of making 90 degree turns, much less the 180 degree turns you'll be asking it to make in this situation. Now on the bucket I used just some cheap fiberglass cloth from Autozone and some equally generic polyeurethane resin on it. Now the polyeurethane resin is more fluid and cheaper, but ultimately I believe Epoxy resin is the best way to go as far as both final stiffness and ease of use as its inherent stickiness keeps the fabric from floating away and sliding around as you try to smooth it out. I'm not going to go into the details of "How to Use Fiberglass" because I am by no means an expert myself and there are much better tutorials available on the web anyways. Here's what I ended up with after fighting the slippery polyeurethane resin.

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At this point in time I was driving dad's leftover GMC S-15 which just plain wasn't getting the job done as far as looks and performance went. Granted it was a nice black on the outside with the nicest wheels you could get from the factory at the time and even had the 4.3 v6, but the bright red cloth interior and dented/rusty exterior left a little to be desired.

Eventually though the mustang started to get long in the tooth and a replacement needed to be found. We looked at everything from Mustang's to Camaro's , but oddly enough we ended up at the Eagle dealership looking at a used Camaro when my father stumbled across a dealer driven 1998 Eagle Talon tsi. So we make the jump from big domestic v8 to japanese turbo 4 cylinder. A bit of a change, but to my surprise the car was almost as fast as the mustang ever was, of course the 5 speed helped this a bit. This was the beginning of the fixation with smaller, lighter, 4 cylinder powered underdogs.

In the next installment we'll move into my car and the girl's issues with her talon.