A racecar build plan

I have two things motivating me to generate all these words: documenting and sharing. None of us have ever built up a race car, Lemons or otherwise. Documenting the story seemed like a good idea. Sharing what we've learned, hard won (if not wisdom), also seemed like a good idea. Learning how to do this stuff is hard, and if what we're sharing here helps other folks then we've paid forward some of the help that we've received.

As we'll see here, building a car actually involves a staggering amount of things. Who knew? Of course, there's everything required to pass Lemons Tech. The cage, being the most  complex, "long pole in the tent" item, is complete. But now we have everything else to tackle. Fortunately, a couple decades as professional computer nerds have honed our ability to make a shitload of lists.

Trello is a fantastic, simple, free-tier-available system for creating lists with items, and moving the items from list to list. For example "ToDo", "In Progress", "Done" - just the kind of labels you'd need if you're trying to track dozens of tasks against a final completion. We've used it for race planning for years and love it. We also use it for our Race Retros, which I'll cover in an upcoming post.

We started by breaking down our tasks into "required to race" and "nice to have before the race" categories. As with any project, time and budget constraints become real and you have to make some choices. Getting lost on a nice-to-have, while your required tasks sit un-actioned, is a sure way to miss the green flag.

This is our To-Do board with required items to complete before the June race. This is just a snapshot in time (for posterity, April 23 ish) of our progress. Happily, most of our required-to-race tasks are now completed.

I want to make a few comments here and there about specific items on our build lists.

Install race rearview mirror.

You will be so much happier keeping track of all those cars catching you eating your dust with a big mirror. We use this one available from Summit Racing.

Replace antifreeze with water.

In Colorado, we fill the cars with antifreeze during the cold winter months. We can often see temps below zero. However, in Lemons we run water only.

3.11.2     Coolant. Coolant must be water only—no antifreeze, anti-boil, water-wetter, or other additives allowed. (That stuff is slippery—when your car pukes its guts all over the track, we don’t want to be sliding around in it.) A functional catch tank is mandatory.

Now let's take a look at the Stretch Goals board.

Nothing on this stretch list is supposed to be critical. I expect we'll knock through about half of this, depending on how the next two work nights go.

repair side markers (useful in 24hr race)

Seeing things (other cars, apex markers, curbs, racooons, errant bodywork...) is very important. Also important is that other drivers see you. In the full-24, where we race overnight, we are keen to make sure other drivers see our cars.

As our deadline looms, we've started to organize a specific list for each work night. Here's a peek at what's lined up for next Monday.

Our work sessions run pretty efficient for a bunch of goofs, but I'll say this: the more effort we put into planning before we start, the more efficient we are with the limited time available to us. We're fortunate to have a great group of people, but 6 or 7 humans standing around catching up on life isn't going to make great progress. So! Plan your work time!

My favorite board is the growing list of completed tasks.

As you can see much of this was part of the interior removal preparation for our cage install. Nothing too exciting there.

Install Stainless brake lines.

Along with DOT 4 or 5 brake fluid, this is required for any vehicle seeing track time. Cars setup for street use will quickly overheat their brake fluid, bringing it to a boil and seeding the lines with air bubbles. Pushing on your brake pedal and encountering air bubbles instead of nice thicc brake fluid is going to ruin your day. Upgrade your lines.

Install race quality wheel studs.

You are going to be putting a ton of energy into your wheel studs. Frequent wheel swaps, hard cornering, hard braking and getting up on the curbs all put wear on metal that was never intended to take that much punishment. Upgrade your wheel studs. We used these for our 280zx. Whatever specifics you choose, ARP is the way.

Replace pads and rotors.

Maybe this is obvious, maybe it's not. Invest in your pads, we love the R4-E or ST-43 compounds available from Porterfield Brakes. Whatever is available for your vehicle, just reach out to them and indicate you need endurance pads. What happens if you use a non-endurance compound?

You cannot overstate how much 9 hours of sustained high temperature and high friction is a special use case requiring special equipment.

We've got 5 weeks to go before the race, and things are really coming together with our 1981 Datsun 280zx. Stay tuned as we continue to share progress, lessons, and pictures of things breaking.