City Boy - The Hangover

I ordered pizza 45 minutes ago and over my rumbling stomach, the only sound I can hear is Petey's hammer smashing--over and over again--on our poor Mustang's door panel. He's figured out a way to remove the inner doorskin metal without having to just leave it in and smash it flat, but that somehow still requires an amazing amount of hammering. He insists that it's the "right way" to do it, which means that's the only way we're going to do it, even at the cost of my sanity. In the grand scheme of things, this means we are still literally hammering away at the City Boy's bodywork, which you may have seen in a previous issue of your favorite magazine of all time (ahem, that's Circle Track). With our bumpers installed, we turned our attention to stripping our stock door panels and modifying the hatch to work out on the racetrack.

Of course, we've never actually been to the racetrack, so we're basically making this up on the fly, but light and loose wins races, so we're going with it. Thanks to our overbuilt but completely necessary NASCAR-inspired door bars, we knew that the stock door panels would never work, which meant some trimming was going to be in order. As you'll see, "some trimming" meant basically removing the entire door, leaving only the outer most doorskin. If you're cutting up your first race car along with us, it sounds like more work than it really is. Otherwise, if you're an old-school racer who has built more cars than I am years old, you know that it's always a bunch of fun to destroy stuff in the name of racing.

Along with the doorskin, we were also tasked with modifying the rear hatch of our Fox-body to eliminate the heavy factory glass and to creatively trim sections of the sheetmetal to drop some pounds and skirt some of the rules at our local tracks. Remember, when you're dealing with glass, please take it seriously. Precariously perching the hatch above an office dumpster and throwing old spark plugs and hammers at the glass until it breaks is not only irresponsible, but it is dangerous. If you can, it's best to get a local glass guy to come pull it out safely and doing so will save you the trouble of cleaning up shards of glass for days...ask us how we know.

Anyway, our pizza just got here and Pete finally stopped hammering, so I guess it is time to eat some food before I jump back behind the camera and watch Crew Chief Epple put the finishing touches on our door and hatch modifications. Follow along to see how it all goes together and make sure you send pictures of your first project to us dropping a quick email to rob.fisher@sorc.com.