Our Late Model stock car project has been an opportunity to apply much of the technology that we preach in the pages of Circle Track to a real race car. The culmination of that effort is to actually race the car. So we put together a plan to travel to North Carolina and race the car to see if all of our hard work has paid off. The results were amazing.

The NASCAR-sanctioned Late Model stock car we have been reporting on for some time is now finished. In the latter weeks of April, we completed assembly, aligned, and set up the car, and took it to Orlando Speedworld for a shakedown run. The car performed better than expected. Here is how we prepared the car for testing.

Live and learn. We've been saying that to ourselves a lot lately. It's essentially just a nice way of saying you've just screwed up, but don't plan on doing it again. Because we did a lot of livin' and learnin', Project Mudslinger was delayed so much that the car was completed about the same time the season came to a close.

The pieces are starting to come together for the Reality Racer Project Modified. The base engine was on hand, but there are still other engine components being ordered. It doesn't mean we have to stop and wait, because there's plenty of work to be done. Luckily, we're not on a deadline since we're not chasing points.

Originally, when we sketched out the plan for Project Mudslinger, we spent no more time considering our car’s bodywork than a 2 year old would his Brussels sprouts. Everyone in our group has his own strengths, but skinning a car is one that none of us claim. Simply slap on a little sheetmetal, and a lot of duct tape, and as long as nothing fell off we figured we’d be set. Painting would be handled by whatever brand of spray paint we could get by the case at the hardware store.

Of course, if you have been following the progress of Project Mudslinger in Circle Track you already know that plan has been canned. In racing, it turns out, you should treat plans like you do your socks: Update them often with fresh ones or you’re going to stink up the works.

Quality Skinning

When Chris Hargett and Neil Wilson offered their time and expertise to help hang a new body on our Mustang we jumped at the chance. Chris and Neil, of H&W Race Car Fabrication, first got down to work on the previous installment of the Project Mudslinger buildup, and since then we’ve really been enlightened on just how much quality sheetmetal work can mean to a race car.

Dirt cars in this class do not depend as much on aero as their asphalt brethren, but it’s still important that the body is an advantage and not a hindrance to the way the car handles on the track. Also, several manufacturers have helped us out along the way, and there is no way they want a project they are involved with to look like a rolling pile of you-know-what. We want to represent them well—I’m sure you have the same concerns for your sponsors.

The primary steps covered in the previous installment were to find the car’s approximate ride height (by installing the engine, a dummy transmission and finishing up the suspension) and to build a level framework inside the car to hang the interior sheetmetal. The roof and rear quarters have to remain stock and in the stock location, so other than a little trim work, that part was easy. Because there was no wiggle room there, we began by placing the nose. We are using a flexible plastic Dirt Late Model nose we got from JR Motorsports. It comes in two halves, so it was easy to cut 2-½ inches from the inside of each half to get the proper width. We used an aluminum backing sheet to span the joint and Pop riveted everything together.

Finding the proper location was a little more difficult. We spent a lot of time moving the nose around, setting it on blocks to simulate ride height, and stepping back to make sure it fit the overall proportions of the car. The problem was its low profile didn’t fit with the radiator framework already welded in place. Actually, the radiator mount needed to be moved closer to the motor anyway, so it was easy to see what needed to be done. Out came the saws and welder for a little “fine tuning.”

I don’t remember much from my high school days—and what I do remember is receeding right along with my hairline—but there was one story about the most unlucky dude in Greek mythology that has stuck with me all this time. This cat’s name was Sisyphus, and he had done something so heinous in his lifetime that he was sentenced to forever push a large boulder up a hill. Every time he neared the top of the hill the rock escaped from his control and rolled right back down to the bottom, and he’d have to start over. Don’t ask me what the point of rolling the rock up the hill was, I don’t know.

The gist here is we’ve all had days when we’ve felt a lot like Sisyphus. As Project Mudslinger has inched ever nearer to completion, we’ve sometimes felt trapped on the same hill. Last month we recounted the process of installing the steering system, then ripping it out and starting over again. Project Mudslinger is still moving forward, but as we’ve learned more about what we need out of the car, we’ve begun the process of refining some areas that still needed a little help.

Thinking we were ready to put a body on the car, we ordered five sheets of aluminum from Stock Car Steel and Aluminum, loaded everything up and trucked the Project Mudslinger car to a friend’s race shop. Chris Hargett races Dirt Late Models and Neil Wilson is his crew chief. Together they have started H&W Race Car Fabrication, building and repairing cars for other racers. They once made the off-hand comment that they would help us out if we ever needed anything and now we’re holding them to it. Chris earns his living in the daytime working in his father’s body shop, so we knew we wanted his help making the Mudslinger look like a real car again.

Using half-inch square sticks of steel that we also got from Stock Car Steel, Chris and Neil began by building a framework to box out the inside of the car. Our rules say we have to have a stock steel roof and rear quarters, so to keep weight low, the rest of the car is going to be aluminum. Because we weren’t going to be using the heavy stock trunk lid we decided to make a Late Model-style trap-door access to the fuel cell. It required a trip to the hardware store for a piano hinge and a little extra time on the sheetmetal brake, but it turned out really trick. We also cut out all but the exterior face of the A-posts. While we were at it, we notched the A-posts and dropped the front of the roof appoximately an inch. The goal is to make sure the roof is angled slightly down, or is at least level, so it won’t act like a big sail going down the straights.

Click Here For Project Costs

Coming into this project, the crew of Project Mudslinger had a few expectations: We expected to have some fun; we expected to learn some things along the way; and, most of all, we expected to get this car running before we all died of old age. That's certainly not too much to expect. What we didn't plan on was learning something about ourselves. That self-realization stuff is for somebody else to watch on Oprah. Frankly, we prefer a simpler environment where we can get dirty working on the car, tell jokes and burp if the spirit leads without having to say excuse me. I know what you're thinking: What the heck are you talking about? Read on, you'll see. I just wanted to get that off my chest before we started.

Before Project Mudslinger had cross-threaded its first nut on a bolt, we spent a lot of time gathering information from everyone we could find with racing experience. What are we going to need? How much time is it going to take to get a car built? What does it take to be competitive? And then there was the one I’m sure every racer has asked: How in the world can it cost so much?

In our conversations with other racers and car builders I’ve noticed that many of them refer to building a race car as an “art.” This analogy has merit; the Renoirs and Picassos of the chassis building community are people like Smokey Yunick, Junior Johnson, Eddie Dickerson and Banjo Matthews.

Then there are the builders who are kind of like that guy doing caricatures for 10 bucks down by the mall—it looks pretty good, but you’re sure there’s no way your nose is that big or your hairline that thin.

The Project Mudslinger crew one day hopes to be building the racing equivalent of the Mona Lisa, but sometimes it feels a lot more like a paint-by-numbers Elvis on black velvet. Part of the problem stems from the fact that we are trying to build a shop from scratch at the same time we’re building the car. That means that more than once our progress has been stopped cold by something as ridiculous as not having the right fastener. That probably won’t change until we can build up a decent bolt bucket—take a tip from us and don’t go racing without one.

Although progress has been slow, we were able to make some headway on the chassis while our engine was being prepared at Johnson’s Machine Shop (see “Shoehorn, Please!” for more details). First on the to-do list was the front suspension. We are replacing the existing A-arms with new ones from Ford Racing Performance Parts. They have all the same angles but are upgraded with low-friction ball joints. But before installing them in the car, we upgraded the bushings with a set of Polygraphite racing bushings from Performance Suspension Technology. We also ordered a brake rebuild kit from PST that keeps us within the rules for stock brakes but replaces just about everything except the rotors and calipers up front and the drums in back.

We are using Bilstein’s shocks and struts because it is one of the few companies that produces a circle track racing-quality unit for a stock Mustang. Both the struts up front and the shocks in back are a mono-tube design, which helps ensure consistency lap after lap. We ordered ours with the company’s in-house valving specs, but Bilstein can produce shocks with almost any damping and rebound numbers you can dream up. The only problem we encountered is the struts are made to late model specs, and our ’93 spindles were a quarter-inch too large for the mounting bracket. We had to take the spindles to a machinist to get the strut tabs shaved down to the correct thickness. To make sure we didn’t alter any of the steering geometries and wind up crabwalking down the track, we cut an eighth-inch off of each side instead of taking the easy way out and lopping a quarter-inch off either the front or back. The shocks are matched with Blue Coil racing springs. We are starting off with a 750-pound spring in the right front, 650 in the left front and 175 on both sides in the back. Just to make sure, we tested all four on a friend’s spring checker, and each one checked out exactly at the marked spring rate.

So you’re sitting there in your shop looking at a brand new race car and you think to yourself, “Let’s go racing.” Well, not so fast! There’s plenty of stuff to be done to the car before you go racing, and that’s what Ryan and Rudy Zeck experienced with our Circle Track Southern Force Late Model Stock Car.

Setup Basics

Sure, the car looks fast just sitting in the shop, but there’s still plenty that needs to be done before it gets to the racetrack, and most of it is just the basics.

“You need to set everything up with the weight actually in the car,” explained project crew chief and former racer Rudy Zeck. “You need to set your ride heights and your caster/camber. A good starting point for a short-track setup is 3-½- to four-degrees negative camber in the right front and a small amount of positive camber in the left front. As far as caster split, you run more positive caster in the right front. Usually you start out at 3-½ to four degrees versus the left front where you’ll set it up at one degree. That way you’ll have a two- to three-degree split from right to left. That helps the car turn in the center of the corner. If the driver lets go of the wheel with that split in the car, it (the car) will want to go left. That’s exactly what we did with this car to prepare for the first race.”

Race Day

The crew arrived at Zeck’s shop in Concord, N.C. at 7 a.m. That left plenty of time to do a final check of the car, load up and get to the track, which, on this day, happened to be the famed Hickory (N.C.) Motor Speedway. That’s where the American Racing Association held a 125-lap event for its Southern All-Stars Late Model Stock Car Touring Series.

The 90-minute drive from the Charlotte area, plus a brief stop at McDonalds for breakfast, forced the team to arrive at the track later than anticipated. “We have a volunteer crew (Jacob Lyon, Bob Dillner, Matthew Dillner and Amy Calello), so we want to make sure they eat on the way to the track,” said driver Ryan Zeck, who is also a team engineer for Robert Yates Racing (working on both Dale Jarrett’s and Ricky Rudd’s teams). “If we don’t get them something to eat on the way to the track, they’ll be unhappy. You don’t want your crew mad at you. That’s a big factor a lot of people don’t think of. Taking care of your crew is just as important as taking care of the car.”

The new car itself concerned Ryan and Rudy. “We didn’t go test, and that was a mistake,” said a worried Rudy. “We’re coming up here feeling confident. We know everything was done right on that car, and it’s one of the best looking Late Models here. It’s clean and simple. But because of time and our jobs, we did not get to shake-down the car, and you should always do that before you race a car the first time.

We’ve all heard big things often come in small packages. Yes, we know it’s a cliché about as old and tired as Grandma’s mint-green Buick grocery-getter, but there is a kernel of truth to it. In the case of the Project Mudslinger, every cubic centimeter of engine displacement means one pound toward the car’s total weight. You can overstroke a four cylinder to come up with gobs of thrust, but it does no good if the weight penalty makes it impossible for you to turn in the corners. Needless to say, we are looking for big power in a small package.

Race Engineering and Johnson’s Machine Shop have been wrestling with this problem for years, and the two companies have teamed up to produce some pretty vicious four-bangers (see our stroked four cylinder buildup, “Supersize It!,” in the Feb. 2001 issue, or go to www.circletrack.com). They agreed to assist us in our quest for speed and even to let Circle Track follow along to show you exactly what’s going on inside our little black powerplant.

Race Engineering specializes in the short-block, and Johnson’s Machine builds the heads, complete with overhead cam. Race Engineering normally ships its short-blocks assembled, but for our project Tim Yates, Johnson’s head engine builder, is handling all the engine assembly at Johnson’s shop in South Carolina. Our block is a 2.3 liter that originally lived in either a Ford Mustang or Ranger pickup. It has been bored .030 inches over, align honed and machined to zero deck the pistons. Total displacement will be 2,340cc. Rules state the crank also has to be a stock piece, but that’s about all. Race Engineering takes advantage of that by shaving approximately three pounds off the counterweights. Three pounds may not sound like much at first, but it’s a ton in terms of rotating weight and drastically improves acceleration. After balancing, our crank now weighs in at a svelte 28 pounds. Both the block and crank are baked at 700 degrees in a special oven and shot-peened, both to strengthen the metal and thoroughly clean it after years of road use.

Before our Race Engineering Pro rods and Wiseco pistons are installed, everything is prefitted, complete with bearings, and thoroughly checked for proper clearances. Yates says Johnson’s and Race Engineering recommend .0025-.0028 clearance between the main bearings and the crank and also .007 endplay.

Once everything checks out, final assembly can begin on our short block. Our 5.7-inch rods are fitted to a special set of Wiseco pistons. Because the wristpin hole extends into the oil groove a spacer is supplied to support the oil ring. The first ring is gapped to .012, and the second is gapped to .010. Main caps are bolted in at 85 pounds, while the rod bolts are torqued to 50—both with 30 weight motor oil.

There’s a great story about how Elvis Presley made an unannounced visit to then President Nixon in 1970. I’m not sure how much is fact and how much is myth, but the story goes that Nixon welcomed Elvis, who presented the President with a rare Colt .45 pistol. In return, Nixon gave Elvis a badge and an honorary position as a United States Narcotics Bureau agent.

For the momentous occasion, Elvis was arrayed in his usual, subdued garb: black velvet cape, a white shirt open to mid-chest with a collar large enough to camp under, a belt buckle the size of Texas and two chains with enough gold to make Fort Knox sit up and take notice. It was a fantastic outfit if you ask me, but then again, I write for a racing magazine and not GQ.

After the exchange of gifts, Nixon, who was wearing a much more presidential suit and tie, couldn’t restrain himself any longer and finally made a comment to The King about his choice of attire for a meeting with the President of the United States.

“Well, Mr. President,” Elvis is said to have replied, “you’ve got your gig, and I’ve got mine.”

That’s the way we felt as our Project Mudslinger vehicle was finally stripped to the core and ready for the rollcage. We are smart enough to realize building a rollcage we’re willing to stake our lives on just ain’t our gig, so we loaded up what was left of our car and trundled it off to an expert.

Like we said, safety is something we take seriously. Normally, guys racing in Mini-Stocks are on a pretty tight budget, but we do recommend having a professional build your cage if you don’t have complete confidence with your welding and fabrication skills. For help we turned to Wes Filyaw and NASFAB in Concord, N.C. Wes has been racing Mini-Stocks for years and is one of the few people in our area that specializes in building that type of car.

We are also lucky to have the advantages that come with living in central North Carolina, a hub for big-time stock car racing. While most chassis and cage builders will do it for you, we decided to order our own raw materials. Stock Car Steel, located in Mooresville, N.C., provides raw materials to almost every NASCAR Winston Cup and Busch team in the area, but it also delivers to any race shop within its range. The great thing about this company is it doesn’t require gigantic minimum orders like most industrial steel distributors. If you can find an outfit like this close to you that will deliver, it’s definitely the way to go. We ordered up 20 feet of 2-inch square tubing, 40 feet of 1-½- inch .095 dom tubing and another 60 feet of 1-½-inch .083 dom tubing. It was waiting for us at the NASFAB shop the next day. We also ordered a box of 50 gussets from A&A Manufacturing to further strengthen the center section.

The comment that sparked our inspiration was innocent enough: “We should do that sometime.” The conversation was about building a race car, and it still surprises me how little planning we did before committing ourselves to the project. There were three of us, brothers Rodney and Scott Helms and myself, and we knew we wanted to start small and race on dirt, but otherwise, our enthusiasm far outstripped our knowledge.

A few of the decisions were easy to make. We chose Lancaster (S.C.) Speedway because it’s close to home, dirt and offers a division to our liking: the Modified Fours. Mod-4 cars, as they are commonly called, are four cylinder rear-wheel drives. They are entry-level but a cut above the Bomber Class and require a good amount of preparation. That was fine with us since the allure was building a car as well as racing it.

With that out of the way, it was time for step one: Find a car. And here we ran headlong into our first obstacle. A quick tour through a couple of local junkyards left us overwhelmed. Ninety percent of the field in this class is made up of Mustangs, so that’s probably a safe bet, but what model? How much damage is too much? How much should we expect to pay? We needed help.

Calling all experts LWP Auto Salvage is a family-owned scrapyard in Concord, N.C., that specializes in helping racers, so we went there armed with plenty of questions.

“Most people these days in the four-cylinder classes are racing the Fox body Mustangs, even though they have a strut front suspension,” explains Wayne Pendergrass, the “W” in LWP and a racer himself. “A double A-arm setup is easier to adjust, but to get a Ford with that you have to go back to the Pintos and Mustang IIs, and those are getting pretty rare.”

Wayne spoke the truth—unmangled Pintos and Mustang IIs were tougher to locate than Charlton Heston at a Greenpeace rally. But he did point us to an ’89 sedan body that he’d already hulled out. We snatched it up quicker than you can say, “Will you take a check?” and Wayne even threw in a pair of doors, a hood and a nosepiece (although it may be damaged beyond repair). By the way, if you don’t have a good pair of gloves, get some before you set foot in a junkyard. We invested in several pairs of Mechanix Wear gloves and have been very happy with them.

A hulled-out body may save us time stripping the car, but it also meant we had more junkyard shopping to do. We found both a front suspension and rear end off a ’93 model at Love Auto Parts. Again, we weren’t just looking for parts, we were looking for someone who could steer us in the right direction, and we found him in Mike Honeycutt. Mike has worked with race teams big and small and knew exactly what we needed. He led us to a ’93 Mustang with only minor damage and even took off the parts we needed. Because most Fords, including Fox-body Mustangs, are unibodies, the entire front suspension came off in one piece.

Planning to build a race car from scratch is a lot like watching a sunrise in the desert—pretty to watch take shape, but you know the heat is coming soon. That is basically where we stand at Circle Track magazine; both our previous race car buildup projects have been retired, and it’s time to start fresh all over again. It’s pretty exciting—after all, buildup projects are a lot of fun to watch develop for both readers and the poor grunts spending too many nights away from home turning wrenches.

So you can imagine how our ears perked up while we were chewing the fat with longtime racer Rudy Zeck (who is also Speedway Motorsports director of research and development), and he mentioned he and his son, Ryan, were thinking of building a new car for the upcoming season.

A new car? What type, exactly? Ever thought about writing for a magazine? The poor man never knew what an innocent phrase like, “Sure, why not?” could get him into.

The Crew

You might say Rudy Zeck has a checkered past in motorsports—checkered flags that is. Rudy started racing ’50s-era Chevrolets in 1967 in California, and won track championships at Redwood Acres in ’68 and ’75. In addition to his 13 years as a driver, Rudy also spent several years as a crew chief for a Grand National team that raced at Ontario (California) and Riverside (California). Lately he’s put his effort toward advancing Ryan’s racing career. In ’94 Rudy, wife Pam and Ryan packed up and moved from their Eureka, California, home to new digs in Concord, North Carolina, where he signed on with Speedway Motorsports, the company that owns six tracks that host NASCAR Winston Cup races.

Twenty-four-year-old Ryan has been racing since he was nine and one way or another intends to make racing a career. When he’s not driving or working on his own cars, he works as a chassis engineer at Robert Yates Racing. Driving or working on a setup, it’s all the same as Ryan sees it.

“Racing fed my desire to further my education,” he says. “I wanted to learn how to design parts on a race car and advance the technology so it would go faster.”

Ryan has been racing Late Models since ’93, when he won three races and was the Rookie of the Year at Coos Bay International Speedway (Oregon) and Redwood Acres Speedway (California). In all, he’s won six Late Model races in limited starts. Ryan was the first recipient of the Alan Kulwicki Memorial Scholarship at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and graduated in ‘99 with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering.

The Plan

It didn’t take long to talk Rudy and Ryan into letting Circle Track come on board and cover the process. Because Ryan’s dream is to race for a living in one of NASCAR’s top series, the two felt the best step was to compete in a touring series. To that end, the American Racing Association Late Model Stock series seemed like a perfect fit. The ARA’s top division visits several tracks but doesn’t require the competitors to travel across the country, it works to keep costs in check, the cars are almost identical to NASCAR Late Models and it even has television coverage.

“The biggest reason we want to race the ARA Late Model Stock series is we believe it will be good experience,” Rudy says. “You are not always racing at the same track, so you’ve got to learn how to set up the car and drive different tracks on different weeks.”

This racing thing sure is an up-and-down deal. I guess it’s a lot like golf in that respect. You can have problems that convince you you’re going to quit right there and take up another sport, but it only takes one thing to go right, and you’re reminded why you love it so much and can’t imagine doing anything else.

Front suspension tuning can be one of the most critical aspects of getting your race car to handle properly. That is why it is unfortunate that many Street Stock racers simply throw in a heavier right-front spring and never experiment beyond that. We wanted to start with a Street Stock that was set up for racing and take it in another direction to see how much improvement was possible. We started with the #37 Street Stock that Bob Carpenter races at Ventura Raceway on the 1/4-mile dirt track.

Front suspension tuning can be one of the most critical aspects of getting your race car to handle properly. That is why it is unfortunate that many Street Stock racers simply throw in a heavier right-front spring and never experiment beyond that. We wanted to start with a Street Stock that was set up for racing and take it in another direction to see how much improvement was possible. We started with the #37 Street Stock that Bob Carpenter races at Ventura Raceway on the 1/4-mile dirt track.