Jan ’19 updates

January 31, 2019

Bespoke items always take longer than expected

Active GT40: with the # of custom items we’re looking for, we slipped past an end of year delivery…which means we didn’t have the Christmas Holiday to work on the car.  It’s in the final stages and expect delivery in February.  Chris remains great to work with, and the car is coming together nicely!!

Back in December the chassis was completed and sent to powder-coating. It’s now back for final prepping…including a set of custom “Bundle of Snakes” exhaust headers with large 1 7/8″ primaries into 3.5″ collectors.
1 option that I was set on was to get the bodywork mounted by Chris…it’s hard enough to put a production car hood back on straight, it’s a whole new level to line up all of the panels/gaps. Chris goes the extra mile and has sanded the bodywork as well. the amount of FG dust on the ground is evidence enough of the hard work they’re putting into this build.

ATL Fuel Cells: We finalized the details on the dual fuel cell…but similar to the most car builds, it takes longer than I would have expected…once we slipped the starting point into the Fall/Winter, it ~doubled the design/build time as that’s when all of the race teams are doing the same thing. They’ve been easy to work with, and have been accommodating of a few revisions to get what we wanted & also refined the details to reduce cost. 

The GT40 fuel tanks is unique in that there’s 2, each holding ~8 gallons. This was our final schematic…we’ll use the Driver’s tank as a slave, with a cheaper transfer pump to move fuel to the Passenger side (Master). This helps to reduce cost/complexity, as we only have to put 1 high pressure fuel pump, & 1 scavenging trap door in the fuel tank.

Mendeola Transaxle: this has slid into 2019 as well…they continue to be great to work with, and also really busy.  I had envisioned an OTS (Off the Shelf) transaxle that they’d just crate up and ship…didn’t realize they do each one custom to the exact customer specs. Commitment is for early March.

cool cut-away of a Mendeola Transaxle
Mendeola get used in lots of builds…everything from GT40s to offroad dirt monsters!