The Process, Production Based Racing Car.
The easiest thing about racing is finding the desire to do it, making it happen is another thing entirely. Common advice for aspiring competitors is to buy a ready to race car. Now, understand that “race ready” is always a fallacy. The car is never race ready, it will need something and when you really start digging around it’s probably going to need a lot, if you intend to enjoy your race events. Buying a car is not bad advice however, but it’s not for everyone. If you are like me, half of the motivation is some car or another that you’ve taken a fancy to and only that one will do. So, for whatever reason we decide that the only way to proceed is to build ourselves a race car. Great, that’s settled now.
The single most common mistake that new competitors make when they decide to build a race car is that they make a lot of assumptions about what parts race cars need and they start buying the parts they think they are going to need right away, sometimes even before they have acquired the car. Put the plastic on ice for a minute and hear me out on this one. If your desire is to go wheel to wheel racing, the very first thing you need to pick out for your car will be the class letters you’ll slap on the door. You need to figure out where your car will fit in and what you can afford to do. WHY? I just want to buy that badass billet intake manifold that all the posts are about on the make model FB page, obviously I’ll need that for the race car, it adds 10HP! Must have!
A lot of people enjoy racing cars like the ones they drive on the street, and not everyone fits comfortably in tiny convertibles.
Not so fast. You have picked your car, you’ve decided that you want to build it from scratch. You can’t draw a map until you know the destination. Many classes for production based cars in wheel to wheel sprint racing have restrictions on what parts you can change from stock. A few of them are very restrictive, some are less so. Generally speaking, the more restrictive the rules are, the more affordable the racing is. Arms races are expensive. In SCCA you can run just about anything you want in STU, but in order to do so competitively, you’ll be really throwing money down the chute.
So find your class and find out what is allowed. Go to some races and watch the competition and the race groups in your area. Talk to some of the competitors that are already racing in the class you want to enter, make sure it’s for you. Then pour over the rules. Then ask more questions, and get a good understanding of where you are headed.
Another reason that you shouldn’t just go off half cocked on the shopping spree, I can guarantee you that for the first year of your racing, the part that holds you back the most will be your brain. Save your money for entry fees and seat time. You need to tune the driver up, so put your resources toward that.
Next let’s talk about what we do once we’ve picked the car and the class. What’s first on the to-do list?