Vorshlag overview of 2010

Welcome to the new Vorshlag Blog! This first post is just a quick overview of the last 12 months of cars, projects and product development here at Vorshlag. We’ve definitely been busy here – making several new camber plate designs, new wheel stud coverage (Porsche, Subaru, & Mini were added to the BMW line-up), more products for our E36 LS1 V8 swap kits, selling lots of AST shocks, and building all sorts of new project cars.



Our latest new chassis to delve into is the “S197″ Mustang chassis, specifically a 2011 Mustang GT 5.0. This year the Mustang got a whole new motor, the 5.0L 32 valve V8, and it got a 100 hp boost over last year. The GT also got optional 14” Brembo brakes for 2011, and this set-up is selling in huge numbers. We’ve got camber plates, shocks, lowering springs already and more new products in the pipeline. We’re running the car in SCCA’s STX class for autocrossing as well as NASA’s TTB class for Time Trial, with an eye towards moving up to TTA when the parts “points” start adding up (forum build-up here). The car made 378 whp, bone stock, and its faster than stink – it will be the most powerful car ever to enter STX class, by a good margin, but also likely the heaviest. The first NASA TT event is this coming weekend at MSR-Houston, where Terry (me) and Amy will both be running the car in TTB class.

Our first entry into the Grassroots Motorsports $2010 Challenge was an older E30 BMW with an LSx V8, which we spent over 1500 hours of after-hours time building, with an all-volunteer team of Dallas areas racers. This car was a big marketing success for us, pulling in 250K forum views in the first 12 months, even if it did explode the drivetrain -twice- in the drag race portion of the GRM event, last October. Sure, we’ve done V8 swaps before, but the trick with this project was that we had to buy and build the whole car for $2010, which meant we had to hand fabricate just about everything… it was kind of silly, but damn… it turned out looking and sounding pretty mean. The car was fast and looked good, but it was fragile. We did well in the concours judging and autocross portions of the 2 day GRM shootout, but we didn’t get a full 1/4 mile drag race pass in, which hurt our overall standings. We’re just tweaking and tuning on it this year (making it stronger & faster!) and going back for the $2011 Challenge in October, as well as taking it to the Ultimate Track Car Challenge with it in July at VIR.

Vorshlag bought a 38′ enclosed trailer and diesel 1 ton tow rig last year, and we put some miles on it going to some “away events”, like the GRM Challenge, the Solo Nationals, several NASA weekends, among other events. Unfortunately our SCCA DSP/NASA TTD BMW E46 build was pretty much a disaster, especially in SCCA autocross use.

At least we set a couple of NASA TT track records in this BMW, and Amy got her TT license driving it, before she grenaded the last motor at an autocross (doh!). M54s do NOT like to rev! The stock motor kept eating oil pump drives and wiping out rod bearings (twice). We’ve since just pushed it into the corner and it awaits an LS1 swap, after we finish Matt’s ’95 M3 LS1, which we’re building in the shop now. This car will help us finish out more sub-systems and other products to make the E36 LS1 swap easier for customers. next.

Stay tuned to the Vorshlag blog throughout 2011 for more project and product updates. These will also be cross-posted to the Vorshlag Twitter and Facebook pages.

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