Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Witchdoctor/Costas 3rd gen Camaro: 24 hours of LeMons race car

Collapse
X
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Witchdoctor/Costas 3rd gen Camaro: 24 hours of LeMons race car

    Update for Oct 23, 2010: Figured I'd post this up, as some of you might be interested in building or running a LeMons car.



    Costas and his band of merry men (and women) have been campaigning this 3rd gen Camaro in the 24 Hours of LeMons and Chump car for the past few years. There have been a lot of hands in this build, including a cage by TurboTodd, and tons of other prep work by Costas and many others. The car itself is some early 1980s 3rd gen with a factory 305" V8, complete with craptastic stock 2 barrel carburetor and manual trans. Its pretty nasty looking now, and well... it probably always will be.

    Here's some writeups of the build:
    They've placed as high as 2nd, back in their very first LeMons race in it in Oct 2008. Initially they had some flak for the car potentially being an overdog, but not anymore. The thing only had 180 hp stock, and it shows. Stock radiator. Stock exhaust manifolds. Its pretty weak. But its consistent, and they do well in events do to good preparation, good radio/crew work, and FAST pit stops. The car is getting some small tweaks here and there, mostly for safety and reliability. It ain't pretty.... if you saw this car in person you wouldn't doubt the $500 claim.




    One thing that they knew they needed to do faster was driver extractions/changes. Part of this involved adding a quick release onto the steering column & wheel. Costas had scrounged and bought a cheap, weld-on, circle track style quick release coupler. We rummaged around in my shop and found the perfect adapter to thread to the stock column (one of our long reach strut top nuts we make for our camber plates), he whittled it down on the band saw and it fit perfectly. We threaded it down around the end of the column then welded the thing to the end of the shaft so it cannot ever come off. Then we welded the supplied (and modified) coupler around that and made it nice and strong and perfectly centered. It sounds pretty hokey but it came out pretty damn slick. Its only bolted on with one bolt in that picture but it will be drilled/bolted with the required 3 bolts before race day.



    Costas also wanted a better/safer seat & a Sparco adjustable slider. They had an aluminum race seat in there before that had no cover or padding, bolted to a hacked-up stock slider, and it was pretty damned uncomfortable for 1-2 hour stints and too high for the tall co-drivers. So Costas rounded up a used Sparco bottom mount seat and slider and we built an all new bracket for it one Saturday.



    I made this one like I have done many times in the past... started with 1.25" square tubing, drilled and added tabs to make it fit the very much not aligned factory stock seat bolt holes. Then mocked up the seat and slider a dozen times in the car with various height drivers. Once we got the heights right at both fore-aft extremes (it moves more than 18" with these sliders), we tacked everything up in the car, then pulled it out and finish welded everything, then shot it with gray paint. All of this fitting, testing, and welding took 3-4 hours, like it always seems to.



    We were trying to keep it light but it still crept past 5 pounds. Oh well, its very strong, has tubing at the rear if they want to bolt the submarine straps to it, and the entire seat & slider assembly should bolt into any 3rd gen - which will be nice if this LeMons car ever expires, so it can donate the seats and some other bits they can unbolt.



    Last but not least... there was some nasty flapper valve in this exhaust manifold adapter bracket thingie that was leaking exhaust and had to be choking off some flow. Since it was a $0 fix, Costas yanked out that butterfly valve and then cleaned it up a bit. Then I welded the hole solid (inside and out) and ground the weld smooth. Should flow a tiny bit better now... every fraction of a horsepower helps.



    So that's the extant of the work we did at Vorshlag that Saturday. Its a drop in the bucket, and I am not posting this claiming to have done any real, substantial work on the car - it just passed through the shop and was "interesting". Sometimes the pictures help us remember how we did stuff - to replicate later. Getting old and all.... this is more of a "bad memory/prep notes" kind of post. There's a ton of LeMons cars being built in the Dallas area, but this was the first one I've worked on.

    They are running the car next at the LAISSEZ LES CRAPHEAPS ROULEZ, at No Problems Raceway in New Orleans, LA, later this month (November 20-21). Assuming its all back together in time. This will be their first "True 24 hours" race in the Camaro... that's right, no "break" for the night, this will be a round the clock, through the night 24 hours race!

    Stay tuned...
    Last edited by Fair!; 11-01-2010, 12:47 PM.
    Terry Fair - www.vorshlag.com
    2018 GT / S550 Dev + 2013 FR-S / 86 Dev + 2011 GT / S197 Dev + C4 Corvette Dev
    EVO X Dev + 2007 Z06 / C6 Dev + BMW E46 Dev + C5 Corvette Dev

  • #2
    Re: Witchdoctor/Costas 3rd gen Camaro: 24 hours of LeMons race car

    HUGE thanks for the help that day Terry!!

    Some of the links are broken but they should be back up soon, I changed hosting a while back...argh.

    I'll have more updates and a race report to file assuming all goes smooth and we get there!!


    Costas
    cars and such...

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: Witchdoctor/Costas 3rd gen Camaro: 24 hours of LeMons race car

      Updated for Nov 13, 2010: Well I had a nice post ready to go and I lost it, timed out. I hate that about forums sometimes. Anyway... went by to help Costas last Saturday and here's what we worked on...



      Motor was out, we got it in and stabbed to the trans. Costas worked on the exhaust manifolds, water pump, intake, and carb.



      Kind of an odd note: the 2-bbl intake manifold has 2 mounting holes but the carb that goes with it has 4. The gasket has provisions for only the 2 in the intake. These came off the same car, too. You can also see the ample engine bay room on a 3rd gen V8. Paul could almost stand comfortably in front of the engine... at least until he installed the water pump, then it got a little "snug". I think he might of liked it... I posted that picture on his FB page and tagged him, saying his relationship status had changed to "with water pump". I installed a 3 gauge cluster ($22 at O'Reilys, on sale!) and we hooked up the sensors. The Camaro has dual water temp gauges, for redundancy.



      I spent an embarrassingly long time installing two Dzus fasteners on the cover door for the fuel cell. Costas and another team member had built this steel/aluminum fire break cover for the entire fuel cell, since the 3rd gen has no effective rear firewall. They had this hinged door to cover the top, which you'd need to open to refuel. These 2 wing-nut style Dzus fasteners will make that an easy, fast part of the pit stop. Had to do a bit of de-construction to get the hinge flipped around then used the Dzus dimple tool to recess the holes and make them flush mount. While I was jacking with that Costas had put the rest of the engine bay back together and was already rattle canning the left side of the car.

      I was only there for about 6 hours, but Costas worked night and day all weekend - he sent me a video Sunday of the engine firing right up, exhaust system installed, car on the ground and the gauges all reading in the green. That took a lot of hours of hard work. He didn't have a ton left to do this week other than some wiring and more paint, front end needed to be installed... ok, there's a bit left. The New Orleans "true 245 hour" race is this weekend - best of luck, guys! Hope it stays together.
      Last edited by Fair!; 11-17-2010, 12:57 PM.
      Terry Fair - www.vorshlag.com
      2018 GT / S550 Dev + 2013 FR-S / 86 Dev + 2011 GT / S197 Dev + C4 Corvette Dev
      EVO X Dev + 2007 Z06 / C6 Dev + BMW E46 Dev + C5 Corvette Dev

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Witchdoctor/Costas 3rd gen Camaro: 24 hours of LeMons race car

        FREAKING EPIC WEEKEND!!!

        Huge update coming soon.

        We finished. Running.

        Through electrical fires (driver at night: "Hey, there are sparks in the car, but they stopped", crew: "stay out there, keep making laps!!"....LOL), a frontal hit with a wall (well, about 20 degrees off perpendicular), errant hood pins, degrading fuel cell foam, etc etc, we made it.

        Finished 11th, beating 12th by 2 seconds and missing the top 10 by a handful of laps.

        Epic event. WAY better than the normal '2 day' events. We did stop for severe fog (could not see 50'...srsly) but got over 18 hours of racing in.

        Costas
        cars and such...

        Comment

        Working...
        X