Vorshlag S550 & S650 Mustang Development + 2018 GT, 2024 Darkhorse & #Trigger

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After we unloaded the subframe, Brad soaked it in WD40, which loosened up the grease and grime. After an hour of soaking the muck was wiped off, and it looked good as new. Not a ding or scratch on it, which is amazing since this is the lowest part of the chassis.



We then took weights of the subframe and the replacement EPAS steering rack as well. This car came with a good rack but we had to steal it last Fall to fix Matt's crashed white 2015 GT, so this was another 2015+ replacement EPAS that I bought second hand.



James also gave me his stock bumper beam, which we weighed then used to align the front frame horns after Evan cut out and replaced the bent one. We won't use this beam for the build, but it sure came in handy for frame alignment.



Now I included this weigh from BMR for their drag race front subframe, and it is 30 pounds lighter than stock. But we usually ignore the drag race subframes, as they are not known for taking lateral loads from giant Hoosiers. We'll stick with the stock subframe for the time being, unless we need to start chasing weight more seriously down the road.



Replacing a subframe is usually a time consuming job, and of course we did it with the LS drivetrain and T56 magnum and long tube headers in place. But with an engine hanger securing the engine from above, it wasn't too bad.



Brad had pre-assembled the new subframe with the replacement EPAS steering rack, the chassis was lowered down to that, and it was bolted into place.



Having this un-bent front subframe gives me some peace of mind and also allows us to develop more parts based on the unadulterated OEM unit. We also might use the stock lower radiator mounts/grommets that are in the forward "stubs". The stock bumper beam and alignment also means our tubular bumper beam will be reproducible for others with unbent S550 chassis, too.

LS MOTOR MOUNT DEVELOPMENT

When doing an LS swap we check our engine placement, which we try to get as far back and low as possible. The stock front crossmember and oil pan spacing dictates the height, and the transmission / shifter placement set the fore-aft placement on this chassis. We knew we would be using an T56 Magnum XL, as it was designed for the S197 chassis - which shares an engine bay size and a transmission tunnel shape with the S550 chassis here. The engine was hung from a engine bay brace and we tweaked it for level, lateral and vertical placement, and kept our drivetrain angles in check.



On this car I wanted to keep the NVH from the engine mounts to a minimum so we left the OEM engine mounts in the front subframe. This will work great for street cars, and there are already poly and all metal engine mounts that work with the stock Coyote V8 that can be swapped in place. We have used some of the aftermarket choices for the stock mounts and were a bit underwhelmed - so this will give us an excuse to make a Vorshlag poly and Nylon engine mount kit that works with the S197 andS550 Coyote V8s, as well as our LS swap kits for both chassis.



The uniquely high placement of the stock engine mount isolator makes for a nearly horizontal piece that needs to go from the block to the chassis. Space gets a little tight around the front header tubes but nothing we cannot design around.



Our tubular LS motor mounts are one of our most time consuming items to make and our engineering team (me, Jason, Myles) have been talking about a CNC cut and bent plate steel design for some time. We made some test units for another chassis but this horizontal design might lend itself to this style more easily. After we talked about the design Myles drew up something in CAD, then cut one in cardboard to test the fit.



That part looks good so he tweaked the CAD design, cut one out on the CNC table, bent it to shape then tack welded it together. The production mounts will be fully welded, of course. We still had a few iterations of revisions to make yet.



This looked good in the car mocked up to the engine-side plate, but then we needed to install these with headers and check for clearance to the front primary tubes.



A little more welding and these would be good to go - Myles made a final version after this and when we have the drivetrain back in the car (soon) we can lock down the production fixtures for this engine swap kit and make a production run.



We tested a number of long tube headers and tweaked an existing LS swap header to fit this chassis, as seen above. I will cover that below.

LS & T56 TRANSMISSION CROSSMEMBER

With the engine placed it was time to set the transmission angle and design the transmission mount crossmember for this drivetrain swap. Whenever we begin an LS swap we want to test the "down angle" of the T56 Magnum XL trans to match the "up angle" of the rear axle, it was all kinds of wrong. The pinion had nearly a 9 degree up angle.



That is when we paused the trans mount development until we could figure out the deal with the rear subframe (see this section in the main S550 development thread), which turns out wasn't bolted fully into the chassis. With the subframe mounted correctly and sitting on new Whiteline bushings - and using this slick little flange tool that Myles made on the CNC table - we could see a pinion up-angle of 3.3 degrees, which was what right in the range I expected to see (a 2-3 deg pinion angle is normal).



With the transmission down angle set the opposite of the pinion up angle (so the U-joints on the driveshaft don't get into a harmonic battle), Myles got to work on the T56 Magnum swap transmission crossmember design. He has designed and built a number of these lately for our LS swaps using CNC plasma cut parts, for these LS swaps: Z4, E36 RHD, E36 LHD, E46 and FRS/86/BRZ chassis. This S550 design just follows that new style of trans crossmember we adopted in 2019.



We made this design change to gain some room so we could utilize this proven polyurethane transmission mount bushing from Energy Suspension - which uses a captured, fully isolated design. We have moved to this mount for all of our LS swap transmission crossmember designs as of May 2020.



This is the production ready crossmember for our LS / T56 Magnum XL swap for the S550 chassis. The slotted and tabbed design self-aligns and will be fully TIG welded on production jigs when we make our first batch. Even with just a few tack welds it can hold up the weight of the 125 pound Magnum XL. The exhaust and ground clearance are both exceptional. And the shifter lines up perfectly with the opening in the tunnel.



We measured for and drew up a design for the driveshaft, which is made for us with a massive 3.5" x .120" wall aluminum tubing and strong 1530 U-joints at both ends. This 15.8 pound one-piece driveshaft is rated at 900 hp and works with both bolt circles that Ford used on the Super 8.8" axle drive flange, and comes with an adapter ring to keep it centered.

S550 LS SWAP LONG TUBE HEADERS

The LS engine is so little compared to the Coyote this engine bay was designed for that we could take some liberties with engine placement to potentially shorten header development time.



When headers typically take 9-12 months to go from prototype to production, I was looking to save time on this step!



And that we did. Sending several measurements to our production header manufacturer, they were able to make something for us that fit on just the 2nd try. Huge time savings, and this is a 1-7/8" primary, proper full length header with 321 stainless bends.



These pictures show our header design that fits this LS550 swap and uses the same design parameters (maximum ground clearance, 1-7/8" primaries, 3" collectors). Packaging is one of the many benefits of the LS V8 engine design over any DOHC V8 design.



This level is placed at the lowest part of the car (the bottom of the front subframe), and that line is inches below the bottom of the headers. So unlike most long tube headers that hit the ground first, these are tucked up nicely into these two massive tunnels that Ford left us.



So this long tube header setup is now production ready, just needs final welding. We will order a batch for inventory very soon. We can also make these with 2" primaries with little to no changes - there is just so much room in this engine bay, it is unreal. These bigger primaries will come in handy for our Phase 2 engine for sure.

GT350 AXLE INSTALL

As part of the rear subframe bushing work referred to above, we removed the Ecoboost axles (halfshafts) and replaced them with this Ford Performance GT350 axle shaft kit. This is a lower cost replacement for the GT axles that comes with stronger CV joints.



This rear subframe was from a V6 or Ecoboost car, and the axles looked pretty crusty and small. While it was out Brad pulled the old axles out.



These are the part numbers and images of the axles we removed - didn't measure these but they "looked small". I wrote a LOT more things in this section about the GT350 axles, with about a dozen more pictures of weights of S550 GT vs the GT350 axles, but the post ran so long I spun that section off into this tech post about GT350 axles.



We also installed the 4.09:1 geared, Auburn Pro diff equipped aluminum differential housing we built for my 2018 GT into the back of the '15 GT at the same time as the GT350 axle upgrade. That wrapped up the back end of our #LS550 for now.

THE CARBONING!

On March 3rd, 2020, I was working late at the shop and a freight truck arrived at 7 pm, in the dark, while pouring rain. I had to scramble a bit to make room, then get the fork lift hooked up, and unloaded this big pallet of carbon fiber parts from the box truck. Big batch of carbon parts for 2 cars arrived, so I dubbed it "The Carboning!" - I was as excited as a kid on Christmas!



We broke down the pallet and unboxed all of he Anderson Composites and Seibon parts. These are two sides of the same company, with Anderson being their domestic car arm and Seibon being the import car arm. For our S550 Mustang I received a carbon trunk and carbon doors, shown above.



For our LS powered endurance BMW E46 project we got a carbon hood and a carbon trunk. The quality and finish on all of these was great. These Seibon pieces are not "dry carbon" motorsports parts (which they also make) but their more affordable carbon-over-fiberglass / shiny gel coat versions. Still lighter than stock, but not as light as you could see.



My favorite parts that arrived were these Anderson carbon fiber doors, which weighed in at 15.9 pounds - versus the 84.2 pound stock doors. As badly as I wanted to stick these on the 2015 GT, the sensible part of my brain (which is very small) reminded my lizard brain that these have essentially no crash protection. These make for a 67% weight savings over the bare steel doors - not including the glass, window motors, or regulators. We have to wait until the car is caged in Phase 2 to drop these pounds - so we will stick with the "lightened" 49 pound steel doors for now.



The carbon trunk was 10.7 pounds vs the stock 24 pound steel trunk, for a 13.3 pound drop, or a 55% weight savings.



Brad removed the steel trunk and installed the carbon unit with zero drama, no fitting, just bolted on. That is RARE in the composites world but typical of Anderson parts. We recommend disconnecting one of the lift struts, as the carbon unit is less than half the weight of the steel trunk. Body lines are perfect.



The 2018+ GT carbon hood installed beautifully on my 2018 GT, and we ran it on that car for most of a year. But on this 2015 GT with a "2018 front end conversion" we had some issues. Next time I will explain further on what we had to do to REALLY convert this "early" S550 to the 2018-20+ GT front end.

WHAT'S NEXT?

We have a lot more to share, but this post is running super long. We've already measured for and ordered a much larger radiator, which will be installed with a steep roll. The budget aluminum 6.3L LS engine (Phase 1 use) is complete at HorsePower Research and the oil pickup tube is being modified to fit the wet sump pan we're using. Goal for this Phase 1 engine is to make the same "485 whp" number that the Gen III Coyote made with headers, CAI, and a tune - using the less costly Gen III LS6 GM cylinder heads and LS6 block from 2003.



We have "adjusted" the 2018+ fenders to properly fit the 2018+ hood (installed above), then added the factory "upper tie bar" structure - which greatly sped up mounting of the 2018 headlights and nose. Then we built a rather unusual tubular bumper beam, which will be used to protect the steeply rolled radiator.



We have the super light flywheel, twin disc clutch, bellhousing, Accusump, and T56 Magnum XL for this install on deck. We will show all of this work and more next time.

Thanks for reading!

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We always keep the inner door latch even on gutted doors, to make "rapid egress" possible in case of fire. After realizing the inner door panels are worth almost nothing on the used parts market, I asked Brad to just "extract" the stock inner door latch and surround.



He sliced and extracted this handle and the surrounding mounting plastics, which was bolted right to the inner door structure. We did ZERO cutting on this door and left a lot of "meat on the bone" but I wanted to see how much weight drop we could get just by removing the glass, regulator, inner door panel, mirror and window motor.



The final weight of the door (84.2 - 49.0) made for a 35.2 pound drop for one door, with no cutting. With a cage we could cut away a lot more, but we've got carbon doors for Phase 2 waiting. I might replace the chunky 2.5 pound side mirrors with something sleeker, but they might just go back on for Phase 1.



A new pair of hinges from Ford were purchased to use with this door, as the original hinges from my black '15 went on Matt's white '15 GT, along with the driver's door. The guys had to remove the front fender to mount the white door and alignment was... tricky, but with some hammering and a little 2x4 love, it lined up.



This banged up drivers door isn't pretty, but it opens/closes smoothly, has all of the crash structure, and it is only temporary. We will do the same "lightening" work to the passenger side door soon, which will give us a 70 pound drop over the super heavy stock doors, which isn't too shabby.

FULL CHASSIS REWIRE

Like almost everything else of value on this chassis, the whole damn wiring harness and fuse box were gone. This creates some extra work for us, as we need to chase down some harness ends to wire into things like the EPAS and ABS, but it is also a great excuse to rewire the whole car to remove COMPLEXITY, FAILURE POINTS, and WEIGHT. There was only a little wiring left, like the ABS sensors at the hubs. All of the dash, engine bay, lighting, and chassis wiring is gone. The X-Y axis yaw sensor was still on the transmission tunnel, so I guess they forgot to grab that.



As we delve into the wiring on our 2015 Mustang GT I wanted to show typical chassis wiring harness weights and our "race car" harness solutions. The 49.4 pound weight shown above is a typical OEM chassis harness from a BMW E46, which is not too different from other cars we work on. Nearly 50 pounds of CAN integrated madness, and that's not anything in the engine bay either - just the chassis harness. Sometimes a bunch of this copper is hidden under the carpet, behind the dash, but it is everywhere - like a plague.



Old OEM wiring can really let you down as it ages. Breaks in the plastic insulator casing can cause shorts, the wire itself can get brittle and break, the retaining clips at connectors break off, etc. I'm not saying we have never built race cars with OEM wiring - we have, and it usually gobbled up repair time during the build, and the end result always looked like a hack. Instead of spending dozens of hours cutting circuits out of an old OEM harness and repairing broken or damaged wiring for a LS swapped dedicated race car, we would rather replace it with a new harness



We usually start with a complete chassis harness from Painless Performance Products, like the one above for #Trigger. Making a harness from scratch takes a LOT of time and can gobble up a lot of money. This 21 circuit harness is brand new, uses GM color coding, and weighs in at 7.6 pounds... and we will cut some of this away. This one cost $249 and was made nearby in Ft Worth, Texas.



Of course some racers can be "wiring snobs" and will brag about a $20K custom chassis harness they had built, elaborate Power Distribution Modules. Will any of that make their car one bit faster or slower? Not really, but it comes down to functionality, reliability and of course cost. Where else could that $20K on a fancy chassis harness be spent to make the car faster? Lots of places. We have used these Painless chassis harnesses on a number of race car builds and the clocks don't care that they didn't get Raychem heat traced / custom labeled / IP67 sealed / custom chassis harnesses with PDM boxes and all of that. We aren't building F1 cars.



We do go the extra mile and use better Deutsch DT series connectors and their gold plated solid pins on any junctions we have to add. We will also use some of the OEM connectors and a length of wiring from the stock bits we are trying to connect to (if they are in good condition). It is not uncommon to spend more on the Deutsch connectors than on the entire Painless chassis harness. Things like the headlights, tail lights, windshield wipers, and a select few things will either get a "pigtail" cut from the OEM harness and spliced into our Painless harness, or new OEM style plugs with pins crimped onto the Painless harness. Non-stock things like the motorsports heater box fan motor will get a Deutsch connector.



These are some wiring pictures from other builds using DT series connectors. We are not unaccustomed to a "total rewire" of a car, and in fact it generally solves a lot of problems on chassis more than ten years old. The E46 M3 (above left) has the Painless fuse box mounted to a panel under the false floor on the passenger side. The LS3 powered, tube framed 69 Camaro (above right) has the Painless fuse box mounted to the transmission tunnel, per the customer's request (easy access, like modern Trans Am race cars). We will likely add the fuse box to our #LS550 under the hood, where there are acres of room, or where the glove box used to be.



For the high amperage power distribution we will use another 3-pole Bussman block with 100 to 150 amp fuses, like we used on this Gen II Coyote swapped 2010 Mustang above. This helps take the feed from the battery (and the solid state Cartek battery isolator we will install) and feeds it to the fuse box, starter, EPAS rack and other high amp circuits



Lastly the battery will be another Group 75/25 Optima yellow top AGM battery mounted with one of our production 2-piece battery trays. We have used this battery setup on 3 cars recently and each time it "fixed problems".



Sure, this is a 20 pound jump over the golf kart sized Odyssey PC680 AGM we used to put in a lot of cars in the past. But as we've seen, modern cars have enough drain that they tend to kill a little PC680 in a matter of only a few days. ANY build with an EPAS (electric power assist) steering should have a BIG battery, not the little ones. I cannot count how many times we have had to push a car with a dead PC680, but that hasn't happened with anything sporting the larger Optima units. The Group 75/25 is the lightest Optima they make, a solid 10 pounds lighter than some other group sizes. Dead batteries have cost me too many hours of frustration, lost track sessions, and I have had enough of that nonsense. We will find that 20 pounds elsewhere.

BRAKING SYSTEM

This car came with a hodgepodge of OEM brake parts, many of which were from different sub-models that didn't work together. And lots of parts were just missing. Again, the Parts Farm took everything of value from this rolling chassis and we had to add a lot of OEM pieces back.

ADDING BRAKE MASTER, BOOSTER, ABS, LINES, & POWERBRAKE FRONTS

We ordered a new PP1 brake booster and PP1/PP2 style master cylinder from Ford, which we sell on our website. The master cylinder is indeed designed with a very different hydraulic ratio than the base GT/V6/Ecoboost brake master, which we found out the hard way when we upgraded our 2018 GT to the PP1 brakes.



I was never convinced that the "Performance Pack" brake booster we bought for our 2018 GT (above left) was in any way different than the base GT unit, but it did have a different part number. The 2015-17 GT used the same booster for PP1 and base brakes, so we bought that model and installed it (above right).



I am not going to re-hash what was already posted in the main S550 development thread earlier, but long story short: there is a reason why we include the PP1 master cylinder with the 6 piston Brembo 15" brake upgrade kit (above right) that we sell. It will NOT work properly on track without the correct hydraulic ratio master, and the difference is easy to measure and see. We are using aftermarket Motorsport front brakes on #Trigger, however.



The salvage yard removed the ABS controller and bracket, so I bought a PP1 ABS unit online for $64 and then bought a new bracket from Ford for a whopping $18. Sure we could have made a bracket, but why? This is a nicely made, fully isolated bracket for this chassis and this ABS brick, and installation took minutes.



Sometimes the real trick is learning when it makes since to build something custom vs buy something new that is made for the job. That made this a quick bolt-in job of the ABS brick.



Next up were the two main feed lines from the brake master to the ABS brick, which you can actually buy from Motorcraft from most parts suppliers (ie: not the dealership) for about $25. These are pre-bent hard lines with stainless braided flex sections in the middle. They lined up perfectly and we have managed to salvage most of the other brake hard lines on this chassis.



The rest of the front brakes are just the 380x34mm rotor / 6 piston caliper Powerbrake kit we had on the red 2018 GT. We already covered the big weight drop and better pad and rotor wear on the existing S550 development thread. We have the front flex lines on the Powerbrake kit already plumbed in, and we will add some of the same brake deflectors to a custom undertray / tunnel feed system like the other car had.

REAR BRAKE "UPGRADE" + NEW FORD RACING HUBS

With so much of this car's wear items being questionable we decided it would be smart to upgrade both the front and rear hubs with the ford Racing versions we sell. These come with longer and stronger ARP wheel studs, which can be very handy, and the new hubs will give us fresh Ford bearings to start with.



These hubs are relatively easy to install in the rear - and since we had the rear subframe and axles being swapped anyway, this wasn't a lot of extra work.



The work up front is also pretty straightforward. With the front brakes out of the way the main center nut was removed, the new hubs swapped on, and the nut torqued to 250 ft-lbs. The ARP studs are much longer at both front and rear, which will show the tech inspectors what they want to see - fully engaged open lug nuts at each hole.



The Parts Farm cobbled a rolling chassis together for us out of several cars, and the rear subframe and brakes obviously came from an Ecoboost or V6 car. We could tell because the rear disc brakes were the very bottom base model versions, as they were the solid disc brake rotors. It also had an aluminum super 8.8" housing, which was a bonus (the GT 6-speed and GT350s got an iron unit, which is 16 pounds heavier). We will use this aluminum housing in another build, so that was a win. I did get some weights on the old sliding single piston rear caliper and and bracket - shown above - but I forgot to weigh the solid or vented rotors. It's all cast iron stuff so it is a bit on the heavy side.



To get #Trigger up to at least GT standard rear brakes we put together our S550 "Rear brake upgrade kit" using Stoptech 13" rotors and the associated calipers + brackets needed. This rear kit makes it easier for owners of these base model V6/Ecoboost cars to upgrade to PP1/GT level brakes out back, and with our front Brembo 6-piston brake kit they can have matching PP1/GT front brakes and master cylinder as well.



This kit consists of new 13" vented GT rear rotors and new calipers and mounting brackets made for the thicker vented rotor. These are actual pictures of the parts that come in our rear GT brake upgrade kit - and could also be used to refresh your GT rear brakes if they are looking pretty haggard from track abuse. Some might think it strange to use the inverted hat GT rear rotors on this car, but you know what? They worked pretty dang well on the back of our 2018 GT for 2 seasons of track and autocross use. Did they get hot? Oh yes, we logged 800°F rear rotor surface temps. But we still only used one set of rotors and G-LOC pads on the back of that car for 2 full seasons, and they still have life left.



We logged 1.5g stops on Hoosiers and 1.4g stops on "street" tires, so these bits weren't holding us back. Of course we would like to be able to have rear rotors that can be actively cooled, so we will work on making a "normal" 2-piece rear rotor for the S550 at a later date. For now, this should be fine for Phase 1 of our #LS550 build.

REPLACING THE FRONT SUBFRAME

The front subframe was bent in several places on the car we bought, as I have outlined before. But the critical points measured out OK, so this was initially going to be ignored to save time and money for other parts of the build. Then a free OEM S550 front subframe and bumper beam popped up on a local S550 Mustang FB group - I could not ignore that price.



I picked up these parts and they were all in perfect shape - just like he said. Big thanks to James Mowdy for the hookup on these parts! Major peace of mind knowing this bent unit will be out of our car.



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Project Update for June 10th, 2020: The last post covered most work on this #LS550 project through November 2019, but we have done a good bit since. Late last year I had hoped to be on track with this Mustang by now, but the global pandemic and subsequent economic slow down kicked those plans in the teeth. We also got really busy at the shop and brought in 2 brand new customer car builds during this period, which shoved the shop builds to the back. Now that the world is re-opening, we are restarting work on 3 different shop owned builds and have some tech to share.



As you can see, the 2015 GT is looking a lot more complete of late. The "Phase I" 6.3" LS engine build is complete and that plus the T56 Magnum XL, our production engine + trans mounts, our production 1-7/8" long tubes, and production driveshaft will be in the car "for the last time" before start-up in a matter of days. We have the seats, suspension, roll bar, brakes, and wheels & tires from the 2018 GT on this car, and filled in a lot of missing factory pieces along the way. Carbon hood and trunk have arrived and been installed, and even lightweight carbon doors are here.



This update has a LOT of S550 components weighed, and I mean a LOT. Some always ask why - weight is CRUCIAL and one of the main goals of this build is a sub-3000 pound weight for Phase I. More importantly, I've bet a steak dinner with some friends that we can meet this number! That's a 600 pound drop from stock, and a great challenge. I'm not going to cut safety corners and throw on carbon doors or run without at least a 4-point roll bar, so that's making this more difficult.

LIGHTENING THE INTERIOR

These weight goals mean we need to look for big chunks to remove, and the interior is an obvious one. This 2015 GT came with "some" of the interior. It had most of the dash but not the gauge cluster or trim. It had carpet, center console, and door panels, even the back seat, interior plastics and a headliner.



We yanked the one good stock power seat (50 pounds), the back seats, and the headliner - it was trashed due to curtain airbags that deployed. I have been stewing over what to do with the rest ever since. We have since pulled the carpet, but it might go back in for select events.



I have been sorely tempted to build this car to run in the Optima GT class and ballast it up to minimum weight (3200), since I've run that class in 3600+ pound cars and done pretty well. But SO MUCH about the Optima series rules goes against my main goals for this car: to run it VERY LIGHT with GIANT HOOISERS and BIG AERO. No compromises. Optima is all about compromises and the show car judging BUGS. Everyone else here at Vorshlag keeps yelling NO! but my inner jackass wants to go run Optima with this car. A decision I will have to make later.



The dash was stripped by The Parts Farm of anything of value, like the gauges, trim pieces, and vent panels. I have already purchased these missing pieces and ironically I got it all from the Parts Farm via eBay. Possibly from this same car! Why? I just cannot stand a dash that has lots of big holes in it, and these trim bits weigh next to nothing. But still, I'm going in the wrong direction - adding weight.

ATTACK THE DASH

We have weighed a number of OEM dash assemblies and knew there would be some pounds worth chasing in this big beast. Again, I don't want to run "no dash" in this car, as I feel it looks trashy and incomplete. Initially I also want the dash cross bar structure, until we cage the car, to add some lateral crash worthiness and to give structure for the steering column - both for track use as well as in a crash. So we're keeping the dash, for now. Down the road, it might get "skinned" and attached to a cage crash bar to chase more weight.



The nearly 51 pound dash assembly that came in this car had one intact airbag (passenger side, all of the steel structure, the glove box, and most of the plastics. The center console weighs 9 pounds and we will likely keep it as-is, to cover up the E-brake and shifter. Gotta hold my drink somewhere, right!?



Behind the dash is even more weight to chase, namely the HVAC box that houses the heater core, blower motor, and air conditioning evaporator core.



The dash pad is pretty thick and heavier than I expected at 5.4 pounds. This steel bracket at the base of the dash attaches the steel dash structure to the transmission tunnel was heavy for as small as it is - we will replace that with a simple aluminum bracket that should weigh 1/3rd as much.



This was a big chunk we won't be replacing - the HVAC box. It weighed in at 22.5 pounds without any coolant, so that's a nice chunk removed. If we do install a heater core for defroster use (handy in some winter months, even in a race car) we will put back a 7 pound heater core + blower box we have used on many other race cars. For now, nothing goes back in.



There were TWO intact airbags still in the dash that we attacked, including this main passenger side unit at 5.8 pounds. The plastic vent tubing was light at 2.5 pounds and is also staying out.



The glove box door had some heft, with 4.6 pounds in the main part due to a knee airbag being part of the door. Then this secondary "hidden" glove box compartment was 2 pounds and held several factory owners manuals and some sort of dash controller. Wen we have time I will "skin" the glove box door and extract the knee airbag. It is buried inside some plastics that are fused together, and I would like to keep the skin of the door there to cover a giant gaping hole. For now, it's all staying out.



There was a lot of hardware that was removed that held in the airbag, controllers, and HVAC bits - almost half a pound. The glove box door "surround" and upper center panel of the dash will go back in, so that's 1.9 pounds NOT removed.



There was a big, chunky, PINK plastic bucket molded into the upper dash plastics that held the main passenger side airbag. I wasn't sure how much it could weigh but I asked Evan to go ahead and cut it out. He used a 3" cut off wheel in a die grinder and mowed through the perimeter.



It was 0.4 pounds, so we're starting to chase ever decreasing weight drops. It was time to stop and put the steel structure back together with the main dash plastics to we able to mount the assembly.



We didn't modify the steel structure much, and that 20.4 pound chunk is the majority of what is left in the final plastic and steel dash assembly at 31.9 pounds. The various dash trim pieces I bought weigh "ones of pounds" and will cover up most of the remaining holes. Lets tally up the dash + HVAC weight losses below:

• HVAC box = 22.5 pounds
• Dash insulation pad = 5.4 pounds
• Steel lower dash bracket = 1.6 pounds
• Dash lightening = (50.7 - 31.9) 18.8 pounds

In the end we lost 18.8 pounds from the dash assembly by removing both airbags, the glove box, and some smaller bits. Removing the 22.5 pound HVAC, dash pad, and the lower bracket totaled a 48.3 pound drop in all of the work shown above. This drop is good considering we are keeping the steel dash structure, all of the outer the dash plastics, and the center console.



It is hardly pretty at this point but it is 48 pounds lighter in this area, and once we have the digital dash and the OEM dash trim plastics in place it will look a lot better. Stay tuned for that!

ROLL BAR, SPARCO SEATS & HARNESSES

We are planning to add the same safety gear we used in the 2018 GT on Phase I of #Trigger here. That includes removing the back seat, adding our 4-point roll bar (which is finally going into production soon), and the same seats and harnesses.



We built this roll bar to work with dual-purpose S550s that still heave a headliner, and it can be used with the rear plastics if they are trimmed. Again, if we ever decide to run Optima in their "street car" classes (not "Outlaw") we will go back and add some of these interior panels. But for now, we're chasing weight - and we've pulled the back seat, door panels, headliner and even carpet.



This step included bolting in the 4-point roll bar we made for the S550 chassis and installing our S550 seat bracket bases, the slider on the driver's side, and the two Sparco halo style seats. The Schroth harnesses are anchored to the seat bases and the roll bar.

STEERING COLUMN

Again, this car was pieced together with leftovers from many others. The steering column had been removed, which was barely held in place. This had been out of the car, stripped of the airbag and controls, and shoved back into the car quickly.



The steering column assembly was jammed into the steering shaft assembly (below right) under the dash. The threaded hole on the coupler had to be repaired / retapped before it would go back in place. We will keep this steering shaft for now (it easily clears our production LS swap headers), but if the "rag joint" at the junction to the steering column has any play we will replace that with a proper splined U-joint. This shaft assembly has a nice OEM firewall flange and it is just less work to keep it than replace.



I also want to keep the factory tilt / telescoping column assembly, as it is relatively lightweight (12.7 pounds), has a rigid cast aluminum structure, and the ergonomics of this column + wheel fit me very well.



Not enough weight there to chase at the moment, especially for a race-only part that will lose adjustments and likely even some rigidity. We will replace the OEM steering wheel with something better and add a quick release soon.

MOUNTING THE PEDALS

As the story goes, "The Parts Farm stripped anything of value" from this car. That included the factory pedal assemblies. So off to eBay I went and bought this manual transmission S550 "clutch + brake pedal" assembly, and it came with the drive-by-wire throttle pedal, too. Evan mounted all of that and we looked at the spacing from the Ford throttle pedal and brake pedal, to match with our LS3 pedal.



Since we are using an LS engine I bought an LS3 pedal from a 5th gen Camaro / C6 Corvette and got to mounting it.



Myles did some mockup work and we debated distancing of the throttle to gas pedal. Too close and people mash both pedals at once, and too far and you cannot to the "heel / toe" brake and do the gas pedal dance needed for seamless downshifts...



Once we came up with a distance we all liked he made the LS3 pedal mount bracket to work with existing S550 firewall studs and nuts. So this bolts in place of the OEM pedal and has nearly the same distance to the brake pedal as the Ford.



The height of the LS3 pedal also matches the height of the Ford pedal, so it should feel the same driving as any S550. This pedal will plug into the aftermarket EFI system we are using, too.

FIREWALL BLOCK OFF PLATES

While the dash was out and the pedals were being mounted we made note of the big gaping holes in the firewall. Fire, fumes, and fluids will always try to find a way into the cabin so we needed to cover the openings left behind by the heater box and OEM wiring harnesses we have removed.



Evan made some templates for firewall openings we need to cover, and Myles cut them out on the CNC plasma table.



Evan lined up the first one, marked and drilled a pair of holes, then added some Clecos to hold the panel in place. Then he drilled the rest of the holes and installed 1/8" pop rivets around the perimeter of each opening.



The image above shows all four of these installed on the firewall of our 2015, and I will feel safer going on track with these openings properly covered with metal. We have since made this 4-piece block off plate a production S550 product and have sold a number of these kits. I'm not hiding the fact that this is a big reason why we bought this salvage car - to develop more parts to help others turn more S550 chassis into proper race cars.

GUTTING THE STEEL DOORS

This salvage 2015 GT came with two perfectly good doors and even front fenders. We always look at dropping weight in the doors of any car we work on, but we have to balance that weight savings with safety and streetability. "Street cars" need roll up windows and side impact crash structure in the doors. Dedicated race cars with cages can have the doors "skinned", the window glass/regulators removed, and the crash beams cut out. We're in between those two extremes on Phase 1 of this build.



The stock doors are HEAVY on the S550. We can take a stock S550 door and start cutting until we get it into the 25-30 pound range, as we have done on many other cars in the past. Remember though, Phase 1 is only using a 4-point roll bar (behind the driver), so we need to keep the door's crash structure in place. Window glass, however, is fair game and is being removed. Phase 2 of this build includes a full cage and carbon doors (see them below), so we need an interim solution.



Matt's white 2015 GT got tagged at track event by another car, and we had to steal the driver's side front fender and door from #Trigger. That saved him some time and money on the repair (all of this car's repair work is covered in the main S550 development thread). What do we do for the missing driver's door on our black 2015?



"One man's trash is another man's treasure." Matt's 2015 white driver side door already had the door glass shattered, so it was a perfect candidate for a temporary door for #Trigger. Brad got to work gutting the regulator, vacuumed out the broken glass, and Evan hammered out the bent leading edge.

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MOCK-UP 2018+ FRONT BUMPER COVER

My reasons for using the 2018-2020 GT front end are multiple - it is more aerodynamic than the 2015-17 nose, it makes the car look newer / more relevant, and I have a beautiful Anderson Composites carbon hood from our 2018 GT to use. The folks at Parker Performance saw my previous post about looking for grills and they sold me some immaculate 2018 GT upper and lower grills at the great price.



Once those arrived, using 2 sets of hands, Brad and I we were able to get these grills popped into the floppy plastic bumper cover. This gave the front cover a lot more "structure", which then allowed us to mock it up on the front of the car. I also ordered a front frame horn stub that was cut from a 2015+ Mustang's left front frame stub (shown in blue) from eBay.



Brad and I added a lot of wooden boards to act as a lower support just to see where this bumper cover lined up on the 2018 fenders, which themselves were added in the last segment. It all lined up perfectly and nothing else major needs to change to use the later fenders and nose on the early car. Of course we aren't using many of the OEM front end structural pieces, as we plan to make lighter versions of these.



Seeing this nose installed without the upper radiator support normally use was a bit of an eye opener - there is enough room to allow both of our engineers Jason and Myles to stand in front of the engine!



We had fun sticking things in front of the engine - like this giant trash can (vaguely turbo shaped). "So much room for activities". With 24" of distance between the front of the LS engine to the bumper cover we should have plenty of room for a rolled radiator.

REPLACE FRONT FRAME STUB

As you know from my previous posts, this 2015 GT chassis was a salvage car put together by The Parts Farm with a bunch of leftover parts, and it had a busted up front end. The damage was isolated to the left front frame stub, the bumper beam, hood and subframe. The upper radiator support was completely hammered (which is a plastic/composite piece we did not plan to re-use) and the leading edge of the front lower subframe (the left lower radiator mount) was pretty bent up. We initially just cut both lower radiator mount structures off the subframe, but have since replaced the whole front subframe.



When the car arrived in late August 2019, Brad removed the mangled front bumper beam. That deformation had tweaked the mounting plate of the right front frame stub (which itself looked straight). We had taken the car to our friends at Heritage and they measured everything with tram gauges - the frame rails were both straight behind the bent up section on the left front, and they even checked the tweaked subframe and all of the critical sections were in spec.



We didn't plan to just replace the OEM bumper beam but it would have been handy to have one to line up the new frame stub. We plan to build a tubular bumper beam like we did on this S197, shown above right. This will let us push the bumper beam farther forward, and we can make the crash beam wider, for more protection of expensive bits like headlights and such. These S550 front headlights cost $1100/each new, and bring $450-600/each used! It is worth protecting those from a light impact with a wider bumper beam.



After two months of seeing this bent left front frame stub, I finally found a good "front horn" cut from a S550 Mustang, and it was time to replace this front section of our car's frame. There are accordion sections designed into the steel front frame stubs that are made to deform in a crash. This helps isolate the damage in some impacts to just the front few inches of the frame, and it is relatively easy to cut off that and weld something back on. Ford wants you to replace the whole frame in a crash, but insurance / repair jobs typically just replace the front stub with a horn - there were lots of these for sale on eBay. I marked where I wanted the cut with blue tape, just behind the damage, so only about 6" of the frame needed to be replaced. The $120/shipped cut frame horn I bought was about 12" long, so we had lots of room to work with if I "missed the cut" on the first try.



I came into the shop early one morning and started to carefully cut the frame horn with a SawsAll and a sharp, new bi-metal blade. I went slow but this cut did not go straight - the SawsAll was not the right tool for the job, and the cut was not square with my tape marks. When the crew showed up I talked with Evan and we marked a new cut, about an inch further back, and he got to work. There's a reason I employ real fabricators...



He marked both the horn on the car and lined up the same spot on the replacement frame stub, then cut them both with this long die grinder with a 90 deg head and a 3" cut off wheel. He cut the new stub a bit short, then "snuck up on the cut" using the 12" round disc on the sanding table. You have to slow down and use the right technique to do the job right.



This pic above shows the alignment of the car's frame and the replacement frame horn after Evan had cut both pieces and setup these sheet-metal clamps to hold it in place. These are handy when butt welding two thin pieces of sheet metal together. The placement of the cut was behind the last dimple in the frame, with a round hole in the frame as the guide.



Evan then used the MIG welder loaded with .023" ER70S wire and stitched along the cut. After the weld was completed, he sanded it smooth using a tiny air powered belt sander - I missed that step in the pictures. All of this was done in about 90 minutes, so it went quickly.



After he was done sanding he hit the bare steel with self-etching primer - afterwards I will be damned if I could see the weld. It was completely gone. I was going to have him "plate" the seam but when he hung himself off the end of the frame and jumped up and down, it was solid.



I know this might seem like a lot of pictures for what some would consider a simple repair, but this bent frame stub really bugged me. I had to walk by this car every day and see that janky bent piece - and now its perfect. Evan's repair work here really impressed me, and I was impressed how quickly he got this done. Amazing work!



What's crazy is he didn't have a stock bumper beam to line up the frame stub, yet he took some measurements from another car and it lined up perfectly. When we finally did get our hands on a stock bumper beam, Evan was able to use that to reshape and flatten the right front frame stub's mounting plate, with some gentle persuasion.



Above is the stock 2015 bumper beam lined up and bolted to the two frame stubs of our car. Couldn't be happier with how well this turned out - a professional body shop couldn't have done it better.



We have since replaced the entire front subframe - which we got from the same guy as the bumper beam. I will cover that in detail in another post.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Well that is the first round of work that happened on our 2015 chassis, showing tasks completed from August to mid December 2019.



We have a good deal more work done than this first series of posts shows. Next time we will show more of the LS V8 swap, body panel fitting, interior work, carbon panels added, and more.

Thanks for reading,

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PHASE 1 PLANS + LS SWAP EXCUSES

This Dec 2019 blog post talks about our first BMW LS swap and how that build (and ten other unique chassis we have LS swapped since) has helped our company grow. We raced this "Alpha" BMW from 2006-09 (below left) with big success. It was really light (2500 pounds) and pretty fast on track with a 490 whp 427" LS engine. Our red 2011 Mustang GT was run for 5 seasons where it set 16 track records (TT3) and racked up 75+ wins. Our red 2018 GT was run for 2 seasons (in TT3 and TT2), but in NASA was always stuck between classes. It did "well enough" and won some events with SCCA and sub-events in Optima, but mostly we used it to develop and test a lot of new products. Both of those Mustangs suffered from artificial limitations I put on them - namely keeping them full weight street cars with minimal powertrain changes. I'm ending that handicap on the #LS550 project.



Many of you have asked why we are putting a General Motors LS V8 into an S550, but it makes sense when you realize what we are trying to do. Take a popular chassis that is relatively new / current model, make it much lighter, add a lot of power, and don't hold back. That's what made our first BMW E36 LS swap work so well - it was relatively new (the E36 was only 2 years out of production when I started that build in my garage), it ended up very light, had easy power with the aluminum LS V8, giant tires, and was very easy to drive. At 2508 pounds with a cage, 315mm Hoosiers, and 490 whp LS it was pretty easy to go fast. We didn't just win events, we set top times of the weekend, and ironically didn't spend a ton of money doing that. That's what we want to do on the #LS550, if we can.



We now have the current Mustang chassis that effectively cost me only $1400, and we have taken a lot of weight out it. We will continue to show weights as we go along, even though the car is not yet complete. We also didn't "take out a Coyote V8" as many like to keep stating - we bought a rolling hulk with no drivetrain and saved it from the crusher. We are installing the latest model S550 bodywork, getting a bunch of weight out, and will put in a LS V8 + big tires, big aero, big brakes, big everything. It isn't rocket science, it's just simple math. With less mass to slow down/turn/speed up, we can do more with less. Or do even more with excessive horsepower.



And as I stated in that blog about LS swaps, we can simply make more power, more reliably, for less money with the LS engine family. That's just a reality, plus it "packages" very well when compared to any DOHC V8.

PHASE 1 OUTLINE FOR #LS550 BUILD

This 2015 Mustang GT we are calling #Trigger is being built in two distinct phases. The first phase is going to be LS swapped with a relatively small stroker engine, stock width bodywork, little to no aero, and TT/HPDE track ready. This is meant to be something that just about anyone with a reasonable budget should be able to replicate - nothing too custom, everything pretty much bolt-on. This first phase of the build will not be a "world killer" nor will it be an expensive build. Simple, reliable, light, and cost effective are the goals on Phase 1.



We are making everything for this car "reproducible", especially the LS swap kit, suspension, wheels, drivetrain, etc. The Phase 1 engine is going to be very modest, using 383" / 6.3L aluminum LS we are actually building for our endurance BMW E46. We will control it with a cost effective but powerful EFI system and it will be shifted manually with a very strong yet very simple T56 Magnum XL transmission.



Everything else is coming from the best, proven, leftover parts we used on our red 2018 GT. Things like the differential/housing/gearing/cooler, the MCS RR2 coilovers, the wheels/tires, the brakes, the control arms, Sparco seats, and 4-point roll bar. I want Phase 1 on track SOON and then we can get onto Phase 2 shortly thereafter, which will have upgrades in bodywork, power, grip, and aero.



Like the early days of our BMW E36 LS "Alpha" project (above left), Phase 1 version of this #LS550 won't exactly be pretty - just light, simple, and quick. When we have a break long enough to have the chassis go to "paint jail" we will have this car sprayed in one color, likely the same "Race Red" our 2018 GT wore. What's more important is getting it on track so we don't miss the entire 2020 season.

I'm not going into the Phase 2 plans just yet, but many of those things are already underway, and some parts are already standing by. Now let's jump into the reconstruction of this chassis and the Phase 1 upgrades starting in the section below.

RECONSTRUCTION, LS SWAP & 'RICCO SWAPPE'

As we "deconstructed" the 2018 GT to make it more sellable in September/October of 2019, many of the parts that came off went onto the 2015 GT: the 18x11 Momo and 19x11 Forgestar wheels, the 305 RE-71R and 315mm Hoosier R7 tires, the MCS/SPL/Vorshlag suspension, Sparco seats, our roll bar, and the Powerbrake 380mm 6 piston front setup. At the same time we removed some additional weight from the 2015 GT - interior bits.

The plan for "phase 1" of this 2015 GT would be to LS swap it, try to make roughly the same power as the Gen III Coyote (approx 485 whp), and use the same basic underpinnings as the red car had (suspension, brakes, tires, etc). This would let us continue to test the same upgrades we had on the red '18 on a similar car with less weight.



We also began accumulating a lot of "missing" parts that we needed to complete this 2015 GT. Lots of things were stripped from the salvage car that we didn't notice when I drove to Georgia and back in a day and a half of non-stop driving. This 2015 chassis had virtually no wiring, many of the brake lines were gone, all of the brake system components were gone (calipers, master, booster, ABS computer), and more.



We weighed things as they came out, of course. The full weight door was a staggering 84.2 pounds, but we found some weight savings here later which we will show before we install the carbon doors. The stock, power actuated, base interior cloth seats were only 50 pounds each, which is lighter than the 75-80 pound power seats we have weighed in other cars.



The dash, carpet, door panels and center console are still in this chassis for all car weights early on. Later I realized that running this car with carpet and interior panels made no sense and they came out. I still wanted a little bit more of a complete looking interior so I found some of the missing dash panel inserts and gauge binnacle, which will go in to the final Phase 1 build (above right). The Sparco race seats, 4-point roll bar, and 6-point Schroth belts will be going in, sure, but the half-stripped dash was looking too unfinished for me.



Been leaning heavily on eBay for the thing that site is best for - finding used car parts at good prices. I rarely buy anything new on eBay, but the complete pedal box (above left) and EPAS steering rack (above right) replaced missing parts or items we stole from this car to repair a customer's wrecked S550.



We pulled the aluminum 2-point strut tower brace that we had added to our 2018 GT (it wasn't an option on the base model) and have since added several more factory pieces to that make this tie into the firewall and cowl. I will show all of those pieces and weights in a later post, when we install them. We put the 2-point brace in place to show the room down to the LS3 intake manifold during some LS engine mock-ups. The LS engine is just so tiny!



Those that question the reasons behind an LS swap should look hard at the image above - click it, blow it up to full rez. I shot both pics myself, from the same height/angle, and cropped the images to show the same width of each chassis. Both S197 and S550 engine bays have the same distance between the strut towers (roughly 36"). The Coyote in the S197 (left) is a pretty snug fit, but the LS (right) in the S550 has room for days around, above, and in front of it.



We set the fore-aft placement of the engines + trans to get the shifter to line up and have the best clearance under hood. The T56 Magnum XL shifter sits right inside the stock shifter hole and 85% of the engine sits behind the front axle centerline. With a one off "cut and slash" drift missile type of install, sure, we could have cut the firewall and tunnel to shove it all back further. But that would defeat the purpose of this build: to make an LS swap kit that was really 100% bolt in. We want to sell LS swap parts that people might actually buy (we have had a massive response to this swap).



The "Phase 1" engine is a mild 383" aluminum LS that can use a wet sump oil pan and an Accusump, so we tested the engine location with a variety of LS wet sump oil pans: the 4th gen Camaro LS pan fits easily, as does this steel, baffled pickup, 7 qt Summit oil pan. I will show more of this pan later.



The transmission crossmember began in the images above - we had to pause briefly to fix some driveline angles. We will test fit a 4L80E automatic as well, and possibly make a transmission crossmember that fits that automatic (for drag racers and street cars).



Exhaust header room looked good but the height of the motor mounts and placement of the steering shaft made us think that a custom long tube header would have to be built. We had 5 different production LS header designs we tested and found a setup that that worked.



During driveline angle tests I noticed something odd, and it turns out the rear subframe wasn't even fully bolted in, and one hole was cross threaded. Yea they threw this car together quickly with a bunch of leftover parts. The subframe came out to be able to re-tap that hole, which went cleanly. Normally I am not a big fan subframe & diff bushings, as their value vs time to install is dubious. I never felt like the rear subframe was flopping around on our 2018 GT. But this car is "going to eleven", plus it had some really worn, aged, cracked bushings back there.



With the subframe out, the diff mount and subframe bushings (8 in total) needed an upgrade. We ordered the Whiteline bushings to swap in. The extraction of these 8 mounts is a REAL CHORE. If you short cut this and break out a SawsAll, it can easily cause damage to the somewhat thin metal on the steel subframe assembly. We made some custom tools and tried a number of tricks getting the old bushings out - which I will show in more detail in another post.



After the many hours of work removing the old ones, the new bushings went into the subframe in less than 20 minutes. An all new SPL Parts lower adjustable toe link went in, replacing the stock bits here (see above right). This toe link is a brand new design from SPL and was not installed on our 2018 GT.



SPL Parts were also swapped into this spherical/adjustable vertical link shown above, which replaced the stock rubber bushed piece. We transferred this part right over from the 2018 GT.



The 4.09 geared, Auburn Pro diff equipped, aluminum super 8.8" was swapped into the subframe while it was down. We will make another diff cooler / fan / pump for this car as well (we were going to swap the one from the red 2018 but that car's buyer wanted it badly). The adjustable Whiteline rear swaybar was transferred over from our 2018 GT, and some GT350 axles were ordered (cheaper from Ford Racing than the dealership) as well as new rear hubs with ARP studs, which we left on the 2018 GT. More details on that another time.



Jason and I searched the online used parts interchange and found one shop in the Dallas area which was organized enough to list fenders, hoods, headlights and bumper covers for many cars at reasonable prices. We bought this white 2018 front nose for 1/6th the cost of the stock pieces, and it came with some structural and grill bits that were going to cost extra from Ford. I want to re-use the 2018 style Anderson carbon hood - and the '18 front end is supposed to have less drag - which is why we picked up a 2018 nose. I found some lightly used 2018 GT upper and lower grills but struck out on 2018 headlights (horrendously expensive for any S550, new) and park lights to wrap up the front. We had none of these parts on the 2015 to start with, so going to 2018 look front bits was no extra cost other than the fenders.



We had already sold one of the 2015 front fenders to a customer that needed it for a quick repair before Nationals, so it wasn't a stretch to get two new 2018 style front fenders. One is really perfect and the other is OK, but its the best we could get at the same yard we got the nose from. Paid even a smaller fraction of the cost of new, and both used fenders came with some small bits that aren't included with new OEM fenders.



I asked Evan to use our strut tower cutting fixture and open up the tiny tower holes to a 3.0" opening. We used a 2-3/4" hole saw on the 2018 GT but this 3" is as far as you can go and still keep the entire vertical "wall" and the curved portion of the factory tower. Some of our customers have already tested this hole size without issue.



Time for the good stuff! The MCS Remote Double "RR2" model coilovers went from our 2018 GT straight to the 2015 chassis, as did the Powerbrake six piston front brake kit.



On November 22nd, this round of installation wrapped up. Brad slapped on the 19x11" Forgestar / RE-71R set of wheels and tires, which really made the car look more complete. It was set on the ground and it made me smile. All of the work above happened in October and November, when we had an hour or two to spare between tasks on customer cars. Hoped we would be at this point back in September, but we were slammed.



I came in on a Saturday and scaled the car with the parts shown above. Engine is missing 70 pounds of crank/rods/pistons, the radiator, battery, front bumper beam (we will make a tubular one) and bumper cover, left side door, and two seats. We also don't have a fuel tank, driveshaft, clutch, or rear axles in the car. But the rest is pretty much there. The LS is no lighter than the Coyote, as they are nearly identical in weight. But with only 2327 pounds showing I was more than happy.

This is less than the 2349 pounds the car weighed when it rolled in - when it had no motor or trans, no front brakes, and skinny 8" wheels. Jason and I added up about 500 pounds of parts that needs to go back into this to be a running/driving track car. So our bench racing puts us less than 3000 pound goal, for now.

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Project Introduction - March 9th, 2020: Since our black 2015 Mustang GT (the #LS550 swap we call #Trigger) road race build is going so far beyond what we did on our red 2018 Mustang GT, or any other S550 we have worked on in the past 6 years, we figured it was time to move this car to its own build thread. EDIT: And in 2023 I re-merged this project build thread into the original S550 Development thread. and added our S650 development build into the same MEGA thread.



This build started as a salvage titled chassis purchased in August 2019 that was hit in the front and stripped of the drivetrain, wiring, brakes and pretty much anything of value. We bought it cheap and have been working to turn this into a race car to use to test parts and theories. We have already used this car to create our LS V8 swap using a T56 Magnum XL trans, repaired the bent frame rail and replaced the other bent bits, swapped in suspension/brake/wheel/tire/seats, and more. Since we have been working on this car more lately, we wanted to go back and summarize what we started with, show how we got to this point, and then continue the build updates for this car in this thread.

TRIGGER BUILD THREAD
This build thread is also posted on these forums:

• Track Mustangs Online
• S197 Forums

We have had an S550 Development Thread going since October of 2014, and we will keep the generic S550 work, all S550 parts development, and business related content posted there - even these LS550 specific tasks done to this 2015 GT will be cross-posted there. In that thread we have shown our initial S550 development work using tester's 2015 Mustang GT PP1 (camber plates, MCS coilovers, wheels, etc), then work on our red 2018 GT (below) starting in Feb 2018, some customer S550 cars, etc. Anything having to do with our 2015 #LS550 build will go in this new build thread, to keep it more focused.



Our red 2018 GT (above) went through a number of phases, and there was already some confusion between that car and our black 2015 build, as well as some S550 customer work shown in the main "development" thread. This new thread it would keep us from "crossing the streams". Also, in the Mustang specific forums where we are sponsors, we felt that moving the #LS550 thread out of our "vendor specific" sub-forums would make more sense. You don't tend to go diving into Vendor forums unless you are looking for something, and we would rather keep this build in the road racing / corner carver specific sections of those places.



The work we did in 2014-15 with Aaron's 2015 GT (above) and then later on our red 2018 GT would be considered our initial phase of our S550 development. In that time period we tackled a lot of basic issues, came up with a lot of fixes, and tested a lot of vendor's parts. We had 5 different damper sets on our 2018 GT alone, have made two S550 camber plate versions, fitted 18x11 and 19x11 wheels from Forgestar and MOMO. We have tested on track with 200TW and Hoosier tires up to 315mm, power mods that took the Gen III Coyote to 485 whp, base brakes / PP1 brakes/ Powerstop brakes, and brake cooling that ranged from 4" ducted backing plates to our more effective brake cooling deflector designs.



Safety gear upgrades we have developed included 4-point roll bar that we built, our new style of seat mounting brackets, and various racing seats and 6-point harnesses. We have always had a heavy S550 that ranged from 3550-3650 pounds. The high weight complicated the already high differential and engine fluid temps, so we worked with Mishimoto to develop an oil cooler for the 2018+ GT, installed their radiator, a vented carbon hood from Anderson, then started development on our own diff cooler. We also made tow hooks for the 2018+ GTs which proved to be popular.



One thing always held us back - the restriction of not cutting the car. Why? To keep resale value at it's highest. This limited our 2018 GT to "little" 305 and 315mm tires and a relatively high total mass. The Coyote V8 is a great engine, but it has pretty hard upper limits for Naturally Aspirated horsepower. 500 whp is pretty much the bleeding edge limit, and resorting to higher revs or boost only leads to rapid engine destruction. That's not opinion - that's physics.

HOW TO GO FASTER IN AN S550?

With this #LS550 project we WILL BE cutting on the car. That allows some "Next Level" of development to happen. The most basic set of solutions to "going faster" in a road course setting with the S550 (or anything, really) includes: more tire, more power, more aero, less weight. It all really boils down to MORE.



To get to that Next Level would have required sacrificing the resale value we had in our low mileage 2018 GT, which we pulled from road course duties at less than 2500 total miles on the odometer. We cut up our "purchased new" 2011 GT (upper left) to add flares, wing, splitter, and ducted hood - which did make it significantly faster, but also made much harder to sell as a "semi-race car". We eventually found the right buyer, and the car brought good money, but it took nearly 18 months to sell that 2011 GT. We sold the 2018 GT for asking price in only 2 months of trying - since it wasn't "cut up" or radically modified.



The "financial lesson" about cutting on a relatively new car, which we learned with the 2011 GT above (and many other street cars we have modded), was what kept us from cutting on our 2018 GT. And also that led us to buy the cheap salvage 2015 Mustang rolling chassis....

FINDING A "CHEAP" S550 MUSTANG "RACE CAR" CHASSIS

After I got tired of making excuses about driving a 3800 pound street car (2018 GT) against "real race cars" in NASA TT and Optima series events, it was time to do something about it. We had considerable "internal debate" here at the shop about our "next big shop build". After looking at global sales numbers for the S550 Mustang relative to a number of other potential chassis. it was decided that a lightweight, caged, aero equipped, flared and ridiculous S550 build made the most sense. I put a call out online for a 2015-up S550 Mustang rolling chassis, but after looking locally and trolling salvage auctions for months it was a bust.



Then Steve Poe of Poe Motorsports put me in touch with The Parts Farm in Lyons, Georgia. This salvage yard buys wrecked V8 pony cars at salvage auctions to then strip and resell the drive trains, body parts, and other valuable bits. It took a bit of leg work, but once we found them, they put together a rolling chassis 2015 GT for us. Then it was just a matter of driving 1,000 miles from home to go get the car. We paid $2500 for this cream puff, which was thousands less than the much more wrecked cars we found on Copart auctions in Texas.



After I told them what I needed, they sent me a dozens of pics of the 2015 Mustang GT above, which they had already stripped of the 5.0L engine/trans/wiring and a number of other parts. This car was otherwise very rebuildable for a race car. The $2500 price was the best deal I had seen in months of looking at even less suitable candidates (some people wanted $10-15K for wrecked V6 Mustangs)



A long time friend of mine, Paul M, volunteered to co-drive with me for the 2000 mile round trip from Dallas to east Georgia and back. We left in the F350 and enclosed trailer at 5:30 am one Friday morning, drove all night and arrived at the farm-turned-salvage yard at 9:45 am Saturday morning. The folks there were helpful and already had the car ready to load. We pushed it near the trailer ramp, winched it inside, paid for the car, and we were back on the road 45 minutes later for the 1000 mile trip back to Dallas. It was a grueling 34 hour round trip, but we got back early enough to have the full day Sunday to catch up before going in to work on Monday.



Starting with this very low cost chassis allows us to cut anything we want - to fit wider tires, lower weight, add radical aero, and swap in a different engine - without ruining the value of a $35-40K+ new vehicle. Yes, this was a "wrecked car," but after selling off some bits we don't need, it's now a $1400 complete chassis that is 100% paid for. The main portions of the chassis, frame rails, and upper horns were straight, the doors close perfectly, and it has zero rust or other issues. We started with an initial weight at 2349 pounds (no engine, trans, or front brakes) and then began removing parts.



We took the weight of our 2018 GT (above left) in its final NASA TT2 trim at 3626 pounds with half a tank of fuel, which was as low of a fuel level we could run on track with the stock saddle tank. Then we got into the 2015 chassis. Removing the OEM front and rear seats, busted hood and bent bumper beam, and a few other items got it down to 2089 lbs. Even at that weight there was still carpet, a full dash, center console and both 84.2 pound doors in place. We speculated at the time that a sub 3000 pound fully caged S550 race car was possible.



At this point it was August 2019 and we had seen some weight drop and made a lot of plans. In September we pulled our 2018 GT from our event schedule and started removing many of the suspension, brakes, wheels, seats, safety gear, and hood from it. Much of this was to be moved over to this #LS550 chassis.

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Once the old subframe was removed the right front frame stub "relaxed" a fraction of a fraction of an inch, so there was still some stress being held in place from the accident that totaled this car. With this subframe sitting on the shop floor, the EPAS steering rack was removed and swapped over to the new subframe. Man I'm so glad this part showed up because I was reluctant to spend $900 on a new one when a good, used OEM unit like this would do. Just needed some patience and good luck.



Got a few shots of the underside of the engine bay with the subframe out of the way. The LS engine is hung from the engine bay brace and the trans is bolted into the crossmember we built.



We weighed the electric power assist "EPAS" rack while it was out of the old subframe, then swapped it over to the "new" one. Everything lined up perfectly.



The subframe was reinstalled and everything was torqued to spec with the new hardware. The bumper beam was then bolted to the front frame stubs, which lined up perfectly. This "correct" OEM subframe will now allow us to use the lower radiator mount bushings in the front subframe extensions (that we had to cut off the old, bent unit), which should work great with a rolled custom radiator install. I will show the radiator install in a future post.

ELECTRICAL WORK: FULL CHASSIS REWIRE

Like everything else on this chassis, the electrical harness was removed. Like - the whole damn wiring harness and fuse box are gone. There was only a little wiring left, like the ABS sensors at the hubs. All of the dash, engine bay, lighting, and chassis wiring is gone. The X-Y axis yaw sensor was still on the transmission tunnel, so I guess they forgot to grab that.



As we delve into the wiring on our 2015 Mustang GT I wanted to show typical chassis wiring harness weights and our "race car" harness solutions. The 49.4 pound weight shown above is a typical OEM chassis harness from a modern BMW, which is not too different from other cars we work on. Nearly 50 pounds of CAN integrated madness, and that's not anything in the engine bay either - just the chassis. Sometimes a bunch of this copper is hidden under the carpet, behind the dash, but it is everywhere - like a plague!



Old OEM wiring can really let you down as it ages - breaks in the plastic insulator casing can cause shorts, the wire itself can get brittle and break, excess weight and mess, etc. I'm not saying we have never built race cars with OEM wiring - we have, and it always sucked up a lot of time, and the wiring looked like ass. Instead of spending dozens of hours cutting circuits out of a harness and repairing broken or damaged wiring for a LS swapped dedicated race car, we would rather replace it with a new harness



Something like this one from Painless Performance Products. Making a harness from scratch takes a LOT of time and can gobble up a lot of money. This 21 circuit harness is brand new, uses GM color coding, and weighs in at 7.6 pounds... and we will cut some of this away. This one cost $249 and was made right here in Ft Worth, Texas. It is going into our 2015 Mustang starting next week.



Of course some racers can be "wiring snobs" and will brag about a $20K custom chassis harness they had built. It won't make their car one bit faster or slower - it comes down to reliability and weight, and of course cost. Where else could that $20K be spent to make the car faster? We have used these Painless chassis harnesses on a number of race car builds and the clocks don't care that they didn't get Raychem heat traced / custom labeled / IP67 sealed / custom chassis harnesses with PDM boxes and all of that. We aren't building F1 cars here.



We do go the extra mile and use better Deutsch connectors and pins on any junctions we have to add, but often we will use the OEM connectors and a length of wiring from the stock bits we are trying to connect to (if they are in good condition). It is not uncommon to spend more on the Deutsch connectors than the Painless chassis harness. Things like the headlights, tail lights, windshield wipers, and a select few things will either get a "pigtail" cut from the OEM harness and spliced into our Painless harness, or new OEM style plugs with pins crimped onto the Painless harness. Non-stock things like the motorsports heater box fan motor will get a Deutsch connector.



We are not unaccustomed to a "total rewire" of a car, and in fact it generally solves a lot of problems on chassis more than a ten years old. The E46 M3 (above left) has the Painless fuse box mounted to a panel under the false floor on the passenger side. The LS3 powered, tube framed 69 Camaro (above right) has the Painless fuse box mounted to the transmission tunnel, per the customer's request (easy access, like modern Trans Am race cars). We will likely add the one to our #LS550 under the hood, where there are acres of room.



For power distribution we will use another 3-pole Bussman block with 100 to 150 amp fuses, like we used on this Gen II Coyote swapped 2010 Mustang above. This helps take the feed from the battery (and the solid state Cartek battery isolator we will install) and feeds it to the fuse box, starter, EPAS rack and other high amp circuits



Lastly the battery will be another Group 75/25 Optima yellow top AGM battery mounted with one of our production 2-piece battery trays. We have used this battery setup on 3 cars recently and each time it "fixed problems".



Sure, this is a 20 pound jump over the golf kart sized Odyssey PC680 AGM we used to put in a lot of cars in the past. But as we've seen, modern cars have enough drain that they tend to kill a little PC680 in a matter of only a few days. I cannot count how many times we have had to push a car with a dead PC680, but that hasn't happened with anything sporting the larger Optima units. The Group 75/25 is the lightest Optima they make, a solid 10 pounds lighter than some other group sizes. Dead batteries have cost me too many hours of frustration, lost track sessions, and I have had enough of that nonsense. We will find that 20 pounds elsewhere.

WHAT'S NEXT?

At the 2019 PRI show show we talked to a number of vendors who have seen this #LS550 build and want to work with us to test some of their products. Tilton had reached out before the show. We looked at their new Tilton ST-246 twin disc clutch in person, and it was impressive. Its lighter than a stock clutch and flywheel, of course it is still Tilton, but not "stupid light" setup that you stall every time you try to move the car. With two full sized sprung hub discs of two material choices, it can hold 850 or 1250 ft-lbs of torque. We will use one of these in both our 86 and the #LS550, and it should work well for us on Phase 2 engine.



Evan made some templates for firewall openings we need to cover, and Myles cut them out on the CNC plasma table. If these turn out as nice as I hope we will sell these as a kit to other S550 race car builders. We have a lot more going on but I won't bore you with more speculation - mostly I wanted to cover what we have done in the month since my last post.

Thanks for reading, and have a happy 2020!

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This level is placed at the lowest part of the car (the bottom of the front subframe), and that line is inches below the bottom of the headers. So unlike most long tube headers that hit the ground first, these are tucked up nicely into these two massive tunnels that Ford left us.



So this long tube header setup is now production ready, just needs final welding. We will order a batch for inventory very soon. We can also make these with 2" primaries with little to no changes - there is just so much room in this engine bay, it is unreal. These bigger primaries will come in handy for our Phase 2 engine for sure.

LS MOTOR MOUNT DEVELOPMENT

With the transmission crossmember done and headers fitted we could finalize our engine placement - which was already pretty well established. The engine was hung from a engine bay brace and we tweaked it for level, lateral and vertical placement, and kept our drivetrain angle in check.



On this car I wanted to keep the NVH from the engine mounts to a minimum so we left the OEM engine mounts in the front subframe. This will work great for street cars, and there are already poly and all metal engine mounts that work with the stock Coyote V8 that can be swapped in place. We have used some of the aftermarket choices for the stock mounts and were a bit underwhelmed - so this will give us an excuse to make a Vorshlag poly and Nylon engine mount kit that works with the S197 andS550 Coyote V8s, as well as our LS swap kits for both chassis.



The uniquely high placement of the stock engine mount makes for a nearly horizontal piece that needs to go from the block to the chassis. Space gets a little tight around the front header tubes but nothing we cannot design around.


Our tubular LS motor mounts are one of our most time consuming items to make and our engineering team (me, Jason, Myles) have been talking about a CNC cut and bent plate steel design for some time. We made some test units for another chassis but this horizontal design might lend itself to this style more easily. After we talked about the design Myles drew up something in CAD, then cut one in card board to test the fit.



That part looks good so he tweaked the CAD design, cut one out on the CNC table, bent it to shape then tack welded it together. The production mounts will be fully seam welded, of course. We still had a few iterations of revisions to make yet.



This looked good in the car mocked up to the engine-side plate, but then we needed to install these with headers and check for clearance to the front primary tubes.



A little more welding and these would be good to go - but Myles is working on a final revision to these LS mounts and we should have a production ready version of them ready in early January 2020.



BRAKE & PEDAL BOX INSTALL + DASH WEIGHTS

While all of the LS swap design work was going on I asked Brad and Evan to take out the stock dash and get many of the missing parts I had ordered installed. I also felt like there was some weight to be saved in the dash - which I wanted to keep and finish off, at least the outer shell.



When we bought the car (shown above) the dash had already been stripped of anything of value - the gauges, trim panels, radio and virtually all of the wiring. The dash had been out but then slapped back into the car hastily with many of the bolts missing. We could shake the dash and it was barely held in on one side.



First the steering column was removed, which was also barely held in place. This had been out of the car, stripped of the airbag and some other bits, and shoved back into the car quickly. The splined slip joint under the dash was somewhat mangled and jammed together, so that had to be repaired before it would go back in place. I want to keep the factory tilt / telescoping column, as it is relatively lightweight (12.7 pounds), has a rigid cast aluminum structure, and the ergonomics of this fit me in this car well. Not enough weight there to chase something that will lose adjustments and likely even some rigidity.



The dash is held in place on the sides of the A-pillar sections as well as this lower bracket, that we removed. Pieces like this will be replaced with much thinner aluminum brackets that way 1/4 as much.



We then got a weight of this semi-stripped dash assembly, which was 50.7 pounds. There is a lot of weight in there that we can whittle down, including an airbag that is part of the glove box. The center console was just sitting in the car when we got it, but it weighs in at only 9.1 pounds. We will likely reinstall that for the Phase 1 build, as well as the lightened dash. I just like a little more completeness in the interior of a car, even a race car.



With the dash out of the way the sound insulating pad at the firewall was removed, along with the HVAC box. This insulation pad will not go back in and sheds 5.4 pounds in the process.



Last up is the HVAC box - which is the heater core, evaporator core for the air conditioner, blower motor, and complicated duct work buried under the dash. This 22.5 pound box (without the coolant that the heater core holds) will not go back in either. Instead we will use the 6.5 pound lightweight defroster box we normally put into race cars. This keeps a heater core and blower motor in a more compact box to blow on the windshield on cold race days. All told these pieces above weigh in at 102 pounds, and I suspect we will reinstall the steering column, center console, a gutted dash, and a lighter heater box.



Didn't weigh the missing but lightweight dash trim pieces, which ironically I bought on eBay from The Parts Farm (they could have come off this same car). If we can cut that total interior weight number down by 40 to 50 pounds that will be a nice accomplishment - while still keeping a fully functional/adjustable steering column, a visually complete dash, and a working heater in the car. I will show those lightening steps and weights going back in on a future post.



This car was missing the pedals, brake booster, brake master, and more. I bought this used OEM pedal box from a 2016 Mustang GT online for $124, and it even came with the Mustang electronic throttle pedal (which we might not use, depending on which EFI system we go with). The pedal box was bolted in with the dash out of the way, then the brake booster went in from the firewall side.



We ordered a new brake booster and PP1/PP2 style master cylinder from Ford, which we also sell on our website. The master cylinder is indeed designed with a very different hydraulic ratio than the base GT/V6/Ecobooster master, which we found out the hard way when we upgraded our 2018 GT to the PP1 brakes. I was never convinced that the brake booster we bought for our 2018 GT was in any way different but it did have a different part number. The 2015-17 GT used the same booster for PP1 and base brakes, so we bought that model.



I am not going to re-hash what was already posted in this thread earlier, but long story short: there is a reason why we include the PP1 master cylinder with the 6 piston Brembo 15" brake upgrade kit we sell. It will NOT work on track without the correct hydraulic ratio master, and the difference is easy to measure and see.



The salvage yard of course removed the ABS controller and bracket, so I bought a PP1 ABS unit online for $64 and then bought a new bracket from Ford for a whopping $18. Sure we could have made a bracket, but why? This is a nicely made, fully isolated bracket for this chassis and this ABS brick, and installation took minutes.



Sometimes the real trick is learning when it makes since to build something custom vs buy something new that is made for the job. We have most of the brake hard lines that will be routed and secured after the subframe swap is done, and the front flex lines are on the Powerbrake kit. We're making rear flex lines for the upgraded rear brakes, which I will show later.

REAR BRAKE "UPGRADE" + NEW FORD RACING HUBS

With so much of this car's existing parts being "iffy" we decided it would be smart to upgrade both the front and rear hubs with the ford Racing versions we sell. These come with longer and stronger ARP wheel studs, which can be very handy, and the new hubs will give us fresh Ford bearings to start with.



These hubs are relatively easy to install in the rear - and since we had the rear subframe and axles being swapped anyway, this wasn't a lot of extra work.



The work up front is also pretty straightforward. With the front brakes out of the way the main center nut was removed, the new hubs swapped on, and the nut torqued to 250 ft-lbs. The ARP studs are much longer at both front and rear, which will show the tech inspectors what they want to see - fully engaged open lug nuts at each hole.



I did get some weights on the old sliding single piston rear caliper and and bracket - shown above - but I forgot to weigh the solid or vented rotors. It's all cast iron stuff so it is a bit on the heavy side.



The rear brakes that came on our 2015 were from the LOWEST base, base model solid disc version, shown earlier. These brake discs were rusty and non-vented, so we put together our S550 "Rear brake upgrade kit" using Stoptech 13" rotors and the associated calipers + brackets needed. This rear kit makes it easier for owners of these base model V6/Ecoboost cars to upgrade to PP1/GT level brakes out back, and with our front Brembo 6-piston brake kit they can have matching PP1/GT front brakes and master cylinder as well.



This kit consists of new 13" vented GT rear rotors and new calipers and mounting brackets made for the thicker vented rotor. These are actual pictures of the parts that come in our rear GT brake upgrade kit - and could also be used to refresh your GT rear brakes if they are looking pretty haggard from track abuse. Some might think it strange to use the inverted hat GT rear rotors on #Trigger, but you know what? They worked pretty dang well on the back of our 2018 GT for 2 seasons of track and autocross use. Did they get hot? Oh yes, we logged 800°F rear rotor surface temps. But we still only used one set of rotors and G-LOC pads on the back of that car for 2 full seasons, and they still have life left.



We logged 1.5g stops on Hoosiers and 1.4g stops on "street" tires, so these bits weren't holding us back. Of course we would like to be able to have rear rotors that can be actively cooled, so we will work on making a "normal" 2-piece rear rotor for the S550 at a later date. For now, this should be fine for Phase 1 of our #LS550 build.

FRONT SUBFRAME REPLACEMENT

The front subframe was bent in two ways on the car we bought, as I have outlined before. But the critical points measured out OK, so this was going to be ignored to save time and money for other parts of the build. Then a free OEM S550 front subframe and bumper beam popped up on a local S550 Mustang FB group... well I could not ignore that price!



I managed to go pick up these parts last week, and to my surprise, it was all in perfect shape - just like he said. Big thanks to James Mowdy for the hookup on these parts! Major peace of mind knowing this bent unit will be out of our car.



After we unloaded this 58.2 pound stock subframe, Brad soaked it in WD40, which loosened up any residual grease and grime. After an hour of soak the muck was wiped off, then it looked as good as new. Not a ding or scratch on it, which is amazing since this is the lowest part of the chassis.



Yes there are lighter tubular aftermarket S550 subframes versions out there, but those are more suited for drag racing than a road race car. Most of the suspension and braking loads pass through this welded assembly, which also holds the engine, steering rack, and swaybar and their loading. When it is released we will check out the tubular front BMR road race version and see if it makes sense for Phase 2. Their drag race version drops 30 pounds but I wouldn't turn a corner with that thing on a bet.



Once the "new" subframe checked out Brad dropped out the old and busted unit. The SPL front lower control arms were unbolted, the steering shaft was disconnected from the EPAS rack, and the 8 subframe bolts were removed. Some of these bolts were replaced and the holes in the chassis were cleaned up with a thread chaser.

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What's crazy is he didn't have a stock bumper beam to line up the frame stub, yet he took some measurements and it lined up perfectly anyway. When we finally got our hands on a stock bumper beam (last week) Evan was able to use this to reshape and flatten the right front frame stub's mounting plate, with some gentle persuasion.



Above is the stock 2015 bumper beam lined up and bolted to the two frame stubs of our car. Couldn't be happier with how well this turned out - a professional body shop couldn't have done it better.



We have since replaced the entire front subframe - which we got from the same guy as the bumper beam. I will cover that in detail in another section of this post, below.

REAR SUBFRAME BUSHINGS

When we went to check the rear axle housing's pinion angle and it showed up at nearly 9 degrees, I knew something was wrong with the rear subframe. Brad and Even looked over the car closely, which we have since realized was haphazardly thrown together with spare parts by the place we bought the rolling chassis from. They noticed that both rear mounts of the subframe were very loose, and this allowed the pinion angle to change when it was raised up on the lift.



I asked them drop the rear subframe to take a closer look. One subframe mounting bolt on one corner was cross threaded in the hasty reconstruction of this chassis with random parts, but Brad was able to clean up the threads and get a new bolt secured there. Sloppy work and we've seen much more of this throughout the car, but I guess I shouldn't complain about this on a $2500 chassis that we have since sold parts off of to get down to $1400.



While it was out of the chassis, the 8 rubber subframe and differential mount bushings were inspected. I'm not one to recommend these bushing changes for casual HPDE use, as this is a REAL chore of a job. On this subframe with the age and neglect it has seen, it made more sense to change them. The 5 year old rubber bushings were crusty looking, but again - I don't think this will make a "lap time drop" on these relatively new S550 chassis. This is not something that will likely even "feel better" much less make the car faster - more likely it will add Noise-Vibration-Harshness (NVH), but it will remove some "void" (air) from these mounting points. And no, we won't be adding solid metal or Delrin bushings at these spots on Phase 1. Maybe... maybe in Phase 2.



We ordered the Whiteline rear polyurethane bushings kits for both the the differential mounts (above) and the subframe mounts (shown below). These look very well made and when orientation of the bushing matters, it is clearly marked in raised letters cast into the bushing. The S550 differential bushing kit comes with new hardware, sleeves and washers as shown.



The S550 subframe mount bushings are reinforced at the mounting surfaces with steel rings and also include internal steel sleeves and washers. Now it was time to get to work removing the old bushings. THAT was the chore - removal - but installing the new bits takes only a few minutes. I made a new photo gallery showing the steps we took to get the stock bushings out of the rear subframe, and long story short: it was a a rough job.



Obviously we need the entire subframe assembly out of the chassis, after which the subframe was essentially stripped to the basic steel tubular weldment. That means the control arms, shocks, uprights, diff housing and axles all came off. Maybe you don't need to take it down this far, but it gave us a LOT more access to get to the 8 bushings that needed to be pressed out.



One extra thing we had working against us was the condition of the subframe - it had obviously been sitting in the mud for a while before it was slapped into this 2015 GT chassis. It wasn't even a subframe that came in a GT - as it had the SOLID rear brake rotors and tiniest axles (either a V6 or Ecoboost car), along with an aluminum housing super 8.8" housing (the iron housing is used in manual trans GTs and all GT350/R models). No matter, we were replacing EVERYTHING except the the big cast aluminum control arms. The steel bushings "shells" were rusted into the subframe probably far worse than normal for the age of this part, thanks to the extra harsh environmental exposure.



I've read the horror stories about S550 subframe bushing removal, so we "got ahead" of this by making some custom tooling - hopefully to speed things up. Myles gave me some specs, I went and bought some 4" OD steel tubing shown above, then he made some bits on the CNC plasma table to make this "receiving cup" and some pressing blanks for the other side of these differential bushings.



The steel tubing assembly makes a "cup" to push the diff mount bushings into, while supporting the steel subframe around the hole. The round blank pushes the bushing from the opposite side, and a threaded shaft draws them together. Honestly this should have been easier - the damn rusty bushing shells didn't help us at all.



This was a 2 man operation that gobbled up too many hours - way longer than we expected. We have a lot of specialty tools to do this type of work and we have done it on many other cars, but the S550 bushing removal was the worst one we've tackled in ages. The rusty bushing shells were shot with penetrant and the threaded portion of the tool was tapped with a hammer between impact driving sessions, which helped them pop out of their rusty holes. A car this new should not be this difficult.



We have a series of bushing press tools and threaded shafts as well as an expensive and large C-clamp kit we use on similar BMW bushings. We had to drill out the Ford diff mount bushing holes to a larger size to use a larger piece of all-thread, as these stuck bushing shells tore up some of the smaller shafts we have used before. Eventually we had the four diff mount bushings removed.



The four subframe mounting bushings were even worse, as there was not enough metal on the supporting flange area around these areas to use with the pull-thru threaded bushing removal tool. We had to use the clamp method and make some other custom bits. It was a real chore.



Eventually the 8 bushings and shells were removed, but our plan of making tools to help shops do this job more efficiently was just not fruitful. We had already measured the weight of the S550 rear subframe before at 62.5 pounds, so we did not weigh this one again.



We also had these weights on the stock S550 rear suspension components (above left) and the rear uprights and hubs (above right) from previous testing.



There are a lot of bits and pieces that work together in the Independent Rear Suspension design of this S550 chassis, but that is part of the magic - and why it is inherently faster on track than the stick axle S197 Mustang. Not only does the IRS design give us rear camber and toe adjustments (that a stick axle does not have), which increased mechanical grip on track, the "dynamic geometry" and toe correction can cover up some driving flaws. It is simply easier to drive the S550 at or near the limits than the S197.



Back to the bushing removal. Maybe if we do a few more of these jobs then make some adjustments to our S550 specific tools, it could go faster. And maybe it was just the rusty nature of these shells that made it so bad. And maybe we should have just cut these out of the subframe, like Whiteline and BMR both recommend. It would be super easy to damage the subframe with a SawsAll hacking through these bushings.



The 8th and final bushing was very stuck - so Evan came over with an air chisel and helped cut that one out. It was noisy and very easily could have damaged the subframe, but it came out. This is not a magic solution and was still a big pain in the ass. Anyone who says this is less than a 4 hour job is lying, and you should plan for more like 8. If you are on the fence about doing this, and think you need to for performance reasons, move on to something else. This is a very high effort / low reward "upgrade". I only did this on our car to see how bad the job was, and it was worse than we feared.



With the new bushings it is remarkably easy to install them - just do it by hand. Follow the Whiteline directions and add the grease as shown. There are no metal shells to stick into the subframe, just a solid polyurethane bushing with large washers that cover the outer edges. This setup replaces the rubber versions that have big voids of air - that will deflect under load. I will report back with how much NVH these add after we get the car on track in the spring. Brad reinstalled the subframe with the super 8.8" aluminum housing we built for the 2018 GT, with the auburn Pro diff and 4.09 gears and the cover setup for our diff cooler.



Once it was all assembled Brad raised the subframe up into the chassis and secured it with new mounting hardware we ordered from Ford, since some of the old bits were cross threaded and crusty. The SPL arms were installed in place of the stock bits out back, as I showed last time. He also installed the Whiteline rear swaybar and the mounts we customized with grease zerks. These were easy to rotate "with pinkie finger effort" and still dead silent after 2 seasons of use on the 2018 GT, with no signs of wear. Grease zerks and proper fitting of the bushings/shells to the bar is the key here.



Of course our crew put everything back together as clean as possible, and the assembled rear subframe with the GT350 axles, our 4.09 diff housing, SPL Parts arms, Whiteline bar, and the MCS RR2s is shown above. We need to install the 2-piece Seals-It 3" dia grommets in the trunk floor to put the shock reservoirs inside there, for easier compression adjustments. And our diff cooler will be mounted to the spare tire well for additional testing before we make a batch of those kits. Otherwise the back of the car here is ready to go. We'll run exhaust back here soon, too.

LS / T56 SWAP TRANSMISSION CROSSMEMBER

Last time I showed the LS engine mocked up with two oil pans, and the transmission crossmember was just getting started - but when we went to go set the "down angle" of the T56 Magnum XL trans to match the "up angle" of the rear axle, it was all kinds of wrong. The pinion had nearly a 9 degree up angle!



That is when we paused the trans mount development until we could figure out the deal with the rear subframe (see section above), which wasn't even bolted fully into the chassis from the salvage yard. With the subframe mounted correctly on new Whiteline bushings - and using this slick little flange tool that Myles made on the CNC table - we could see a pinion up angle of 3.3 degrees, which was what right in the range I expected to see (a 2-3 deg pinion angle is normal).



With the transmission down angle set the opposite of the pinion up angle (so the U-joints on the driveshaft don't get into a harmonic battle), Myles got back to work on the transmission crossmember design. He has designed and built a number of these lately for our LS swaps using CNC plasma cut parts, from the Z4, E36 RHD, our updated E46 and the new FRS/86/BRZ version. So this S550 design followed that new style we adopted in 2019.



Once again we are using the proven polyurethane transmission mount bushing from Energy Suspension - which uses a captured design. We first utilized on our BMW Z4 LS swap kit in early 2019 and have moved to this for all T56 crossmember designs of late.



This is the production ready crossmember for our LS / T56 Magnum XL swap for the S550 chassis. The slotted and tabbed design self-aligns and will be fully TIG welded on production jigs when we make our first batch. Even with just a few tack welds it can hold up the weight of the 125 pound Magnum XL, and both exhaust and ground clearance is exceptional. The shifter lines up perfectly with the opening in the tunnel, of course. We will have these in production in a few weeks, after we verify our custom driveshaft design (which should arrive any day).

PRODUCTION LS SWAP LONG TUBE HEADERS

Now this might seem to be done out of order, as normally when we are doing an LS swap on a new chassis we make the motor mounts first, then trans crossmember, then the headers - but this time we had reasons to do everything in reverse order.



It comes down to the immense room underhood of this S550 chassis. The LS engine is so little compared to the Coyote this engine bay was designed for that we could take some liberties with engine placement to potentially shorten header development time. When headers typically take 9-12 months to go from prototype to production, I was looking to save time on this step!



And that we did. Sending several measurements to our production header manufacturer, they were able to make something for us that fit on just the 2nd try.Huge time savings, and this is a 1-7/8" primary, proper full length header with 321 stainless bends.



These pictures show our header design that fits this LS550 swap and uses the same design parameters (maximum ground clearance, 1-7/8" primaries, 3" collectors) - it was just easier to make this happen when we put a tiny LS in this giant car. Packaging is one of the many benefits of the LS V8 engine design over any DOHC V8 design.

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Project Update for December 31st, 2019: After getting caught up on some other build threads I wanted to sneak in one more forum update before the end of 2019. We have made a lot of progress on our 2015 GT project #Trigger in the last month, so I figured this would be the one to cover.



In this post I also want to update everyone reading this build thread with more of our Phase 1 plans for this #LS550 project, as well as briefly cover a number of other shop builds we have going on at Vorshlag for 2020. I have had a lot of you question the sanity of an LS swapped S550 chassis Mustang, but if you read the section below, hopefully our logic and plans will make more sense. There's always a plan...

2020 SHOP CAR PLANS + COMPETITIONS

We have a lot going on here in the shop with customer car builds (2 of the 4 current builds shown below), new product development work, expanding our CNC and fabrication parts production capabilities, and strengthening the business. We usually have a number of project forum build threads going at any one time, including several shop owned cars built to help promote Vorshlag and expand our product portfolio. Balancing the time and budget among those shop cars and customer cars is tricky and keeps me juggling.



In the past I've normally had one and sometimes two "development mules" that we own and build for competition, product testing, and promotion. For 2020 we're going to double down and have a total of FOUR shop development vehicles (plus another half dozen "potentials" I won't even get into). Here I will briefly list these main four and explain what each car will do for us, then we will jump into our #LS550 plans.



First up is this 2013 Scion FR-S we bought in August 2016 to continue development of our LS swap kit but also to test new 86 chassis related products we either make or sell. We have spent the last 2.5 years working with this car and have developed a number of parts, refined even more, and tested out many company's products - our build thread for the 86 chassis goes back to 2012. The 468" LS7 engine for this car is nearly complete at Horsepower Research (HPR) and we will install that with the intent of running this car in "street car" competitions - Optima series being chief among them. This will be Amy's primary race car and also an occasional street car for her.



Next up is this one that the entire shop is pitching in time and money to build - this endurance race car using an E46 coupe chassis, and of course an LS swapped V8. We are almost done with the 383" / 6.3L stroker LS engine for this car, also being built at HPR. This car will be run with a wide tire, good aero, light weight, and reasonable horsepower goal.



My 2000 Chevy Silverado is my second "GMT800" shop truck I've owned and I use primarily this a daily driver and parts runner. But in 2019 we stepped up things a bit and removed the tired 4.8L V8 and installed an HPR built 347" 5.7L LS engine, which immediately killed the 4L60e transmission (not a shock!) The upgraded trans and stall converter are complete and about to go in, as is the Belltech 4/6" drop kit. We are using this truck to develop a production 20x11" wheel, which fits under the stock fenders with a 315mm tire at all 4 corners (the test wheel is shown). We might do some "Pro Touring Truck" events in this one, believe it or not, and have tilt-back Sparco racing seats, full stainless headers/exhaust, and other bits already installed. Why have a boring daily driver?



All of that is keeping us plenty busy, but none of those are the "showcase" race car that I want to promote our brand among the other top shops in the country. Both of the red Mustangs above did more to move our company forward than almost any other of the dozen plus shop cars we have built since the earliest days of Vorshlag. This recent blog post talks about our first BMW LS swap and how that build (with eleven different model chassis LS swapped to date) has helped our company grow. Sadly we only raced this car for 3 seasons (see it below left). The red 2011 Mustang (above left) was run for 5 seasons where it set 16 track records and racked up 75+ wins. The red 2018 GT (above right) was run for 2 seasons and did well enough, but mostly it helped develop and prove a lot of new products. Both of those Mustangs suffered from artificial limitations I put on them - namely keeping them full weight street cars with minimal powertrain changes. I'm ending that handicap on the #LS550 project.



Many of you have asked why we are putting an LS into an S550, but it makes sense when you realize what we are trying to do. Take some chassis that is relatively new / current model, make it much lighter, add a lot of power, and don't hold back. That's what made our first BMW E36 LS swap work so well - it was relatively new (the E36 was only 2 years out of production when I started that build in my garage), it ended up very light, had easy power with the aluminum LS V8, giant tires, and was easy to drive. At 2508 pounds with a cage, 315mm Hoosiers, and 490 whp LS it was pretty easy to go fast. We didn't just win events, we set top times of the weekend, and ironically didn't spend a ton of money doing that. That's exactly what we want to do on the #LS550.



We have the relatively new chassis that effectively cost $1400, which we have taken a LOT of weight out of since - and we will continue to show weights as we go along, even though the car is not yet complete. We also didn't "take out a Coyote V8" as many like to keep stating - we bought a rolling hulk with no drivetrain and saved it from the crusher. We are installing the latest model S550 bodywork, getting a bunch of weight out, and will put in a LS V8 + big tires, big aero, big brakes, big everything. It isn't rocket science, it's just simple math. With a lot less mass to slow down/turn/speed up, we can do more with less. Or do even more with excess. And as I stated in that blog about LS swaps, we can simply make more power, more reliably, for less money with the LS engine family. That's just a reality, plus it "packages" very well.

PHASE 1 OUTLINE FOR #LS550 BUILD

As I have mentioned here previously, our black 2015 Mustang GT we are calling #Trigger is being built in two distinct phases. The first phase is to be fully LS swapped and track ready, and something that just about anyone with a reasonable budget should be able to replicate. This first phase of the build will not be a "world killer" nor will it be expensive to complete. Simple, reliable, light, and cost effective are the goals on Phase 1.

We are making everything for this car "reproducible", like the LS swap kit, suspension, wheels, drivetrain, etc. The Phase 1 engine is going to be very modest, using the 383" / 6.3L aluminum LS we are actually building for our endurance BMW E46. We will control it with a cost effective but powerful EFI system and it will be shifted manually with a strong and simple T56 Magnum XL transmission.



Everything else is coming from proven, leftover parts we used on our 2018 GT. Things like the differential/housing/gearing/cooler, the MCS RR2 coilovers, the wheels/tires, the brakes, the control arms, seats, and roll bar. I want Phase 1 on track SOON and then we can get onto Phase 2 shortly thereafter, which will have serious upgrades in power, grip, and aero.



Like the early days of our BMW E36 LS "Alpha" project (above left), Phase 1 version of this #LS550 won't be pretty - just light, simple, and quick. When we have a break long enough to have the chassis spend a few weeks in "paint jail" we will have this car shot in one color, likely the same "Race Red" our 2018 GT wore. What's more important is getting it on track so we don't miss the 2020 season. I'm not going to spoil the Phase 2 plans just yet, but many of those things are already underway, and some parts are already standing by. Now let's jump into the reconstruction of this chassis and the Phase 1 upgrades starting in the section below.

MOCK-UP 2018+ FRONT BUMPER COVER

My reasons for using the 2018-2020 GT front end are multiple - it is more aerodynamic than the 2015-17 nose, it makes the car look newer / more relevant, and I have a beautiful Anderson Composites carbon hood from our 2018 GT to use. I showed the white 2018 front plastic nose that Jason and I found at a local salvage yard last time. Shortly after posting that forum update, I heard from the folks at Parker Performance and they sold us some immaculate 2018 GT upper and lower grills at the great price!



Once those arrived, using 2 sets of hands Brad and I we were able to get these popped into the floppy plastic bumper cover. This gave the front cover a lot of structure which then allowed us to mock it up on the front of the car. I also ordered a "front horn" that was cut from a 2015+ Mustang's left front frame stub (shown in blue) from eBay.



Brad and I added a lot of wooden boards to act as a lower support just to see where this bumper cover lined up on the 2018 fenders, which themselves were added in the last segment. It all lined up perfectly and nothing else major needs to change to use the later fenders and nose on the early car. Of course we aren't using many of the OEM front end structural pieces, as we plan to make lighter versions of these.



Seeing this nose installed without the upper radiator support normally use was a bit of an eye opener - there is enough room to allow both of our engineers Jason and Myles to stand in front of the engine!



We had fun sticking things in front of the engine - like this giant trash can (vaguely turbo shaped). "So much room With 24" of distance between the front of the LS engine to the bumper cover we should have plenty of room for a rolled radiator. Should have that in next time.

REPLACE FRONT FRAME STUB

As you know from my previous posts, this 2015 GT chassis was a salvage car put together by The Parts Farm with a bunch of leftover parts, and it had a busted up front end. The damage was isolated mainly to the left front frame stub but the bumper beam was pretty trashed. The upper radiator support was hammered (which is a plastic composite piece we never planned to re-use) and the leading edge of the front lower subframe (the left lower radiator mount) was pretty bent up. We initially just cut both lower radiator mount structures off the subframe, but have since replaced the whole subframe (see section below).



When the car arrived in late August Brad removed the mangled front bumper beam. That deformation had tweaked the mounting plate of the right front frame stub (which itself looked straight). Again, we had taken the car to our friends at Heritage and they measured everything with tram gauges - the frame rails were both straight behind the bent up section on the left front, and we checked the tweaked subframe and all of the critical sections were in spec.



We didn't plan to just replace the OEM bumper beam but it sure would be handy to have one to line up the new frame stub. More on that later. We plann to build a tubular bumper beam like we did on this S197, shown above right. This will let us push the bumper farther forward as well as make the beam wider, for more protection of expensive bits like headlights and such in a light front hit. These S550 front headlights cost $1100/each new, and bring $450-600/each used! It is worth protecting those from a light impact with a wider bumper beam.



After two months of seeing this bent left front frame stub, I finally found a good "front horn" cut from a S550 Mustang, and it was time to replace this front section of our car's frame. There are accordion sections designed into the steel front frame stubs that are made to deform in a crash. This helps isolate the damage in some impacts to just the front few inches of the frame, and it is relatively easy to cut off that and weld something back on. Ford wants you to replace the whole frame in a crash, but insurance / repair jobs typically just replace the front stub with a horn - there were lots of these for sale on eBay. I marked where I wanted the cut with blue tape, just behind the damage, so only about 6" of the frame needed to be replaced. The $120 cut frame horn I bought was about 12" long, so we had lots of room to work with if I "missed the cut" on the first try.



I came into the shop early one morning and started to carefully cut the frame horn with a SawsAll and a sharp, new bi-metal blade. I went slow but this did not go smoothly - the SawsAll was not the right tool for the job, and the cut was not square with my tape marks. When the crew showed up I talked with Evan and we marked a new cut, about an inch further back, and he got to work. There's a reason I hire real fabricators, heh!



He marked both the horn on the car and lined up the same spot on the replacement frame stub, then cut them with this long die grinder with a 90 deg head and a 3" cut off wheel. He cut the stub a bit short then "snuck up on the cut" using the 12" sanding table. Sometimes you have to slow down and use the right technique to do the job right.



This pic above shows the alignment of the car's frame and the replacement frame horn, after Evan had cut both pieces and setup these sheet-metal clamps to hold it in place. These are handy when butt welding two thin pieces of steel together. The placement of the cut was behind the last dimple in the frame, with a round hole in the frame as the guide.



Evan then used the MIG welder and loaded with .023" ER70S wire and stitched along the cut. After the weld was completed he sanded it smooth using a tiny air powered belt sander - I missed that step in the pictures. All of this was done in about 90 minutes, so it went quickly.



After he was done sanding he hit the bare steel with self-etching primer and then - damned if I could see the weld. It was completely hidden. I was going to have him "plate" the seam but when he hung himself off the end of the frame and jumped up and down, it was solid.




I know this might seem like a lot of pictures for what some would consider a simple repair, but this bent frame stub really bugged me. I had to walk by this car every day and see that janky bent piece - and now its perfect. Evan's repair work here really impressed me, and is still a bit baffling how quickly he got this done. Amazing work!

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PROGRESS ON 2015 MUSTANG GT RACE CAR #TRIGGER

Now for the fun part of this post - showing the work we have done to #Trigger, our black 2015 GT chassis. This is the car that will continue with what we have learned on the 2018 GT, but will be lighter and is getting MOAR POWER. We will continue to show the build-up in this same thread, and hopefully pick up where we left off in the 2018. The initial LS engine (a very cost effective engine) should make roughly the same power as the Gen III Coyote, which will let us test things with a LOT of the same variables from the red car: power, tires, suspension, seats, and brakes.



We have been accumulating a lot of "missing" parts while removing other parts from this chassis to lose weight. Have not cut anything out of the car yet, but we will in Phase 2. This T56 Magnum XL was mated to our LS mockup longblock in this round.



We have weighed a bunch of bits and pieces as they came off the car, like the full weight 84 pound doors with glass. The stock power cloth seats are 50 pounds each, things like that. We will show all sorts of weights as parts get removed or added to this car.



The dash, carpet, door panels and center console are still in this chassis for all car weights shown. Why? The el strippo interior might happen later on Phase 2 of the build, but I want a little bit more of a complete looking interior for now. I found some of the missing dash panel inserts and gauge binnacle, which will go in to the final Phase 1 build (above right). The Sparco race seats, 4-point roll bar, and 6-point Schroth belts will be going in, sure, but the half-stripped dash was looking too "trailer park trash" for me.



Been leaning heavily on eBay for the only thing that site is good for - finding used car parts at a good price. I rarely buy anything new on eBay, but the complete pedal box (above left) and steering rack (above right) have replaced missing parts or items we stole from this car for Matt's white GT.



We pulled the aluminum 2-point strut tower brace that we had added to our 2018 GT (it wasn't an option on the base model) and have since added several more factory pieces to that make this tie into the firewall and cowl. I will show all of those pieces and weights in a later post, when we install them. We put the 2-point brace in place to show the room down to the LS3 intake manifold during some LS engine mock-ups. The LS engine is just so little!



Those that question the reasons behind an LS swap just need to look at the image above. I shot both pics myself, from the same height/angle, and cropped the images to show the same width of each chassis. Both S197 and S550 engine bays have the same distance between the strut towers (roughly 36"). The Coyote in the S197 (left) is a pretty snug fit, but the LS (right) in the S550 has room for days around, above, and in front of it.



We are still setting the exact fore-aft placement of the engines + trans, but this image above is pretty close to perfect. This puts the T56 Magnum XL shifter inside the stock shifter hole and 85% of the engine behind the front axle centerline. With a custom "one off" kind of cut and slash install, sure, we could cut the firewall and tunnel. This would let us move the engine back even more, maybe even use a shorter T56 Magnum or Magnum S... but that would defeat the purpose of this build: to make an LS swap kit that was really 100% bolt in. To sell LS swap parts people might buy (we have had a massive response to news of this swap).



The "Phase 1" engine is a mild 383" aluminum LS that will use a wet sump oil pan and an Accusump, so we are testing the swap with a variety of LS oil pans for the swap to be built around. The 4th gen Camaro LS pan fits easily, as does this steel, baffled pickup, 7 qt Summit oil pan. I will show more of this pan later.



The transmission crossmember design is nearly done - just checking the driveline angles before we finalize the fabrication of that. We want to test fit a 4L80E automatic as well, possibly make a transmission crossmember that fits this one (for drag racers and street cars). Once the trans crossmember is done then we can set side-to-side placement.



Exhaust header room looks good but the height of the motor mounts and placement of the steering shaft might require a custom long tube header again. We have 5 different production LS header designs we will test in the coming weeks to try to find one side or maybe both sides that fit. If not - we will make a production style long tube.



During driveline angle tests I noticed something odd, and it turns out the rear subframe wasn't even fully bolted in, and one hole was cross threaded. So the subframe came out to be able to re-tap that hole, which went cleanly. Normally I am not a big fan of doo-dad mods like "subframe/diff bushings", as their value is dubious at best... I never felt like the rear bits were flopping around on our 2018 GT. But this car is "going to eleven", plus it had some really worn, aged, cracked bushings back there.



While the subframe was out we decided that the diff mount and subframe bushings (8 in total) needed an upgrade. So we ordered the Whiteline bushings to swap into their places. The extraction of these 8 mounts is a REAL CHORE if you don't break out a SawsAll, which can easily cause damage to the somewhat thin metal on the steel subframe assembly. We made some custom tools and tried a number of tricks getting the old bushings out - which I will show in more detail next time.



After the many hours of work removing the old ones, the new bushings went into the subframe in less than 20 minutes. An all new SPL Parts lower adjustable toe link went in, replacing the stock bits here (see above right). This toe link is a brand new design from SPL and was not installed on our 2018 GT.



SPL Parts were also swapped into this spherical/adjustable vertical link shown above, which replaced the stock rubber bushed piece. We transferred this part right over from the 2018 GT.



The 4.09 geared, Auburn Pro diff equipped, aluminum super 8.8" was swapped into the subframe while it was down. We will move the diff cooler / fan / pump over to this car as well. The adjustable Whiteline rear swaybar was transferred over from our 2018 GT, and some GT350 axles are on order (cheaper from Ford Racing than the dealership) as well as new rear hubs with ARP studs, which we left on the 2018 GT. More details on that next time.



Jason and I searched the online used parts interchange and found one shop in the Dallas area who was organized enough to list fenders, hoods, headlights and bumper covers for many cars at reasonable prices. We bought this white 2018 front nose for 1/6th the cost of the stock pieces, and it came with some structural and grill bits that were going to cost extra from Ford. I want to re-use the 2018 style Anderson carbon hood - and the '18 front end is supposed to have less drag - which is why we picked up a 2018 nose. I have upper and lower GT grills arriving any day but we're still searching for headlights (horrendously expensive for any S550) and park lights to wrap up the front. We had none of these parts on the 2015 to start with, so going to 2018 look front bits was no extra cost.



We had already sold one of the 2015 front fenders to Matt, so it wasn't a stretch to get two 2018 style front fenders. One is really perfect and the other is OK, but its the best we could get at the same yard we got the nose from. Paid even a smaller a fraction of the cost of new, and both came with bits that aren't included with new fenders.



I asked Evan to use our strut tower cutting fixture and open up the tiny tower holes to a 3.0" opening. We used a 2-3/4" hole saw on the 2018 GT but this 3" is as far as you can go and still keep the entire vertical "wall" and the curved portion of the factory tower. Some of our customers have already tested this size opening without issue.



Time for the good stuff! The MCS Remote Double "RR2" model coilovers went from our 2018 GT straight to the 2015 chassis, as did the Powerbrake front brake kit.



Last Friday, November 22nd, this round of installation was wrapped up. Brad slapped on the 19x11" Forgestar / RE-71R set of wheels and tires, which really made the car look a lot better. It was set on the ground at the end of the day and it made me smile. All of the work above happened in October and November, when we had an hour or two to spare between tasks on customer cars. Hoped we would be at this point back in September, but we were slammed.



I came in last Saturday and scaled the car with the parts shown above. Its missing 70 pounds of crank/rods/pistons, the radiator, battery, front bumper beam (we will make a tubular one) and bumper cover, left side door, and two seats. We also don't have a fuel tank, driveshaft, clutch, or rear axles in the car. But the rest is pretty much there. The LS is no lighter than the Coyote, as they are nearly identical in weight. But 2327 pounds? I was more than happy to see a number that low.



This is less than the 2349 pounds the car weighed when it rolled in - when it had no motor or trans, no front brakes, and skinny 8" wheels. Jason and I added up about 400 pounds of parts that needs to go back into this to be a running/driving track car. Maybe 500 if we are super conservative. That's still less than 3000 pounds, so we are hopeful!

WHAT'S NEXT?

This post ran long and I skipped one more August event, SCCA TT at MSR 1.3. I will cover that event next time and finally show more more of our diff cooler iterations. Hopefully we will have the tubular front bumper beam made for #Trigger by then, the nose mounted, and a rolled radiator in place.



I can also show the many steps that Brad and Even went through to get the rear subframe bushings out, using special tools that Myles designed and built. We might make a run of these tools, for those patient enough not to just use a saw to cut the mounts out.

Until next time!

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Other than crashing, this outcome made for the least fun TT weekend you can think of. Nobody in TT got any times, so nobody got class points or trophies - and we made a lot of our "street tire" sub-class trophies. Still, the W2W groups raved about the longer Tri-oval + infield track layout they got to run. Casey in the TT2 C7 Corvette was able to take his new cage, fire system, and log book updates and entered W2W. There he practiced, qualified and raced in ST2 with a Rookie status this weekend. Not only did he set the ST2 track record he won his first race!



NASA has put this event back on the schedule for 2020, thankfully NOT in August. We will be there May 1-3, 2020, with the same split courses for HPDE TT on the infield and W2W on the full Tri-oval + road course. If at first you don't succeed - try, try again!

Photo and video gallery: https://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Racing-...ug-17-18-2019/

TIPS FOR REPAIRING A CRASHED S550

We talked about the repair work to Matt's car online back in August (after he gave us permission), and it was a bit of a thrash on our end + the work needed at Heritage to get this car back up and running in less than 4 weeks. Why not share the work in chronological order here? There were just 5 weeks to repair this car and make it track ready again before the SCCA TT Nationals. Some asked why we stopped everything at our shop to attack the work on this car? Let me explain.



It turns out this car is kind of special to us, for multiple reasons. It was formerly owned by Brian Matteucci, who is an old friend of mine from college, and who's company (Motor-Force Engineering) we bought in 2006. We had Brian use this 2015 GT for our first S550 camber-caster plate for the OEM style spring. And later his 6th gen 1LE for our first 6th gen camber plate as well. Then he sold this car to Matt Givens, his endurance racing team partner - who we got to know at several events. Super nice guy, and a quick driver. He still rocks the Vorshlag banners on his car, too.



Matt bought the car from Brian a couple of years ago and has upgraded to MCS TT2 coilovers that he got from us, added a 4-point roll bar, Sparco racing seats, long tube headers + CAI, and more. Last year he ran the car at the NOLA round of Optima, and did well. In 2019 he began running the car in National SCCA TT events across the country and cleaned up there, setting FTD at more than one event.



In this car Matt had been was racking up the TT wins in the SCCA's unique classing structure by going to events on the road, and we really wanted to see him take this car to the 2019 TT Nationals at NCM. We had originally talked about going to that event in our 2018 GT, and the June Optima event was a sighting trip for this TT Nationals for us. After starting our 2015 Mustang project we decided to skip TT Nationals and instead support Matt.



So it's Monday morning after the TMS incident and Matt's car is parked in front of our shop. It was slid off the roll back there and won't roll because the wheel is crammed into the strut, and the LF control arm is broken. Brad installed the LF arm off of our 2015 GT, swapped on one of my spare 19x11s, and it was driven into the shop. First step of many!



We noted a jacked up front alignment - once on the lift we could see that the steering rack was partially broken and the tie rod was very bent. The transmission crossmember was also shattered. The 650 pound engine + transmission sits on sloppy hydraulic mounts, and when the car was hit from the side, the drivetrain moved as a big undamped mass, which shock-loaded the 2 pound cast aluminum transmission crossmember. Boom!



The LF wheel took the brunt of the car-to-car impact, which drove it into the strut, which bent the strut housing and shaft. The fender was shredded - the fronts are aluminum and very flimsy. We stole the LF fender off my black 2015, to save time and money. Took our driver's door, too.



Luckily we had a set of S550 MCS TT2 coilovers in stock (only set in the country we could get our hands on that day), so we stole the front strut from this kit to replace the badly bent unit on his car. We inspected the camber plate and surprisingly it was perfect, so that and the spring were swapped over.



The steering rack from my 2015 looked good so it replaced his broken rack (left side mount had broken off) plus the new suspension bits went in quickly. One of the inner fender reinforcements was missing from this white car - the big black panel shown above. This is a foot intrusion panel that bolts the frame to the inner fender structure. That being in place would have mitigated some of the damage, and Shiloh wanted this piece to be able to pull some of the seam back in place and align it - so that came from my 2015 GT as well.



We worked on the car for only 3 days (Aug 19th-21st) but had the car to Shiloh rolling and driving - with a replacement door and fender - on Day 4. After I dropped it off his team got to work located the parts needed to replace the busted headlight, bumper cover, and do the bodywork and paint repairs.



It was at Shiloh's for about 3 weeks where they bodyworked the rear fender and bumper cover (secondary impact), pulled the front inner fender structure back into place, then installed the LF fender and door from my black 2015.



They primed, painted, and cleared the left side of the car + bumper cover. It looks great but they noticed an issue with the left side wheelbase - the front wheel was pushed rearward and didn't line up with the fender arch.



It got back to Vorshlag for some work Sept 17-th to 20th, where we attacked some remaining items. The car had a somewhat janky seat bracket that bent badly and pulled the floorpan up from the impact. We replaced that with a Vorshlag CNC cut, steel ribbed seat bracket that was MUCH more rigid. During the install of this is when we figured out that the floor was damaged - because it didn't line up.



Bit of a head scratcher, but Shiloh noted that this happens a lot on cars that get hit - the weight of a driver and/or passenger will push the floorpan out of shape as the seat deforms in the crash. We looked and my 2015 passenger floor is buckled the exact same way! After pulling carpet and some other things out of the way it took about 20 minutes with some sections of 2x6" wood and hammers to persuade the floorpan back into shape. The frame was perfect, just part of the floor distorted. Once that was pushed back our seat bracket lined up perfectly and went in.



We briefly installed the 3-bolt S550 brake deflector (above right), for pictures. We had planned to replace the janky ducted backing plates that had some of the worst corrugated hoses (above left) we had ever seen - routed up and over the arms like we see some do. Not his fault, this is how this product is sold.



We had the car in the air and could not see why the wheel was offset to the rear. Maybe the front subframe was bent? That's a big expensive part ($900) and takes a lot of time to install. The SCCA TT Nationals was only days away. We punted and got some adjustable front control arms with spherical ends from our buddies down at SPL Parts in Austin, which arrived the next day. As Brad was installing these he pulled the factory TC rod, the second lower control arm that looked perfect... and wow. We uncovered the mystery.



the spindle was badly distorted at the mounting hole for the TC rod, as was the ball joint end there and the bolt at the subframe end. So it didn't need a subframe, just a new spindle and arm. We rushed our local Ford dealer and they got a spindle quickly for only $220. Something to look closer at in a car that has had an impact - we will inspect these more closely next time.



Matt was OK with the upgrade and we put the SPL arms on - he had sphericals on one end of the TC rod already, so this wasn't going to be a change in "NVH" for him. The SPL arms are very adjustable and allow for more camber, caster, and slight wheelbase changes. New Whiteline swaybar end links replaced some lower end bits he had in there, so now the suspension was refreshed and it was time for a gross alignment.



The long tube headers and mid-pipe exhaust was out of kilter with the rear bits, so we adjusted that. Installed our 4-bolt brake deflectors to mount to the SPL arms, then fixed the PP1 undertray panels, which had ripped out a few holes.



Brad really crushed it on this job, and when he was done he detailed this car inside, out and under the hood. Matt ended up buying 5 wheels from us that we had in stock, so he now has 3 sets for wets and drys. He picked up the car on the weekend, took it down to MSR Houston for an alignment and track test, then was on the road the next Tuesday headed to NCM. Amazed at the work that Shiloh and his crew did also. Great team work!



Working on this car, then observing some things on my 2015 Mustang GT chassis - which I took to Shiloh for a cross check when I picked up the white car - taught us a number of things. Shiloh pointed out where these cars are super rigid and hard and where they are meant to deform. We took what we learned an put it into this video, linked above. If you have an S550 and do track things, might be helpful to watch this 15 minute video on our YouTube page.

PREPPING 2018 GT FOR SALE

At the time of this writing our 2018 Mustang GT is for sale, as shown below. If this classified ad is still showing "for sale", then it is still for sale. When you go there and it shows "SOLD" then its sold. That should hopefully cut down on 300+ questions over the next 12 months. I hope. #IsItStillForSale



I made a promise when we bought this 2018 Mustang GT in February of 2018 to NOT do any mods that couldn't be un-done. Why? Our 2011 GT had flared fenders and some other mods we could not "un-do" and that made it tough to sell quickly. I stuck to that promise on this car, but we did leave several of the track worthy parts in this car when we put it up for sale.



In early September we decided to scrub further 2019 season events in this car and spent a couple of weeks, between customer jobs, putting the car back as close to stock as made sense. The carbon hood and hood pins came off, the 4-point roll bar came out, the race seats were replaced with the stock bits that have been bagged in storage.



De-stickering the car took several hours, and some of the cheaper vinyl was tough to get off without some heat. With some help from Amy the decals were taken off, then Brad got the adhesive goo removed and waxed and buffed the finish to a shine. I picked at a few decals but broke my thumbnails all to crap. There is no "easy" way to get cheap vinyl off after it has been baked on.



ProTip: Some of the black trim bits had some wax residue near the painted finish areas, which was baked into the finish and wouldn't come off. Crusty white looking stuff. Brad found this "Back-to-Black" black trim cleaner from Mothers and it worked like a charm.



The long tube headers and custom exhaust was a tough call - we could have burned 8-10 hours swapping this stuff back to stock, but how much are used stainless headers worth? And then we'd have to pull the CAI, load the stock tune, etc. The car sounds SO good and works so well with these long tubes and the exhaust we built with the over-sized Magnaflows that we decided to keep it all on their, plus the CAI and include the SCT tuner with the car.



The engine bay was cleaned up after the strut tower brace we added was removed. The Powerbrake fronts were swapped out for PP1 6-piston Brembos and 15" rotors that were used briefly during the progression of our brake development. The MCS RR2 coilovers were swapped for the AST/Whiteline set that we used for much of 2018. These AST5100 based inverted monotubes ride great, are super strong, have rebound damping adjustment and include our camber/caster plates.



The spare tire and trunk carpets were reinstalled (look at the D&E magic!), and the triple gauge panel was left in place. We could have pulled this entirely but the labor involved in adding the wiring and sensors for these is worth more than the parts cost, so we pulled the 4th gauge (diff temp) and left the other three in place. Oil temp, oil pressure and water temp gauges remain in the Boss 302 3 gauge cluster. We pulled the diff cooler and replaced the aluminum 4.09 geared housing with the original 3.55 geared steel case limited slip unit that came on this car.



Last but not least we couldn't let the car leave with this many track ready parts without some sort of brake cooling. This Vorshlag 4-bolt deflector mounts to the OEM TC rod with the U-bolts included in that kit, as shown above. All of the original swaybars and control arms were installed, and the SPL spherical arms will go on the 2015. Comes with the 19x11" Momos and our freshest set of 305/30/19 RE-71R tires so you could drive it to work or rip around a race track equally well.



Brad took a LOT of nice pictures of the 2018 GT in its "for sale" condition. Super low miles, "only driven on the weekends", and of course you can see a lot more here in the classified ad.

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Third TT Session: There were still 5 or 6 turns I was struggling with, not stringing together. I just could not differentiate some turns, and kept putting 2 off in T10 and T12. Had not gotten my bearings. For the 3rd session I taped the track map to my dash just to help figure out which turns were which. Of course I got flustered and went out with the ASC (traction control) turned on, which I figured out halfway through the out lap. DAMN!

Now all the gains I had made on grid placement were lost - I had to back off, point everyone by, then turn traction control off (you have to press a button and hold the brakes for 5 seconds straight), then try to build a gap ahead, and then go. I lost time doing this and only had 2 hot laps: but I ran a new best of 2:22.482 followed by a 2:21.692 before the tires got super hot. This was a stupid mistake, not turning ASC off in grid. Nobody to blame but me!



We had a quick lunch then back to Speed Stop. I'm soaking wet from sweat at this point, salt rings on my T-shirt, exhausted. I cannot overstate how hot and humid this place was - its June in Kentucky, and all sessions on track are in a full fire suit, so it's not hard to understand. Amy's trying to keep me hydrated, using an umbrella to keep me shaded while in the long lines for Speed Stop (below left). The AiM was not talking to the SmartyCam and I had to use a second camera. I'm done with this SmartyCam - it is too unreliable. Even when it works it has pretty poor video resolution.



Didn't find any time in my afternoon Speed Stop times, track surface was boiling and the tires felt greasy. All I was doing was sliding around. Blevins found some time, moving him up to 3rd place overall. Luckily there were no "bonus" laps and I won the GT class for Speed Stop (see below). I felt pretty good about the driving bits - had a 1st in Speed Stop and a 2nd in Autocross, and was still finding major time on the road course for TT.



Forth TT Session: The quick guys in GT class were in the 2:18 to 2:19 range, and I'm in the 2:21s, but still dropping seconds in each session as I learned this layout and find clear track. It was so hot many drivers had already packed up and left before this last session, but I didn't want to leave a single session undriven as I figured out this course. I had hoped for a 2:19 lap, and it was in the car, according to the AiM Solo.

I went out in the 4th and final session and put myself at the BACK of the grid, after letting local racer Marty in his boosted 5th gen Camaro know what I was doing. Letting everyone go by worked in session 3, but I lost track time setting up the "gap ahead". Marty wanted to follow me, as he was also struggling trying to learn this track - so now it was the blind leading the blind. At least we wouldn't be stuck in a train. Sitting in grid, the air coming off the pavement at the IAT sensor was 115°F - I was miserable in my fire suit, so I turned the air con on and tried to cool down, which helped a little.



They wave everybody out of grid but we sat there, let the entire 12 car grid go for about 45 seconds, then we went. This built a huge gap to the slower cars in front. Marty stuck with me a bit and we had some clear track. He had been running 2:26s all day but with a rabbit to chase he dropped down to a 2:22.5! Track surface was well over 130°F, and these "200 treadwear" tires do not like that.



My first lap was all that mattered and I found a 2:20.690, my best of the day. Not the 2:19 I wanted so I start into lap 2 and blew Corner 2, backed off to wave Marty by, then I tried to set a gap ahead again while still running a 2:22 lap. I was hoping to get one more lap in, and the flagger was reaching for the checker but didn't pull it when I went past start finish. I started my 3rd hot lap and predictive timing was showing a low 2:19... but I blew turn 10, put 2 off of T12, and then took it easy coming by the finish.



We went to the results meeting not knowing how we placed. The D&E scoring really tanked us, but I had hoped for a top 3. Nope! No idea where we finished until days later, when we finally saw the results for the individual classes and events. I was shown to be 5th in GT class (see overall results below) and 24th overall for the Time Trial. Obviously this was a disappointment but I had nobody to blame but myself. Many of the drivers at this event had run NCM before (or were locals), and some even flew in earlier in the year to take laps in the Corvettes you can drive in their "Corvette Experience" events. In hindsight that would have been smart, as would gridding earlier for that first session and not getting stuck behind the "rolling chicane" drivers. And putting carpet in the back seat area for the D&E.

NCM event results: http://clubregistration.net/clients/...m?eventID=9459

HOW TO PLAY THE GAME AND WIN

So I bitch about Optima's D&E car show games a lot, but Jonathon Blevins showed how to get the class win this time. He has been running this series in his 2008 GT500 for a few years and this was their debut event for 2019 after a major overhaul and massive rework of this car, including many smart D&E tricks.



As you can see they cut out a lot of the front structure and added some roll cage tubing underhood, swapped struts for a double A-arm suspension, and of course the giant blower. They claim 837 whp, and it was pretty quick on track for a few laps - but with today's 200TW tires and the high track temps we saw here, none of us had much more than that in our cars that day.



The interior is filled with some interesting gear, with an AiM dash integrated into the factory surround, buttons on the steering wheel, and a roll cage that has the upper door bars hidden above the headliner. The judges eat that kind of stuff up. The fit and finish was top notch and he deserved the D&E class win.



Apparently leaving the stock trunk carpet out really hurt my D&E score, but if you have a giant fuel cell that makes up for it. He also drove well in the timed events and got a 1st (autocross), 2nd (Time Trial), 3rd (Speed Stop), and 1st (D&E). That's how you get a class win and an invite to the OUSCI event at the end of the year (where he also won GT class and placed 6th overall - impressive). Do well in all of the events, timed and judged. Congrats to him!



The D&E does skew the finish results quite heavily. If you ignore the D&E scores, Blevins would have still won the class, but I would have been 2nd instead of 5th, down by 6 points instead of 67. I actually tied for 4th but they let D&E be the tie breaker - it means that much to this series. So if you want to win not only do you need to drive fast you ALSO should prioritize the shiny bits. Also have a good story for the 4 minute D&E presentation - a number of competitors made up that their car had unobtanium this or that, and the judges took their word for it. Outright lying about mods you don't have is encouraged in this event.

NASA "TT" at TMS, AUGUST 18-19, 2019

Why, oh why, does anyone in Texas try to hold a Time Trial event in August? Well two local groups did this year - NASA and SCCA - and we foolishly went to both. I knew the "end was near" for our time in the 2018 Mustang, and we wanted to test some versions of the diff cooler we were working on. Unlike many NASA weekends we decided to arrive on Saturday morning instead of the night before to setup and unload. This event was a "home track" that we can get to in 45 minutes, so why get there the day before? Well this was a mistake - it made for a rushed morning, unload, and I was a couple of minutes late to the TT meeting at 8 am. There was a bit of troubling news at the TT meeting, but I will cover that below.



This was an unusual event - the first time NASA Texas had run at Texas Motor Speedway - and the various sub-groups ran completely different courses. HPDE and TT ran the short 1.1 mile infield road course shown above. The W2W groups ran the huge tri-oval + the infield course (they joined and left the infield course where "pit out" and "pit in" are shown above. The full course looked a LOT more fun, but when it was announced that TT would be running the short infield course I was relieved. Why? The infield course is (supposedly) safer, speeds are much lower, and I had run this 1,1 mile course 3 times previously with wins at each event (GTA, Optima, and a W2W event).

SATURDAY

But it was August. In Texas. So it was hot AF! I had dragged Erik from HPR out to the event with me and rented a garage, to keep out of the sun and heat. It was still hot inside the garages but it was almost tolerable with shade. We just didn't venture out much, and I spent some time in the air conditioned driver's center to keep cool. I didn't watch a single lap of any W2W race, and was smart enough to not sign up for instructing, so I didn't need to be in a car except for my lone TT session.



The garages at TMS are super nice and you really MUST rent one if you run an event here. These are the same garages that NASCAR use when they run this track in their series. Spacious, bathrooms on the ends, roll up doors and power. Plenty of room to spread out your stuff, chairs, cooler, etc.



After we got unloaded I picked up our 2nd place trophy for the 2018 season at the driver's meeting - forgot we had placed that high last year. Really wished we had stayed in TT3 for all of 2019, as we were so out-gunned (and hundreds of pounds overweight) for TT2. Bad planning on my part, for sure.

OUR ONE SESSION OF THE WEEKEND

Saturday morning warm-up was our ONE session of the weekend - I will explain. As we were warned in the TT meeting, the infield road course timing loop was broken. Hadn't been used in years, and it was only tested on Friday. NASA was flying in another loop for use on this course, supposed to arrive around lunch time. The W2W folks had the regular timing loop on the NASCAR tri-oval start/finish to use, so they were fine. And HPDE doesn't get timed, so they were gonna be OK too.



This is a VERY short course and the 24 cars in Time Trial were to be split into two sub-groups of 12 cars each. This was something we campaigned for earlier in the year, as we had run here before and knew the difficulties with running more than 8 or 10 cars at a time on such limited track mileage. But, to our dismay, ALL of the TT cars were lumped into a single group for the first "Practice" session, which wasn't going to have times due to the loop being down. The new timing loop was to arrive "after lunch" so we would have a one or two practice sessions before anyone got times. I had planned to do 3 tests of our diff cooler: 1) no cooler at all, 2) diff pump only, and 3) diff pump and cooler. This testing was what I cared about more than "winning" TT2.



It was already 86°F and humid when we went out on track at 8:43 am, after we sat on grid for delays picking up wrecked W2W cars in the previous group. I started grid in P2 behind Casey's TT2 C7 Corvette. He and I used to be closer in pace but his car prep evolved quite a bit over the previous months and this was his debut with a fully stripped and caged C7 ready for W2W, on Hoosiers/aero/etc. I was running Day 1 on the 200TW tires then switching to R7s for Day 2, per my normal plan for the season. I knew from previous events that Hoosiers and Aero were a big help here, so I gladly let him go first.



We took the apron around and joined the 1.1 mile road course as a group. I had a feeling Casey would be quick, and he was with some 38.6 sec laps on his AiM - just walking away from me. I ran a bunch of 40.5 to 40.6 sec laps, and I got 4 or 5 laps in before we caught the back of the field - which was remarkable, for having 24 cars in about a 1 mile stretch. Then I peeled off and came into the paddock. I've gone quicker here in the TT3 2011 GT (39.2 sec), but that was on Hoosiers with aero 6 years previous.

THE "INCIDENT"

Normally I don't show it when "bad things happen", and I want everyone reading this to know that any car-to-car contact in Time Trial is super rare. Since coming to NASA TT events starting in 2006 I have witnessed car-to-car incidents only 3 times in probably 100+ TT events. It happens in HPDE more than TT, honestly. But not talking about this incident would be dishonest, because we knew both drivers and helped repair one of the cars. This happened in the lone TT session after I came in, and I missed all of the action. All was not going smoothly in the middle of the pack, where a massive log jam was brewing. Erik from HPR and Jason from Vorshlag saw it all go down from the viewing stands, who gave me their eye witness accounts. I also talked to both of the drivers afterwards.



The lead car (I'm not getting into all of the who or what on that) went a bit fast through T7 and spun off track left at T8, heading towards a concrete wall along that side of the course. I have seen many cars impact that wall and it always ends up with a totaled chassis. This driver tried to avoid the wall (smart) but after pointing the car away from that near certain impact, he came back across track and tagged the car behind - Matt's white 2015 Mustang GT, shown above. I will cover the repairs to this car below, but long story short: both cars were damaged but both drivers were fine. Both cars had more than minimum safety gear and the seats, harnesses, HANS and roll bars did their jobs well. SMART.

I know both drivers well and neither was overly upset at the other - it was just the result of very close confines plus a spin that got a little out of hand. Matt said he thought the car ahead was going wide to let him pass as it went into T8, so he accelerated to pass on the ritht, then noticed the car coming back across track. He then dove way off track right, to try to avoid - they didn't make contact until 10-20 feet off the track, in the grass. It was the right move to make, given what he could see, just some bad luck.



The session was black flagged. When I heard what had happened I ran over to Matt's paddock area with a floor jack, as the car was being dropped off the flat bed wrecker. He was fine, but his Mustang was a mess. It had popped air bags, the LF wheel was crunched into the body, and the LR corner was banged up. Did not roll. Matt had planned on being at SCCA TT Nationals just 5 weeks from that day, so we had to act quickly to try to make that happen. Jason and I did a quick triage, took some pics, then rolled into action. I sent pictures to our paint an body guru, Shiloh at Heritage Collision - who has fixed a number of SCCA and NASA race cars after incidents, and paints all of our project cars. He felt like it could be fixed, so the work was scheduled. Not going to be an insurance job.



We had Matt call a flat bed wrecker, then I had Amy meet that at the shop, to show where to drop the car. We had some OEM parts from our recently acquired 2015 Mustang we could donate. Matt was a bit in shock but we took care of everything else and the car was at Vorshlag about 60 minutes later. We helped Matt pack up his stuff, then he and Brian Matteucci headed back home to Houston while we waited to see what was going to happen the rest of the day.

There was about a half hour delay, then the W2W race group got going again. The HPDE group ran again sometime around lunch, while the rest of us took a long lunch break at an air conditioned restaurant. During a long lunch break the track shut down and workers tried to get the new overnighted AiM timing loop installed - to no avail. After lunch we knew that there would be no more sessions for Saturday. I missed an incident in HPDE where a car spun off track and almost hit one of the NASCAR lights, which shut down HPDE and TT both. So no more opportunities to collect data. When we left at 2:45 pm it was 103F - a miserable, hot, nasty day.

SUNDAY

After more timing loop attempts overnight, that near miss of their precious light standing out in the dirt in the infield was enough to spook the TMS folks and they called off the HPDE and TT cars for the rest of the weekend. My only regret was not trusting my gut Saturday afternoon and loading up the car and taking the trailer then. So Amy and I had to drive out to TMS Sunday, load the car, hook up the trailer. We stopped by an SCCA autocross happening in the outer parking lot that day, got super sweaty and hot, then headed home. That blew a whole day in triple digit temps again.

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Project Update for November 26th, 2019: Here we are once again playing "catch-up" on forum updates. We had that 3 month Vorshlag forum outage, plus I was out for a number of weeks due to an illness, and the shop was as busy as ever the whole time. After a couple of cars left it made room for a new customer '67 Mustang track build recently.



In this update we will cover 2 of the next 3 track events that we completed in our 2018 Mustang GT: the Optima event at NCM, NASA Time Trial at TMS, and we will show the August SCCA Time Trial at COTA next time. We changed a bunch of parts on our 2018 Mustang GT, got it cleaned up (see above) and it is now for sale.



At one of these TT events, a friend's white S550 2015 Mustang GT got smashed up, so we jumped in to help complete the repairs, and amazingly got it back on track in 3.5 weeks - just in time for him to take it to SCCA TT Nationals. Our black 2015 GT build (#Trigger) went to the body shop for measurements and had a few things "borrowed" to fix the smashed up white 2015 GT, shown below left.



Once this 2015 chassis came back with a clean measurement test, we began the LS engine swap and moved much of the 2018 GT's raciest bits over. This is now rolling on MCS RR2s, SPL arms, 19x11s, and much more. First we will talk about our S550 brake cooling upgrade that has been hugely successful in the last month since it went into production.

FRONT BRAKE DEFLECTORS



Since my last post, our S550 front brake deflectors are in production and selling like hotcakes. We now make this for 7 different varieties of S550 front brake / control arm setups, including the 4-hole with U-bolts (shown above) and a 3-hole version (see below).



This pair of images above show our final S550 brake deflector version next to the OEM Performance Pack plastic flap. The PP cars have a front control arm with 3 threaded holes that this will replace. The same version also fits the GT350/R with the same style 3-hole control arm, and we make a 4-hole version that fits the cars with a control arm that has no holes, like the base GT, V6 and Ecoboost as well as aftermarket arms like the SPL Parts arms - all of which are shown below in different sections.



We make these deflectors in-house, and cut out a batch of these every few days, so if you order it should ship pretty quickly. We have started including some M6-1.0 bolt hardware for all kits because we have seen that the OEM hardware tends to break when removed. Be prepared to drill out the old stuff and re-tap. Likewise the GT350/R arms have the 3 holes in the arms but they aren't tapped - an M16-1.0 tap takes care of that. For the non-PP / non-Shelby Mustangs and aftermarket control arms we include the U-bolt kit, which allows you to attach the deflector to the arm that way.



We will also continue building and selling our traditional S550 (4") and S197 (3" and 4") ducted hose front brake cooling packages, for those who don't have undertray tunnels or a way to add them, or don't trust our brake deflector test data (or Marco's more extensive Ford test data). Hey, you want to spend 3 times as much to use the old school brake ducting with hoses, we'll sell them to you. We should have our S197 brake cooling deflector solution in a few weeks as well as a few other Mustang models we are working on with Marco Garcia.

OPTIMA AT NCM, JUNE 1-2, 2019

I skipped covering the June Optima @ NCM event last time, which was 3 days of cool car fun I need to go back and cover. A lot of stuff went down that weekend that it needs to be covered - there was a lot of good, a bit of frustration, followed by my mediocre GT class finish (5th out of 31) after some good timed competition battles (I finished 1st, 2nd, and 5th in the timed competitions). This event had the normal 3 competition elements: Autocross, Speed Stop and road course Time Trial. The Road Rally was no problem, but our car was judged poorly in the Design and Engineering subjective score.



First of all - wow! What an amazing facility! NCM has a huge paved paddock that allowed for a rather large area to run the Autocross (Saturday) and Speed Stop (Sunday) segments. The road course was massive, had a LOT of elevation change, and is surrounded by walls - which made it somewhat intimidating. Learning this track will bit more time for me. Apparently 4 sessions was not enough seat time for me to get a good lap in. The "National Corvette Museum" is right across the highway from NCM Motorsports park after which this place is named, and we went through the tour there.

Friday



We had the car loaded in the trailer with a fresh set of RE-71R tires mounted, left Dallas on Friday morning at 1:15 am, drove 11 hours straight, and got to Bowling Green at 12:30 in the afternoon. There were 31 cars in GT class with us, second only to 37 in GTV (vintage) for numbers. Yikes!



We unloaded the car, installed all of the required decals, went thru tech, did the fire drill, reloaded the car into trailer, and were done at 4:30 pm. We went across the highway (which literally takes 10 minutes) to the National Corvette Museum. Toured the displays, saw the "sinkhole" and carnage they pulled out, and made fun of Corvette themed clothing in the Museum Store. Of course we bought some stuff!



National Corvette Museum gallery: https://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Car-Shows/NCM-2019/

Had a nice dinner out in Bowling Green in the college district at The Bistro. Amazing food, and we went to their sister restaurant Saturday night. Then crashed at the hotel.

Saturday



Arrived on site at 6:30 am with a thick fog from massive humidity. We unloaded the car again (it rained hard Friday night), and started checking pressures and setting up cameras. Walked the autocross course six times that morning. The Autocross, Design and Engineering (D&E) and the Road Rally were scheduled for this day. Lots to do.

Optima NCM event gallery: https://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Racing-...ma-NCM-060119/

We had 4 autocross runs in the morning, then 4 in the afternoon, with a threat of "maybe some more" if there was time. It was hot and very humid, temps were in the high 80's but with this brutal humidity, it was fairly miserable. Luckily we only had to wear our helmet for the autocross, so I was driving in shorts and a T-shirt, trying to stay hydrated and out of the sun.



I took my first autocross run and the car felt GREAT - gearing was perfect, tires were hooked up, and right off the bat I was the only GT class car in the 29 second range - way ahead of the class. I knocked some time down but ran similar times for 3 runs in a row. Jonathon Blevins had snuck ahead of me in his '08 GT500, which he built just for this series (837 whp supercharged engine). I tried to go to D&E in the morning but it was super crowded. It was hot hot hot, no shade in the paddock, so we hung out in our trailer when waiting to drive.



I walked the course two more times during lunch. It was a momentum course, setup more for Miatas than Detroit iron, so it was a bit frustrating to drive. Speed maintenance type deal, nowhere to use throttle or brakes, and zero slaloms. It was a just a big long: offset, offset, turn, offset, offset, turn, finish. Did our 2nd set of 4 runs right after lunch.



Ran a little quicker on my 5th run, then my 6th was my quickest of the day with a 29.1135 sec time. No better on run 7 or 8 - was really hoping for 28s, which is what most of the fastest cars in other classes were running. I was still in the lead and once everyone in GT had run their 8 runs. I thought this might be the one event we win in GT class, as I tend to do better at Optima in the autocross than any other timed competition.



Then we got in the line for D&E again, and waited... waited... waited... Then we noticed cars were making more autocross runs. Wasn't announced well, but when pressed the organizers admitted that yes, all cars were going to run two more runs. Crap. We had 3 cars ahead of us in the D&E line, but we were going to miss our chance at the additional "bonus" autocross runs, so we hopped out and rushed to grid.

I ran two nearly identical times, 29.2 and 29.5, no help. Blevins improved to a 29.0 on his 10th and final run, bumping me to 2nd. Then my 29.1 run disappeared from the results, so I had to go take my time slips and a screen shot from live timing system to the Timing and Scoring trailer, they sent me to the Optima trailer, then the next day they finally found this time. Didn't show up on the autocross results until Sunday, but I was finally shown in 2nd almost a tenth of a second off the lead. Falling back to a 29.2 time have changed the class order, but it would effect points - as they give points for placements based on ALL cars at the event in a particular segment.



Frustrating to lose an autocross on run # 10, but hey, its Optima - they try to give people as many runs as they can, so it can lead to time drops throughout the day. We're about 400 pounds heavier then the purpose built Blevins car (which is near the 3200 pound GT class minimum), but I still should have driven better. The 4.09 gearing worked really well for us, ideal for 2nd gear, and I hoped that could translate to a good performance in the Speed Stop on Sunday.



We finally got through the D&E judging, the 4 minute presentation went well, but we wouldn't know our score until the next day. Bunch of stock Shelbys and Mustangs in GT class - surely we will outscore most of those? We've changed major parts on every system of this car, and have done quite a lot since we did our last Optima event in 2018 at NOLA. Felt good about it.



But on Sunday we saw the D&E results - and our car did terrible. Ranked 63rd out of 67 cars that were judged! Something on this car pissed off the judges, not sure what. There were multiple BONE STOCK Mustang GTs and Shelbys and Camaros that outscored us by 30 places or more. This poor placement really chapped my ass. A car with a LOT of modifications, prototype parts, and bespoke equipment gets outscored by 30 places by a showroom stock Mustangs? Come on...

"ItS yOuR pReSeNtAtIoN!" some said. Look, I'm not a noob when it comes to public speaking or giving presentations - this was just some weird scoring guidelines. Whatever - the car show portion is the one I hate the most in Optima, and since I'm a bit vocal about it, I guess this is my punishment. We probably need to bring stuffed animals, mini models of our car (yes - they were there), underglow LEDs, big speakers, chrome doo-dads and tacky wraps.



Some of the excuses I heard were missing carpet in the back seat - which was done to make room for the 4-point roll bar. If that is the case, they are literally discouraging safety upgrades to justify the car show crowd. When somebody rolls a car and they get injured due to their car show emphasis, I'm not gonna say "I told ya so", but I am going to think it.

At the end of the day we went on the Road Rally, which was to the Holley Performance headquarters across town and back. We stopped for fuel on the way, got back in plenty of time. We went over to the clubhouse where everyone is eating the sponsored dinner - sandwiches and potato salad - but they ran out of sandwiches a half hour before we got there. How do you run out of food when you know how many people are entered? No biggie, we had another good meal in town. We were pretty tired and over heated, so we crashed out at the hotel early.

Sunday

We have the Speed Stop and Road Course Time Trial competitions left, but by now I had seen the D&E score knew I was out of the running. I've never won the Speed Stop in the many Optima events I've entered (won Optima autocross events a few times), so I didn't have much hope here. I was more hopeful for the road course, but not having run here before was a huge variable. How quickly can I learn a 23 turn course??

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This looked complicated and daunting. I had some track notes, and got some tips from locals who worked at this track, and later from Danny Popp. We were supposed get 3 or 4 sessions, but at only 15 minutes each on the 3.2 mile course that meant you get an out lap (no passing), about 3 hot laps, and a cool down. Best case scenario I'd get 12 laps at speed that day. And with the temps being much cooler in the morning and sweltering in the afternoon, the first track session mattered most. Really the first hot lap in the first session was the best chance at a quick time - on a track I'd never driven. All told I got 10 laps that day at speed. We did 2 slow orientation laps early on in a parade fashion, which was only marginally helpful when there were cars blocking every corner.



I did the first 4 right and 4 left side runs on the Speed Stop in the morning, which put me in the lead for GT class. The 4.09 gearing was PERFECTION on this course - 2nd gear was using all of the RPM range and the brakes were WORKING WELL. I had some good drives, sliding the car just ever so slightly, and braking DEEP into the stop box. My left side time was solid - was the only GT car in the 8 second range. I was stoked, because Speed Stop isn't ever my best event. Time for road course...



One of the locals who helped me, Brian Sowders, put a 2:18 in at the very end of the day in his Shelby GT350. He works at the track and knows it well, but since he had no roll bar or belts he had to run in Intermediate run group - and on this day that meant he was one of the faster cars leading the pack, in a smaller run group, so not much traffic. I ran one of the two Expert classed, since I do have a roll bar, 6-point belts, HANS, fire bottle, and halo seat. What did that get me? Stuck in traffic on track all freagin day. The lap below was in the last session after I figured out a trick to break away from the pack.



First TT Session: I finally got on track for real laps in our first session at 10:30 am. Ran a 2:26.163 on my first ever lap here, in traffic. I was stuck in a train of slower cars for two more laps (2:38 and 2:29) and was very held up. There was gaggle of Corvettes that WOULD NOT let cars pass. I was "that guy" in the Mustang, flashing lights, swerving, waving, just desperate for a point by. Even after wild hand gestures out the window and honking the horn, nothing. These folks would not acknowledge cars behind or lift for a pass. Just PARKED in the corners, and blocked any attempts at passes. I'm still learning the course but couldn't see a damn thing - just the back of Corvettes. Rolling chicanes.



Second TT Session: For the next sessions they would grid you by best times from all previous sessions - so guess who I am stuck behind for the session? The same "I can't see you" Corvettes with +300 more hp but -30 mph minimum corning speeds. It was a train of cars. I finally gave up after 2 laps and let ALL the cars stuck behind me in the megatrain go by. With only 12 cars on a 3.2 mile track it was better to hold back for a half of a lap and get two hot laps in. Unfortunately I had overheated the RE-71R tires in the first hot lap and only ran a 2:23.163 - and found 3 seconds. Still building up my courage, trying to ignore the sea of Armco that surrounded every section of this track, and the concrete wall along the main pit straight.

continued below

[warmmilk]

whats the weight of the Momo Heritage 6 wheels?