Pat's circus of Volvos and race car projects [NASCAR SW Tour Olds, dirt hobby stock]

I could flood the forum with like 6 different build threads, so I will just start by keeping it all in one thread.

I am a longtime GRM [3 decades] reader and have been racing myself since about 2007.  I've done autocross, track days, circle track, road racing, rallycross, stage rally and even tested an open wheel car in France last year.

I took a break from racing after getting a double whammy of health issues in 2020 and 2021 [brain injury and a COPD diagnosis] but I am slowly getting back at it, mainly thanks to a confidence boost from getting into iRacing and doing it at a good level [by good,  I guess I mean being faster than Oscar Piastri, Kevin Estre and others in various cars in the same session]

I figure I'll start this sh!tshow off with my latest project.  Like many others I spend way too much time screwing around looking on Facebook market.  In 2022 I had a hankering to get a stock car to go road racing with.  I did some lurking on here and figured if I was going to look for a chassis, it had to be a perimeter chassis.  I had a car saved on my saved list that had lingered there for what felt like a year.  There were definitely better cars out there but this one for some reason had my interest.  It probably had to do with the badass Oldsmobile Cutlass sheetmetal hung on it.  It was 4-5 hours north of here up in Anderson, CA which I felt had to do with it's lack of movement.  My wife wanted to go camping by a river so I somehow parlayed that into going to check out the car.

We camp and the next morning I drive across town to go check out the car.  The story behind the car goes that it was originally built by Victory Circle chassis for Ron Hornaday Jr in 1990.  Steve [the guy I bought it from] told me he had a chassis on order, but they decided to sell him the one meant for Ron because they were behind at the time.  So to make up for it, they sold him that chassis and even helped him finish it and they rented out Mesa Marin Speedway to teach Steve how to drive and set the car up so that he could dive right into running Tour races that season.

Steve proceeded to race the car on the NASCAR Southwest Tour between 1990-1994.  After it's time on the Tour, Steve ran many open show late model races with the car around the state.  Around 2002, he stopped racing and mothballed the car.  The car was listed as a rolling chassis when I went to go look at it, but Steve had a 355ci V8 that was built to SW Tour specs that was refreshed around 2000 by a shop in North Carolina that was also for sale.  And he still had the old Tex Racing built T-10 he used for Sonoma when he ran the Tour.  After checking out the car, I made an offer to Steve that involved buying the car, engine and transmission as a running unit.  He still had the watts link and a few parts for setting the chassis up for road racing, but not everything so that was left up to me.

My space was full up with Volvos but Steve agreed to store the car for me for a few months, so I finally went and picked it up in October of last year.  Got it home, and since it was unusually hot those few days I let the car bake in the sun so I could remove the vinyl a little easier

Shortly after getting it home, I finally was able to get a CT scan done on my elbow.  You can see I have a little one 2 pictures above.  She loves ducks.  Back in September that year, we were at the county fair and I spotted a giant stuffed duck I wanted to win her.  The game was right up my wheelhouse as a former pitcher - throwing baseballs at glass bottles.  I absolutely brought the heat, won her the duck and managed to do something I never did in high school or playing at the community college level.  I tore my UCL 

Somehow I avoided Tommy John surgery with months of rest and physical therapy.  I put the Oldsmobile aside to work on and finish a few Volvos I had lined up so I could sell them and fund the build for the Olds.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago.  I explored selling the Olds to put the money into my rally car and dirt hobby stock.  A local friend of mine from said dirt hole, Fred Lind, is a fairly accomplished road racer who has raced stock cars on road courses plenty of times.  He told me he had a friend that wanted to buy it and use his garage for a few weeks to work on it.  Somehow, this conversation led to me pulling the for sale ad and taking the car over to Fred's to get started on swapping it over to a road course setup with his guidance [something I kinda needed]

No pictures of the work involved, but I had trouble a while ago starting the car.  As it turned out, the fuel cell bladder was leaking.  Also as it turns out - the bladder expired in 1995.....so the first order of business was ripping the ass off the car to get a new ATL bladder installed.

Second order of business per Fred's orders - rip the left front out of the car.  Measure the various components [tie rod, lower control arm, strut rod, upper control arm] on the right and get the left matched up.

Next up, take all that useless 250 pounts of lead [as it ended up] out of the frame rail on the drivers side.  It was easier said than done, that stuff was wedged and deformed in place.  I made no progress with a jack handle and a 2 lb sledge over 3-4 hours aside from barely being able to remove 2 out of 4 bars that were on the ends.  The center bars were stuck

I took a break for a day, but than noticed this big ass pipe sitting under my house doing nothing.  It looked to be the perfect height for the rail.  It got the two stubborn pieces out in 5 minutes.  MVP

The seat that came in the car was a circle track special, but a unique one at that - a "ROCKNCHAIR" that was made by Craig Raudman's [former SW Tour racer] company as a high quality alternative to the other brands at the time.  But I decided it would be best used on my iRacing simulator.  I have had a Sabelt GT Pad from another project that I decided to use for this car.

It was an absolute pain in the ass to wrestle into the car without removing any bodywork [at least before I did it...] but it squeezed in once I removed the shifter.  In just about the only position it can fit in, it fits my 6'5 frame perfect and is comfortable.  Blind luck.  My main concern was the halo hitting the main hoop of the cage.  No such concerns, 1/3 to 1/2 of an inch is plenty.

After getting it mounted up, I realized I should have done this first.  Cut a section of the door above the door bars and between the main hoop and the front support.  I trimmed that out neatly, so that it will eventually go back in with a hinge to allow easier in/out capabilties.

I've got all the correct stuff for the left front on the way, but now I am figuring out a sway bar setup.  Probably going to run a 1 3/4 inch bar, but I need to get the parts sorted first and how they are going to mount up and work but does not seem too hard

I'll be moving my way to the back of the car as I go along, but this is where I am at right now

Subbed 

Update - made a pretty hard press on getting work done on the car the last few weeks, ahead of it's eviction from my friends garage [his new modified chassis is coming next week]

Got new control arms courtesy of Bryans Racing Enterprises down in Santee CA.

At first glance when it was on the car, my old right front spindle looked ok but once I removed it, I was a bit shocked at the Superlite style brake caliper mount.

Looks like this was how he went from GM brakes to Wilwoods.  I would not trust this at 40 mph let alone 140.

I was hoping to reuse at least the right front spindle but that mount was a no go.  So I took the measurements of the right front [height, degree and drop] and found it to be a "Ford" style wide 5 spindle with 7 degrees.

With my timeline to work on the car, I did not think custom was going to be an option but the search for something to match both sides was not going too well.  I did some more digging though and found Keyser mfg made some and were in stock.

Left side has ackerman adjustment.  Would have been cool to get that for both....

Brake caliper mount provides peace of mind

They even had 4'' ducts for them

Part of getting the front end squared up did not just involve making the spindles, control arms and bar lengths on each side match.  For left turn only stuff the left front control arm mount is typically placed an inch or two back, as well as an inch or two inside on the frame where it is mounted to.

For some reason, finding a duplicate mount of what was on the car seemed impossible so I explored having a new piece cut out of 3/8 metal.  But I also decided to try to carefully slice the old mount off.  So I cut and ground the welds as close to the original mount as I could, than laid out a tiny groove with the cutting wheel along the very bottom, and than hit the groove with a sawzall.  Aside from a small portion of metal from the bottom of the side where I started with the sawzall, the mount came off just about perfectly unaltered because the blade eventually caught right underneath the mount

After welding it back in place and reassembling the left front.  Almost the exact same position as the right side, I can correct it with shims to make the difference.  Note the new spindles and Howe low friction ball joints.

The body was previously hung clearly with the old control arm mount position in mind.....I think my best solution for this will be to just cut around the front of the wheel well to even it out with the back, probably will do it to both sides to look better.  Not really in the mood to try and re hang the front end at the moment, which would probably require bending/braking a new door sheetmetal to be longer aside from a million other things.

Old setup for the rear suspension to center the diff was a spring loaded upper third link and a J bar mounted in front of the diff.

Was not installed, but the car came with the watts link to bolt to the quick change diff cover.  Also still had the mounts on the frame, so all I had to do was install the center piece and come up with some bar lengths and order up some LH and RH threaded heims.

Its on now - but I do plan on some point removing and rebuilding the rear end with equal length axle tubes and shafts.  Currently, the right side is 2 inches longer.  This can be corrected with different offset wheels, but I would prefer to get it all equal as it should be.  It's easier to see in the picture below with the exhaust, but the spring loaded upper link was replaced with a solid bar.

Exhaust is finished, I've since modified that bracket so it does not vibrate and droop down.

Note the dry sump tank in the background

Made a new home for that.  Had to cut the 1 3/4 inch J bar mount out of the frame to get the tank far back enough the have ample space [3 inches] from the exhaust, but also up high enough so that the cap for the tank can come off, and so the lines will reach the tank easily.

The battery box needed a new home too.  While I wanted it further back, I'm still ok with having it between the wheelbase.  Would have been really hard to put it anywhere else, this location already had a perfect ground welded to the frame right behind it ironically.  Since the battery is really hard to reach here with bodywork installed, I also added some charging posts [not pictured] that are near the passenger side window opening and easy to access.  This also required me to move the kill switch - it used to be behind the seat but now it's on the right side within reach of both me while I am strapped in as well as any potential safety crew.

Going over there tonight and tomorrow to button up some stuff, than the car is coming back to my shop to be tucked away until the summer most likely.  I need to shift gears and focus on the other side quest [my dirt car, season starts mid march and it does not have an engine at the moment] and other projects for myself and customers.

Very Cool! Where are you at? I'm in San Jose...

In reply to rdcyclist :

I'm in Capitola, right above the beach village

Got the Oldsmobile back on the ground and out of my friends shop.

It's now tucked away at my clients space

I don't know what my exact timeline is, but I am thinking this summer I will start fine tuning on getting it squared up, getting new brakes on it, getting new shocks and adding a swaybar.  I also need to do dry sump lines to the new tank location as well as finish the seat mounting.  If I get a track day in this year with it that would be cool but if not, that's fine.

Back around mid 2010, I was helping a friend of mine with his 4 banger dirt oval car at Ocean Speedway in Watsonville.  I kind of got the bug and long story short, I built up what was a absolutely terrible Camaro to be someone decent and raced it in 2012 and 2014.  I did not win any races with it but I nabbed a number of podiums and beat out a future IMCA Sport Mod state champion for rookie of the year in 2012.  I ran for fun in 2013 a few times and did well again but sold the car at the end of the year and ended up using that money to buy a 91 Camaro prepared for NASA Camaro Mustang Challenge.  The class got scrapped locally and I did not race it.  Sold it at the end of the year to build a Volvo I had laying around for Lemons.  I did race my friends mini stock and scored a win though.

Last year, after spending the three prior years working as announcer at the track I got the bug again.  A regular named Wally Kennedy told me he was selling his Camaro while I was getting my 83 Volvo 242DL smogged at his shop.  He told me some information about it, and a price and I could not really pass it up.  I had been on the search for a car on FB market.  I had this brainy idea of buying a car for the annual Pettit Shootout.  It's the biggest hobby stock race of the year at the track and it's a two day show.  But the car needed work, and I had about a week until the race.

But after several consecutive evenings, I got it ready.  My 3 year old daughter loves Pingu, and her birthday was that weekend so I added him there.

The weekend of racing on Friday started off great.  I pulled a #1 pill.  I was fastest in my hot lap group.  We had 45 hobby stocks going for 22 spots in the main event.  3 transferred out of each heat so even though I had not raced in a long time [11 years removed from a hobby, 5 from any sort of competition] I felt confident.  I led most of my stacked heat race, and I got screwed on what should have been a yellow flag.  Lapped car spun in front of me and blocked my lane and I got out of the gas after hearing race ceiver chatter that sounded like a yellow but it never got thrown.  I got freight trained on the outside because I had no momentum, fell to third and than the same lapped car spun again and did bring the yellow out.  I started on the outside due to Texas style restarts and fell to 5th after getting stuck on the top [bottom was better]

This put me in the B main.  I started 6th which was around the transfer spot.  My plan was to drop back just outside of the transfer spot and hang on for a while and let people fight each other.  It went well for a few laps

Shortly after that photo the #57 car spun a car in front of him around, he did a few fast 360 and came to a dead stop in front of me and I had no time to react.  I had been picking up the throttle hard right before it happened.  I hit him hard directly in our front bumpers, and after catching my breath I realized I had injured my foot.  I jumped on the brake probably the moment I hit him, and my body moved a lot more than it should have.  It was my oversight because I was in a rush, but I figured out I did not do my sub strap right.  

I went to the ER the next morning and X rays were negative.  But it was quite a sprain.

The car somehow did not bend the clip despite the hard impact.  It was just the bumper, nose piece, a few body braces and some fender and hood hammering.

A month later, my ankle was still not 100% but I had fixed the car.  I decided to race it in the annual Steitz Memorial over in Merced, CA.  Another two day show.  Unloaded the car, felt good in hot laps.  Heat race comes around and, started 2nd and the car was behaving odd during the warmup laps, almost like a slipping clutch.  Green flag flies and the car goes nowhere and I drop to 7th immedaitely, so I start to pull off the track but suddenly it grabs and I run the top and power down the back straight.  I pass a car and go for a second and KABOOM.  Flames shot from under the hood so I pulled the gas valve, hit the kill switch and got the hell out.  Fire went out quick thanks to safety crew.

I'm not sure if it overevved while the clutch was slipping or what, but it really grenaded hardcore.

Which kind of brings me to now.  I stuffed the car away for the winter and our season starts March 21st I believe so I need to get moving, and that can happen now that the Oldsmobile is back and has seen some progress.

Despite hitting 70 mph winds, the tarp stayed on all winter.

I traded a bunch of work on my friends 94 325is race car for a 602 crate to run in the Camaro.  That should be going in sometime in the next couple of weeks.  New clutch and flywheel are on the way, as well as new Landrum leaf springs [I need to store it on jackstands...], Hoosier G60's and valve springs and an MSD rev box for the 602.

Love those old top-tier late models from the 1990s. Keep us posted!

Love those old top-tier late models from the 1990s. Keep us posted!