Grassroots tips and cheap/brilliant non-performance mods for your racecar

Was discussing with a buddy tonight various things we've done to our race cars (in our case, stage rally cars) to improve them in non-performance ways - small, smart features that are really useful when on stage (or at the track, or towing, or whatever). I have a ton of these, which admittedly I've copied from other people who did them first in many cases :)

Things like a pack of those little $5 Husky zip-up pouches you buy at Home Depot that you can attach to the door cards to hold things on stage (like a cellphone providing wireless or GPS to your rally computer). Or what a lot of rally drivers do is ziptie a bunch of zipties to one of the rollcage tubes within reach of the codriver to fix things that might break.

Or simple things like hook to hang the steering wheel on when you get out, or attaching a first-aid kit to the rear firewall by welding on steel chain links and then running the strap through them to hold the kit on the firewall. Some rally teams carry a little squeegie on a stick so the codriver can wipe a foggy windshield while strapped in.

So this is a pretty open discussion about what little, thoughtful, inexpensive, brilliant ideas you've done in your race car to make racing easier in some little way, either during the race, or when trailering the car, or whatever. This could apply to a tow rig or trailer that support racing as well I guess.

So, throw some ideas out there. I'll post up some of my own as well at some point. Grassroots race car non-performance mods!

Here's an example:

For rally you have to carry a first-aid kit. Most people put them in the trunk, but I wanted it inside the car (so it will get less dirty and be accessible from inside if we're trapped in a flipped car down in a ravine or something). So welded two links from a chain on the firewall and use a titan strap to hold the box on.

or zipties ziptied to the cage

your turn...

Camelbak Unbottles permanently mounted on the rear deck. Having the ability to take a sip at any time makes a huge difference to driver stamina, even at a track day.

Instead of zipties, I often use Vecro strap. It's available by the roll and has hooks on one side and loops on the other. I keep a few strips wrapped around the roll bar. Works great for wiring harnesses and stuff you'll need to take on and off.

Keith Tanner wrote: Camelbak "unbottles" permanently mounted on the rear deck. Having the ability to take a sip at any time makes a huge difference to driver stamina, even at a track day. Instead of zipties, I often use "Velcro tape". It's available by the roll and has hooks on one side and loops on the other. I keep a few strips wrapped around the roll bar. Works great for wiring harnesses and stuff you'll need to take on and off.

I've been trying to figure out the best mount method for a camelbak. For the road racing car we just have the longacre jugs in the metal holder, but that won't work well for rally.

If you ever need faux sponsor stickers on your LeMons car, I highly recommend one of these on each door.

irish44j wrote:

Keith Tanner wrote: Camelbak "unbottles" permanently mounted on the rear deck. Having the ability to take a sip at any time makes a huge difference to driver stamina, even at a track day. Instead of zipties, I often use "Velcro tape". It's available by the roll and has hooks on one side and loops on the other. I keep a few strips wrapped around the roll bar. Works great for wiring harnesses and stuff you'll need to take on and off.

I've been trying to figure out the best mount method for a camelbak. For the road racing car we just have the longacre jugs in the metal holder, but that won't work well for rally.

"Unbottle" is actually a specific product by camelback, made for just such a use. Very easy to mount to a cage right behind the seat

This is so well-duh, but I just figured it out. On my street car with adjustable shocks I write the current adjustment setting on the strut towers up front and inside the trunk lid in back in grease pencil. That way I always know where I left it and can make quicker adjustments. When the setting changes, wipe off the old, write on the new.

An offroad rally competitor has 4qt bottle like what coolant comes in with a flap cut in the side, mounted on the side so that flap is facing up. It's full of water and has a squeegee in it stuck through the flap, with a cutout for the handle so the flap can close around it. Bam, easy way to clean mud off your windows. My new tires kick up so much mud past the fenders that I think I'll need to copy this now.

There are drink systems you can buy that attach to regular off-the-shelf drink bottles, like these:

http://www.amazon.com/Desert-SmarTube-Hydration-System-Shipping/dp/B0161N5JNM

http://www.amazon.com/Source-Outdoor-Convertube-Bottle-Adapter/dp/B004QMF0U8

You can get resettable circuit breakers in the shape of automotive fuses now (but usually a bit taller) if you search around carefully. Available in automatic and manual reset variants.

Got two seats and a little room behind them, want to put stuff there, but don't want it flying around? Maybe in a 2+2 coupe with a stripped-out rear area? A seatback organizer can help tidy things up:

Just don't put heavy stuff in them because they'll soon tear themselves from the seat, especially under repeated heavy vertical shock...ask me how I know...

Improve your rear visibility with stick-on parabolic bubbles for your side mirrors, and a clip-on extra-wide rearview mirror - or replace your rearview mirror with a multi-panel Wink mirror if it's for a dedicated day-use track car.

A couple of hose clamps and the useless mount of your choice (like the remains of a broken one, or that thing from the top of the box trimmed down a bit) make a perfectly fine GoPro roll cage mount so you don't have to spend $$$ on the real GoPro one.

You can easily make a nice spark plug wire separator from a few zipties.

An old serpentine or v-belt makes decent exhaust hanger material.

In a pinch, a large amount of electrical tape can be a functional substitute for a bushing.

That "drift stitching" thing people do to hold cracked bumpers together works on metal too if you use safety wire.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ wrote: A couple of hose clamps and the useless mount of your choice (like the remains of a broken one, or that thing from the top of the box trimmed down a bit) make a perfectly fine GoPro roll cage mount so you don't have to spend $$$ on the real GoPro one.

Smart move. The "thing from the top of the box" is your DIY oddball mount kit, ready to be cut/glued/bolted/etc.

Some other ones pertaining to visibility/serviceability:

Painting the underside of the car/interior/wheel wells a light color makes it WAY easier to see everything when you're working on it in less than ideal conditions.

Don't buy dark colored lug nuts/other hardware if you ever want to find them again after removal.

Aftermarket parts sometimes come with hardware with differently sized bolt heads- use your factory hardware instead, or make it match on both sides to avoid taking the 14mm you just used on the left caliper and rounding off the 13mm Chinese ones on the right side.

Some of these are not so simple... but very cheap, mostly free.

• Use stretched lab tubing to pull the nets down out of the way when released to make driver changes faster/easier.
• Moving the start button, wiper, kill and pump controls to the trans tunnel driver's right so when strapped in the hand falls naturally to them. I made the box out of .04 aluminum with a 2x4 as the break.
• Using a tall boy shifter to locate the knob as close to the wheel as possible so you only have to take your hand off for a second and not move it very far. Raising the moment above the tunnel makes the shifts very short throws as well. Anything you have to do 10k times in a race is worth making as easy as possible. We make these for about $22 - it's just a 2 piece bearing welded to a plate and a bushing pressed into the shaft below deck to connect to the shift rod.

• Dry breaks on both sides in the C pillar so the fuel man can be fast and accurate without breaking his back regardless of which side the pitwall is on (rules prevent us from the original intent... 2 jugs at a time). You can see it at the back of the rear window here. My friend Dave fab'd up the firewall to accomodate with cast off trailer sheet from a wreck.

We were having trouble heel-toeing in our lemons car, and a set of "racing pedal covers" from oreillys saved us. Instead of using the dumb clips, we just sunk a couple sheet metal screws through the gas pedal into the real one, offsetting the plastic pedal toward the brake. Made a HUGE difference.

Wear a timex sport watch with a velcro band when racing - super easy to take off your wrist and wrap around a cage bar. Especially helpful if lemons racing without comm... "come in after 1.5 hours!!"

If lemons racing at night without comm, buy some $4 "LED light strips" from the oreillys. Place them on your car at goofy angles so that your team in the pit can identify your car from the rest of the pack in the dead of night. We even made a button so the driver could flash them to communicate.

I remember my first 25 hours of Thunderhill, there were cheap light strips on a lot of the cars. Near dawn, very few still functioned It's such a great idea that it's worth doing anyway - you don't realize just how hard it is to identify a car at night. Also, have some way for your drivers to ID your pits. Apparently they're hard to distinguish. We had a lit-up sign on the end of a stick to attract our drivers.

Camelbak Unbottles mounted (only one is tied down in this pic. Strips of Velcro strap riveted to the back shelf, then passed through the clips on the bags that are there for this purpose. The Velcro means you can adjust the straps for a very full or more flaccid bag, and they're very secure and easy to remove. The unbottle is basically just a bladder in a protective sleeve, it does not have backpack straps like most Camelbaks. I'll bet a clever guy with different vehicular packaging could mount them to the backs of the seats.

I run the hose down through the pads on my harness so they're well contained but easy to reach. I also use Vecro strap (there's a surprise) to make loops on my harness straps to hold down an intercom cord.

This is what I'm referring to: Velcro(ish) strap at HF for $7 If you don't have a roll in your toolbox, you don't know what you're missing.

Elastic cord on Harness buckles to pull it out of place when unlatched. Nothing worse than sitting on a buckle.

Ammo box can be bolted into trunk area to toss all those lose little things.

A scissor jack can have a bolt welded to it, so you can use a lug wrench or bolt gun to raise and lower the jack quickly.

Appliance paint works great on roll cages and wheel wells.

My jeep was a Frankenstein of stock parts from different vehicles. I wrote the year, make, and model for the different components under the hood in paint marker to make getting parts from the flaps easier.

Cut an oil quart container in half, make sure it's the "wide mouth variety. Use the upper portion with cap still in tact. Put a rag inside, and tuck it somewhere useful. Now when you fill with oil you can take that half cut oil container, put it into the oil fill spot where it should insert and hold steady. Now you can take the same style oil container full of oil and dump it into the half cut one. Since they are the same shape it will hold your oil container, prevent spilling, and since they are both "wide mouth' it'll feed oil into the valve cover quickly. When done, pull the oil the container out and repeat. The rag goes back in after checking oil level. The rag also prevents any little bits of oil from running out when stored.

Make sure warning lights for low oil pressure, low coolant, high temps (and maybe low fuel pressure too) are either so bright they can't be ignored no matter where you're looking, or raised up high enough you will see them immediately.

JBasham wrote: Make sure warning lights for low oil pressure, low coolant, high temps (and maybe low fuel pressure too) are either so bright they can't be ignored no matter where you're looking, or raised up high enough you will see them immediately.

Along that same line, make sure gauges are both a very readable style and placed so that you can give them a quick scan easily with minimal need to take your eyes away from what's in front of you. IMO, this means either analog gauges or digital bar graphs, no numeric readouts. It's much easier to look at a gauge needle pointing at the middle of the range and go "yep, that looks about right" than it is to look at a digital readout and think "46... is 46 good or bad?"

In reply to rslifkin:

I like to configure the thresholds such that I never, ever scan my gauges for a value. If a light comes on... it's either pit on the next lap or shut it down NOW and coast somewhere out of the way to where a flagger can see me. The only reason I have gauges is so I can look at them in practice and test/tune. Otherwise the big bright idiot light is my friend.

On your taillights, spray the inside of the housing around the bulbs with 'bumper chrome' or any shiny silver paint. Huge increase in brightness.

hhaase wrote: On your taillights, spray the inside of the housing around the bulbs with 'bumper chrome' or any shiny silver paint. Huge increase in brightness.

Aluminum tape works too.

ultraclyde wrote: This is so well-duh, but I just figured it out. On my street car with adjustable shocks I write the current adjustment setting on the strut towers up front and inside the trunk lid in back in grease pencil. That way I always know where I left it and can make quicker adjustments. When the setting changes, wipe off the old, write on the new.

I do the same thing.

personally I paint anything around fluids white if its a racer. Easier to see the leaks before they become a issue. Just hit the car with the high pressure hose to keep it clean.

Huckleberry wrote: In reply to rslifkin: I like to configure the thresholds such that I never, ever scan my gauges for a value. If a light comes on... it's either pit on the next lap or shut it down NOW and coast somewhere out of the way to where a flagger can see me. The only reason I have gauges is so I can look at them in practice and test/tune. Otherwise the big bright idiot light is my friend.

The only problem with that is that you lose the ability to see something developing. Definitely, big STOP IT NOW! lights are valuable. But it helps to see if the water temp is rising, the water pressure is doing something weird or the oil pressure is going haywire before it gets to your critical point.

Your eyes are really sensitive to vertical and horizontal lines - so ideally, you should position your gauges so that normal is completely vertical. Makes it easy to scan them at a glance.

Keith Tanner wrote: The only problem with that is that you lose the ability to see something developing. Definitely, big STOP IT NOW! lights are valuable. But it helps to see if the water temp is rising, the water pressure is doing something weird or the oil pressure is going haywire before it gets to your critical point. Your eyes are really sensitive to vertical and horizontal lines - so ideally, you should position your gauges so that normal is completely vertical. Makes it easy to scan them at a glance.

Agreed. Warning lights are "back off before you break the car", while gauges let you know "oil temp is slowly creeping up, probably another 2 laps before it's time to call it" when you're really flogging it on a hot day.

Keith Tanner wrote: Your eyes are really sensitive to vertical and horizontal lines - so ideally, you should position your gauges so that normal is completely vertical. Makes it easy to scan them at a glance.

This!!!! I can not stress the importance of this especially in endurance racing. Drivers are people to. They get tired and don't want to think about anything more than they have to. Seeing an orange needle state up is all they need to know to know things are good. I would use VDO gadges in teh cars i worked on because they were black and the orange needles were easily visable during the day and at night they picked up on the light very well making them easy to read even with very little illumination.

Something I also tried to do was eliminate any reflective surfaces in the car that are in a drivers field of view or in the mirrors or in the drivers compartment. This greatly reduces reflections from distracting a dirver and keeping him/her from pulling there eyes in to the cockpit to see what is what. It also makes the gauges stand out much better especially at night.

This reminds me of a GRM article on some race car one of the staff purchased a couple years back and one of teh first things they did in the article was to they replaced a dash board saying it was ugly flat black. My first thought was that they really should be re thinking what they were doing as the nice painted white or maybe brushed aluminum one (don't remember now) they replaced it with will be much more reflective and cause eye strain.

The more you do endurance racing (6, 12 & 24 hour races) the more these kinds of little things become important and even more so when you are racing at night.