Grassroots Motorsports: The Hardcore Sports Car Magazine

We were able to spend some quality time with our cantankerous little Berzerkeley over the weekend as we work toward getting it to move under it’s own power. Now that all of the major components have a home in the chassis, our most immediate need is to sort the wiring.

We gave our eyes and brains some exercise by tracing the bundles of colored wire around the chassis. Our donor bike’s wiring harness wasn’t 100% complete, so to ensure our ability to flow electrical energy to all the important components we’re going to need to splice a few connectors together before this stage of the build is complete. The good news is that we’ve got all of the major branches of the wiring harness identified.

As we’ve been spending more time with the little beast, we noticed that the long hours of pushing one another up and down the driveway (driver has to make engine noises) have taken their toll on our VW-sourced steering box. Tightening a setscrew helped, but we’ll need to pin or spline the shaft before attempting any speed records.

Berzerkeley Project in Gelcoat and on way to PRI show

Our Berzerkeley project car is now in gelcoat and on its way to the PRI show in Orlando where it will become the centerpiece of our booth (#1145).

Gary Hunter and Tim Suddard handled the body repair with expert guidance from Tim Manders of The Body Werks, who came over on a Saturday to give us a lesson in fiberglass repair. Full coverage of every aspect of this project will begin in the April, issue of Grassroots Motorsports.

With this crucial body work step complete, after the PRI show, the next step in this nearly finished project will be to plumb and wire it. Once running, the next step will be to test, tune and sort. Once everything is sorted, then final paint work will commence.

This project will be finished and run for exhibition at the Kumho $2008 Challenge Challenge, presented by CDOC and eBay Motors. This event, sanctioned by NASA will be held then first weekend in October 2008 at Gainesville International Raceway.

The complete Bezerkeley chassis

Stripping the body

The Bezerkeley motor peeks out

Chassis builder and former GRM/Kumho Challenge winner Denny Crabill brought the now nearly done Berzerkeley to the $2007 Challenge to show competitors and spectators what he had been up to.

With the Challenge, and not the SEMA show over, it is time to dig in and finish the Berzerkeley. The first order of business was to strip the body of its old paint. It does not appear that the fiberglass car had ever been gelcoated.

Team member Gary Hunter had the body stripped in a little over a day. The outside of the body was stripped with 80 grit paper on a DA sander. He also blasted the inside of the body with Eastwood’s unique soda blaster kit. This kit uses less air pressure than a standard media blaster and the baking soda like media cuts well and does lots less damage to delicate old fiberglass than standard sand.

With the body stripped and cleaned it was once again time to fit the body to the chassis. This time, rather than pull the engine and disassemble the frame, we took the three-piece body apart. We were planning on re-riveting and bonding the body pieces together anyway so this proved to be a valuable step.

At this point we also got our 13x5.5” alloy wheels (bought from someone’s abandoned BMW 2002 project at a swap meet for $100) cleaned up. To these wheels we mounted some Kumho 215/50x13” tires. These Kumhos stretch the limits of a 5.5” wide wheel, but give us a great footprint and the ECSTA V710s are some of the fastest tires we have ever tested.

With the body mounted it was clear we would need slightly more wheel well in the front and we also had to adjust the shape of the dash to fit around the killer paddle shifters that Denny had designed. The modifications were so easy to do in fiberglass. In fact, we got most of the glass work done on the body on one Saturday all for the cost of materials, which was about $100.

We’ll show you a few pics of our glass work next and do a full story on fixing old British fiberglass cars in our sister publication, Classic Motorsports.

Denny, master fabricator, worked his magic on the Berzerkeley header.

Here is the collector.

Denny Crabill keeps picking away at our Berzerkeley project car. With the car now a roller and the engine and transmission permanently mounted, it is time to button up all the systems. We tackled the exhaust system first.

We used the original header from the Suzuki GSX-R 750 motorcycle for power, we just needed to change it. The way it was originally designed, the header would come straight back on to our feet and thus the pedal assembly. Denny completely rebuilt the header into this work of art.

The Berzerkeley’s drivetrain is almost finished.

Add some half shafts and it’ll be moving under its own power.

Our Berzerkeley project is nearing completion (at least mechanically). The engine and transmission is now mounted in the newly designed and fabricated front frame section. Steering is sprint-car style and front hubs use 4x100mm bolt pattern. The half shafts are now being fabricated out of Honda CR-X parts. Look for this project car this weekend (May 18-20,2007) as we display it in raw, unfinished form at Carlisle, Pa.

Denny Crabill (right) explains his rear suspension design and discs to publisher Tim Suddard. The deal they made is that Crabill would engineer the beast and Suddard would use his fiberglass repair and restoration skills to make it pretty. The tough part is building the whole car for $2007 and having it finished for the Kumho Tires Grassroots Motorsports $2007 Challenge in early October 2007.

Denny Crabill is not known for taking the easy way out and when we came back to check on our Berzerkeley project we were freaked out by the level of complexity and engineering Crabill has brought to this project.

Early on, we needed to make sure our rather large driver fit in this rather small car.

Tight fit, but Suddard is in and has room to work the controls. Originally a two seater, our Berzerkeley is now a single seater in true Funny Car tradition.

Crabill had to engineer a differential that also made a reverse gear possible. Designed from scratch, this homemade dif is made from scraps, and uses a Torsen Gleason torque sensing dif from Toyota Rav 4. A provision for a reverse gear was also added.

More detail on our rear brakes. The bolt pattern is 4x100mm to make common cheap wheels an easy fitment. Some $100 aftermarket 2002 BMW wheels are being used, at least during the testing stage.

Even more detail on the rear brakes and a shot of how simple the car will be to align.

To save money and weight, the rear is supported by an eBay sourced bike coilover. The torsion bar is off a mini-sprint and serves as an anti-roll bar on this application.

Again with the amazing fabrication skill…Crabill built his own fuel cell and used the fuel pump from the wrecked Suzuki 750 GSX-R. You can see this sticking out of the bottom of the cell. The cool looking aluminum rear bumperettes (ala a competition Cobra) are Harley triple trees that we found in a local scrap yard and cut in half.

Classic Motorsports / Grassroots Motorsports Publisher Tim Suddard has a thing for Berkeleys.

He also has a thing for GRM’s signature event; the annual low-budget, go-fast GRM Challenges.

So he decided that he wanted chocolate with his peanut butter, and enlisted GRM Challenge engineer extraordinaire Denny Crabill to turn his dream into reality for the next Challenge in October of $2006: a wicked little Berkeley that will continue the Challenge tradition of low-budget Classics that run with the fastest modern cars.

So, can we turn a tiny 46 year old FWD British sports car chassis into a fire breathing rocket? Stay tuned for further installments, and find out.
-Bill Cuttitta

Now that we have the Berzerkeley back at Denny Crabill’s garage, it’s time to assess exactly what we’ve got, and what we can do with it.

What we’ve got is a car that would weigh around 800 lb. if it were complete with it’s 30 HP 492cc Excelsior aircooled engine. It’s a rather small 10’ 3” of fiberglass bodywork reinforced with aluminum bulkheads, and steel subframes for the drivetrain, front and rear suspensions. The wheelbase is a short 70”, with the front and rear tracks at 42”.

We want a fast little car, even with these tiny dimensions, so Denny located a slightly used but Challenge budget-friendly 140 HP 750 cc Suzuki GSX-R drivetrain that was only a few minutes from his house.

Publisher Tim Suddard stopped in to work on the Berzerkeley for a couple of days on his way to the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix, and together we tried out a few engine locations to see what would work best. After a lot of deliberations, discussion, measuring, cutting, and test fitting, we arrived at a front-mid engine drivetrain location and a monoposto seating arrangement.

Cool? Yes, but arranging the driveline and front suspension is going to take some thoughtful engineering.

More drivetrain and suspension fun next time.