For those of you occasionally browsing the projects and builds subforum (and if you aren't, you;re missing out), you may have noticed that I've been bantering with Jack Higginbotham about the possibility of taking the nearly complete second ASA Stock Car and bringing it to the duck ranch here in F-L-A as an official GRM Project build.
Well, we're rapidly nearing poop-or-cut-bait time, and before we made any decisions corporately and personally, I wanted to do some quick focus grouping in open discussion to determine whether I just have my mid-80s tubeframe race car beer goggles on, or if this is a reasonable and interesting project.
For those who don't know head over to Jack's Thread on his build for a better idea of what we're talking about. What's cool is he's already provided a really good road map for turning one of these things into a viable road race/time trial/autocross machine. Then add in our contact list, and I think some really interesting things could be learned here.
ASA Cars are actually kind of hot in a weird way among the tube frame crowd. There's a BUNCH of them out there, and there's apparently not much you can really do with them anymore in a circle track capacity. And they supposedly very easy to square up for road racing—the chassis are symmetrical, so you only need to move one front suspension corner so the wheelbases match. And SCCA regions, NASA clubs and even independent V8 based race series allow them to run in a variety of classes. At 3600lbs, consumables are cheap, and with 500hp they're fast. And all of the specific race bits like control arms and hubs and all the little fiddly bits are mass produced race car parts available from any "big box" race car place Like Speedway, Summit or Jegs. On paper, it seems like a fairly cost-conscious way to go very fast in a VERY COOL car that will be the hit of most paddocks.
The pictures that Jack sent (I've only included a couple) showed racks and racks of parts. I'd estimate that there's 70-80% of a running car there with the package we'd theoretically be acquiring. I've already written up a proposed editorial plan which, of course, deeply intrigues me, but does knowing more about a car that never rolled off a mass production assembly line intrigue you as well? Part of what we see it as, beyond simple "Project car" progression, is a platform to discuss general concepts. The simplicity and adjustability lend themselves to topics like those. "Why are A-Arm suspensions good? How do you make them better?" Well, now we have an easily adjustable A-arm setup that can move in a bunch of different ways simply by adjusting bolts and shims, that's also fully visible as it articulates on the lift for demo purposes. We came up with a whole mess of general-knowledge topics like that that could make this a really cool teaching platform.
So, whaddya think? Would you read about this car, even if the first 4-6 months of its life was mostly me trying to keep the ducks from building nests in it?
