We worked though the weekend, holiday and all, and all day today. Technically I’m still working now at 11:30pm. The testing on the Mountain is this coming weekend, which means we have to leave very early Thursday. There are many things happening at once so we must have both plans and contingencies. The plan was to have both cars ready to test at ORP tomorrow, make any final adjustments Wednesday and get on the road. At this point, while the D2RS will be ready, the D1PPS most likely will not. Definitely not in time to get an ORP test in, and I don’t want to send it up Pikes Peak without that. So the contingency is for Rodney and Jonathan to share the D2RS during the first test. We already know what to expect from the D1PPS platform so the main goal is to just get Rodney as much seat time on the course as possible. And verify a couple of changes to the D2RS, of course, the new bodywork being not the least of them.
D1PPS
We started on the build late (second half of February), and we knew then that it was going to be tight. And, no surprise, it is. If all had gone perfectly the car would be all ready to go now, but as you know we’ve hit a number of challenges that had to be overcome. When your schedule is this tight, a couple days one way or another can make the difference between making it to a particular milestone (test, in this case) – or not.
The engine is in the car and now we’ve had to work through the typical cycle of tweaks, adjustments and fabrication that are part of a custom build. Had to make some oil line fittings to get them to clear in a tight space, went through a couple types of hose before finding one that works, Fabricated a great number of things including the intake plumbing, and so on. The K&N air filter lives in a ‘cold air’ box behind the right front tire, just like on an earlier D4 Turbo.
The plumbing is coming along although it doesn’t make for impressive pictures. Ditto for wiring. The Hoosier tires are mounted on the wheels at Trackside Motorsports and ready to pick up. It’s definitely still a scramble. Now extremely unlikely that we’ll make the test but the car should be ready and tested for the race barring any major disasters.
D2RS
The bodywork is the main thing on this car, and the prototype first panels are working out well. We are going through a few ways of mounting them, most are temporary just to get it done.
We are reusing last year’s aero package for now, mostly because we already have it and CFD as shown that it will work. Production version will get some minor tweaks, both for fit/finish and functionality. Overall it will still basically look like what you see here. The front wings are inside the bodywork shell but because of the high amount of airflow through the body they work really well.
Wider tires from Hoosier are already here and we are expecting the wider wheels to go with them tomorrow. Aside from that there’s some service to the brakes, as well as tweaks to a few systems. A shakedown drive of the car would be nice before we send it up for testing, so we’ll have to see what we can figure out. At the very least I’m curious what the numbers will say when we put it on the scales tomorrow.