Overview

This is a series of photos of the whole car, mostly taken from the landing at the rear entry to the garage.

Here is the chassis as delivered, with the aluminum panels temporarily attached.

Here's the bare chassis, surrounded by miscellaneous parts and tools.

You can see a couple of front control arms (one lower, one upper) on the floor at the lower left.

Here's the chassis with the front suspension, floor, footboxes, engine and headers installed.

Progress! Too bad I didn't think to take any photos between this one and the previous one. More photos would have made an interesting progression.

Now it has the rest of its rear suspension, headers - and an electrical system!

The entire wiring harness (minus unnecessary segments carefully removed by Mark Reynolds) has been laid in place and connected so we could test run the engine and verify that everything works.

Everything did - eventually!

The morning after its first run. Not much change since it ran the night before, but here you can see it in the cold light of dawn.

Still looks pretty good, doesn't it?

The wheels have finally arrived! Yahoo! We waited far too long for these, but now that they are here, I'm ecstatic.

I put them on to check clearances and to take this nifty photo (aren't they gorgeous?) Then I whipped them off to take down to the tire store to get the tires mounted.

Incidentally, it turned out we had a small clearance problem with the rear brake calipers. That's because Team III had not made wheels for a FFR IRS car before, and didn't realize that they needed to leave enough room for the disc brakes when positioning the inner part of the wheel inside the rim.

A set of spacers made a quick temporary fix; this winter, we'll remove a small amount of material from the wheels and the brake calipers to eliminate the need for the spacers.

And here it is with the wheels and tires mounted! Doesn't it look great?

Little did we know how prophetic the checkered flag would be. But that's another story - told on the Events page.

Incidentally, we were so eager to run the car that we drove it immediately after the wheels were mounted. Since the car wasn't registered and certainly wasn't legal, we only drove it on Nate's driveway and the private dirt road of his residential collective.

Now Nate has installed the sheet metal around the trunk, and we've started buttoning up the top of the footbox. Almost all the wiring is done at this point, and we're about ready to put the body on.

This photo was shot at noon on August 1.

The roll bars! We've been on tenterhooks, hoping they would arrive before it was time to put the body on. They just barely made it.

As delivered from the factory, the roll bars didn't line up with the sockets in the frame, so we had to do some judicious bending. Nate engineered some clever makeshift "presses" for the job, using hydraulic jacks, two-by-fours, and the garage itself to spread the base legs of the bars apart to fit into the sockets.

Here the roll bars sit proudly in their sockets, fitting snugly now that Nate's done his tweaking.

The body is on! Woohoo!

This photo was shot at 9:30 pm on August 1.

Finally the car sits on its wheels, ready to roll under its own power, complete with body.

Nate buckles in and gets ready to fire her up!

It's 7:15 pm, August 4, and Nate and Nellie are about to depart on their famous "date". The car's tires touched asphalt for the first time less than an hour ago.

2 pm, August 6th. We've finished up many more details and the car is about to depart for its first event, the New England Replica Challenge.

See the Gallery page for photos of the (almost) completed car.