Dune Buggy Racing

[kenb]

Hello metalmeet,

These are a few pictures of the car I took Off-Road Racing in the summer of 1980. Although this car had won off-road races in years past, it looked pretty rough when I first bought it, having spent a few too many summers chasing cows & stuff with little or no maintenance. It actually came with a VW king & link front end on it, for those who have been around long enough to remember what that means.

Once I decided to go racing, we stripped it down to the tube frame and replaced the roll cage with a higher one that I didn't smack my helmet against all the time. We also installed a ball joint front end, steering brake, 6 gas shocks, and completed a total chasis rebuild to bring the rest of the car up to competitive racing condition.

The engine was an air-cooled, 4 cylinder VW, scratch rebuilt and punched out to 1640cc. We added a mild cam, and we turned 7lbs off the back of the flywheel for more throttle responsiveness.

I think that most of the 90+ horsepower came from the 200 thou that we milled off the deck of the cylinder-heads, which cost each cylinder-head a cooling fin and raised the compression ratio up into the 12:1+ neighborhood. Naturally, it was av-gas only for this baby after that, but did that little engine ever fly! It didn't last much longer than the racing season either, but it sure lit up the track everywhere it went while it lasted.

Here's a few of my pictures from the summer of 1980:


The picture above is just after rolling it outside the first time, I don't think I had even driven it yet.



This is me at the races. I managed to place 2nd for season points, and I also won the Rookie of the Year title for 1980. I won every heat race I ran in that year, so I carried the checkered flag a few times that summer.








Yep, that was fun. I hope you guys like the pictures.

Cheers,
Ken

[roger n cindy]

ken,hi. nice little toy looks good and sounds like fun, you glad your not buying av gas now? roger

[kenb]

roger wrote:

you glad your not buying av gas now?

Heh, I was paying $3+ per gallon CDN for it back in 1980, I'm quite sure I'd be horrified to see what a weekend worth of that stuff would cost nowadays!
This car also had another petroleum-related personality trait worthy of mention. Due to the external oil cooler and filter we had installed, great care had to be taken to keep the revs down until the oil had time to warm up and thin out a little bit. If you gave the throttle a quick jab too soon after starting it up in the morning, you stood an excellent chance of blowing the PH-8A oil filter off and making a huge mess all over everything. I always brought spares of oil & filters to the track to cover for this contingency, and it paid off more often than I would care to admit.

Cheers,
Ken