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If It Don't Have Wheels It Ain't a Sport
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Phil Veldheer Racing 62 West 40th. St. Holland, MI. 49423-5222 Telephone 616.392.1688 veldheer@juno.com
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When we last left you, we were busy with the UPS man. He's at our house
just about every day. I deal a lot with our local speed shop (Horse
Power Unlimited) but we also get a lot through the mail. Sometimes it's
quicker. If you've read Episode #1,
you'll remember that this car was the
NHRA record holder for many years in V/SA. That kind of car is so slow
they didn't even need a roll bar. In fact at our local track (MARTIN US
131 Dragway), they race in the street class (14.00 flat and slower). All
you need for safety equipment is a helmet. That's nice on a hot day.
We are planning on mid 11's with this car so the first thing we did was get the 8 point roll bar ordered from CHASSIS ENGINEERING. We've used their products for the last three race cars, and they really impress me. The roll bars are manufactured on a state of the art computer controlled bending machine. They have the smooth round bends with no deflection in the tubing. When we ordered for our 81-87 Olds Cutlass, they had the item in stock and we received it three days later. The bars came pre-notched and also included 6" x 6" floor plates. The 8 point was built from 1 3/4" x .134" mild steel. This can easily be updated if we go faster than a 10.00 E.T. [which would then require a roll cage.]
If anybody has any questions, comments or ideas for this race car, please e-mail me at veldheer@juno.com
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Photo #2A shows Kevin Ten Brink in the
back of our new race car. Kevin
is a fellow drag racer. He runs an 8.30 B-1 equipped Daytona. His goal
is a 7 second run in 1997. Koeffel has his heads now doing some port
work, so I think he'll do it. Anyway, back to the Cutlass. Kevin is an
outstanding welder. He had this 8 point installed in less than a day and
a half.
In photo #2B you see Kevin again finishing
up. He did a great job. If
you thought I'd bore you with the whole installation, I won't, just read
the instructions that came with the roll bar.
The next location we took the Cutlass to was Sharks Custom and
Collision in Holland, MI. Marty Hyson is the owner. He painted my red
car and we've won a ton of trophies with that one, so we twisted his arm
to do one more. Luckily he lets us do a lot of the sanding, and taping,
etc. This cuts down greatly on the final cost to refinish our race car.
In photo #2C you can see the car with all the chrome removed, the doors
off along with the trunk lid and our new aluminum hood. This took about
three weeks of hard labor to get to this point. The body wasn't as good
as we thought. When we removed some of the old contingency stickers, we
saw a little rust here and there.
In photo #2D you see future drag race driver,
Tom Tilton wet sanding the
rear quarter. It took about 15 total hours of wet sanding to do a
perfect job (per Marty's standards). In next month's thrilling episode
you'll see an outstanding paint job. In fact we used DuPont paint and
now Marty is thinking about switching to that brand because it went on so
nice and it looks so nice. You'll have to wait a few weeks, til we get
the photos back.