Mk2 Golf championship car 2010

In what could be described as one of my more rash decisions I decided to buy the remains of a Golf Gti that was already competing in the championship, but which had taken a hefty smack in the side making it a bit banana shaped. It came with a spare shell which looked ok, it'd had a lash up respray (ie the rear number plate had been painted around rather than going to the bother of undoing two screws to remove it..) but looked good enough and certainly a better bet than the aforementioned banana!

I justified the new car by figuring that my old car had been quite succesful and so had a reasonable value as it stood. The damaged car had some pretty good components on it and so I would have the ingredients to make a good car with the price difference between the two giving me a cash float to put it all together into a nice shiny new one.

The cage would be a bespoke one made by my good mate Dean Mitchell who has recently come back from NZ where he had his own company specialising in motorsport fabrication, mainly rallying Escorts but a cage is a cage whatever it's going in I guess! Anyway I knew he would do an awesome job of it, he really is a fussy bugger and his welding really is second to none in my book.


Bye bye old car! Hello 85 from the scrappy!



Bit of a clean up underneath before getting too stuck in

 

Off to a roaring start! Got a deadline?

 

How did you jack that up like that?!!

The old shell looks fine! Any other pics?

 

Looks like a clean shell. In white too

 

Looks like a farm - forklift?

 

Spent the lead up to christmas cleaning mainly, shiyat - i'd forgotten what a hideous job cleaning all the goo off the floor is but hey ho someones gotta do it..
Then it was over to Deano to get stuck into the cage which also invloved a lot of tea drinking and standing around looking

 

Lifted by two tall blokes, then supported with a fence post!

You should have seen the other side! Forgot to get any pics in all the excitement!

 

It's finished now near enough, only just getting round to putting up some pics..
Racing on Sunday!

 

Nice one Mike, be interested to see this trackside.

 

Neat cage footplates

 

Yeah, Deans welding is the biz - I've seen some welding that looks terrible, I don't know how some of it goes through scrutineering tbh.. It used to say something like 'a good looking weld is no guarantee of it's integrity, but a bad looking weld is definately not going to be strong' in the blue book (probs worded better but you get the picture!)

 

The original car had lots of ballast in it, so we decided to lose some and put in some extra bars, particularly after having seen how vulnerable the side is in the event of a side impact. Thus a low down lateral bar, dash bar and a cross were fitted to add strength and still be within the weight limit. It now only has 5kg of ballast in it rather than 25odd. Plus i've got a bit fatter with all the junk food eaten during the build..



Moving on a bit, here's one after it was painted

 

Whoaa, shaky!


New stuff courtesy of GSF car parts who have kindly agreed to sponsor me for lots of shiny new parts this year..



Plumbing courtesy of Matt at Think Automotive, proper kit and he even made my brake lines out of red pipe which looks well fast
'Bitsa' exhaust, sounds terrible so will deal with that at a later date

 

Nice bit of welding, A pillar foot


Seat rails complete with spuds for bolting the frame to and a harness eye by the B pillar. Spot the deliberate mistake


Tidy..


Big gusset!

 

Awesome. I love seeing race car preparation. Keep it up with the pics if you have time!
Well worth logging onto the forum again for.

 

Finished car looks a lot like this one Mike!?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9xJlsGRsig

 

Clean build

Interesting seeing these optional cage bars:



I suppose this is the lower-down weight option of all the optional components, plus it must do more for stiffness than the others ?

Square top-edged sear bars, but at different heights?

 

Tidy welding. That has to be the most comprehensive 6 point bolt-in cage I've ever seen.

 

Yeah basically, we thought that rather than have loads of dead weight ie: ballast plates we'd put some extra reinforcing bars in where it's more useful. At the end of the day it will only add a certain amount of rigidity to the shell simply because it can only be bolted to the floor in 6 places. Shame it can't be tagged to the pillars but thats the rule and I understand why they're written that way

Re: the different level seat rails, thats not the 'deliberate mistake' i was thinking of actually! They are angled slightly in real life but i agree it doesn't look like it-in fact when i first saw them i had to rest the seat bracket on top of them to check..

Few more pics


Ooh, flocked dash from Jolfa. Nice mmm

 

Good work Mike