If it don't have wheel's, it ain't a sport.
-Episode #2

by Phil Veldheer

When we last left you, we were busy with the UPS man. He is at our house just about every day. He doesn't like it when 6 slicks show up all at once. The car we are rebuilding was the NHRA record holder in V/SA. The previous owner ran the car with a V-6. That car is so slow, NHRA doesn't require a rollbar for it. In fact our local track, the car raced in street class, which is 14.00 and slower.

As I stated before we are planning on racing in the 11's so the first thing we did was get the 8 point rollbar 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 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 prenotched and also included 6" x 6" floor plates. The 8-point was built from 1 3/4" x .134 mild steel. This can be easily updated if we go faster than a 10.00 e.t. (which would require a roll cage).

Photo 2A shows Kevin ten Brink in the back seat of a latest hot rod. Kevin is a fellow drag racer with an 8.30 et Daytona. Back to the Cutlass, Kevin is an outstanding welder. He had the 8 point installed in less than a day and a half.

Photo 2B shows Kevin 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 rollbar.

Photo2C shows the car at Shark's 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 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. We have all the chrome removed, the doors off, the trunk lid off and our new aluminum hood off. This took about three weeks of hard labor to get to this point. The body was not as good as we thought when we purchased it.

In the final photo 2D you see future race car driver, Tom Tilton wet sanding the rear quarter. It took us about 15 hours of wet sanding to do a perfect job (per Marty's standards) In next months episode you'll see an outstanding paint job, we used Du Pont paint. Marty was using another brand, but because the paint went on so good and laid out so nice, he might change. Let me tell you the finished product is flawless.

Questions, comments, ideas, please e-mail me at 455@i2k.com
Phil Veldheer Racing
Holland MI USA
78 Cutlass 10.39, 87 442 10.83, 87 442 11.86