11/24/2023 0 Comments Nasa stock racing car“Their sponsor bought all these tires and they would go and test. “They were running at Hickory, which is a little oval, roundy-round track,” he said. So now Romito has what amounts to a new set of tires for each weekend he takes to the track. Romito and his father Matt found a deal on a set of tires from a local team. The cars run 15-inch wheels, so a full set of new Goodyears are $700, which is about what you’d pay for a set of 15-inch Toyos for a Spec E30. He recently bought an entire exhaust system, headers and all for $300! Romito has bought Sprint Cup oil pans for $100, a C&R Racing radiator for $150, a clutch disc and pressure plate for $30 and a Richard Childress Racing bellhousing for $30. Upper control arms? How about $7? Yes, seven dollars. That’s less than you’ll pay for front brakes on a Spec Z. New frront brake pads can be had for $25 a set, and last up to three weekends of racing. Romito started rattling off some of the prices he paid for replacement parts, which might not be new, but might have seen only have a few laps or less than a couple of hours of use. And they’re not just cheap in his area, but everywhere. The best part, he said, was how cheap and plentiful replacement parts are. Romito admits that sponsors helped out a great deal with his car, which he estimates to have invested $17,000 as you see it. “The good thing about a lot of this stuff is you’ve got all these Cup teams that do nothing but test this and run this stuff nonstop, so there is no question whether it’s going to last or hold up,” Romito said, comparing it with production-based racecars, which sometimes fall short of the mark when used for racing. They are built to race every week for 400 to 600 miles at a time, so even a full weekend of NASA racing barely taxes the car at all. The cars themselves are essentially bulletproof. “Sometimes you can find them for a little cheaper than that.”īut the upper echelon teams go through them so quickly that the cars still have lots of life left in them by the time a NASA racer gets hold of one. “Teams, what they usually do, at the end of every year, they’re offloading cars because they want to get new cars, and you can find them all day long on sites like Racing Junk, from anywhere from $15,000 to $25,000 depending on how badly they want to get rid of them,” he said. There are lots of teams headquartered in the area who run in NASCAR, ARCA, Nationwide and the K&N series, but the interesting thing is that bargains aren’t exactly rare. That makes it easy to go and get bargains when you find them. NASA’s Southeast region probably has more of these kinds of cars in Super Unlimited than any region, due in no small part to its proximity to Mooresville, N.C., the heart of NASCAR’s manufacturing and team base. We don’t really notice it because of the way the car is set up.” “It’s all aero for circle-track stuff but it doesn’t affect us a whole lot. “But the roof also has a 2.5-inch drop to the right rear of it, so when you look at it, the body looks like it’s sitting on there crooked, and they do that so the air rolls off and hits the right side of the rear spoiler,” he continued. And they do that to get the air to roll off the side of the car. On the back left side of the car, the body actually kicks over toward the passenger side right at the middle of the quarter panel. If you look down the driver side of the car, you can see the front fender, it rolls out and that’s because they run a lot of positive camber so when the car rolls over the left front tire is flat. “That car was actually set up for roundy-round. “When they hang the bodies on those cars, they do it for the aero,” he said. The left front fender is formed differently as is the left rear quarter panel. If you’ve ever seen video footage of a Sprint Cup car coming down a straightaway and noticed that it somehow looks “off,” here’s why. The key differences lie in how teams set it up for ovals and how the body panels are set in place. Though the car was built for oval tracks, Romito set it up for road course courses and said the car is perfectly suited for road racing. It has the nicest and best parts you can put on it.” “Practically, when I got the car, it was brand new. He remembers the car coming through the shop,” Romito said. “I have a friend who used to work for Roush.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |