,
Right about this time, Mark gives me a call and he picks us up to take us to the Cosworth office. Sure it was cool to drive around and check out the track, but it was hot and sticky. When it's hot in Los Angeles the heat is dry. Call us weak, but we were more down for air conditioning than sweating. We were ill prepared without hats to fend off the sun either.
Here Mark shows Ken and I how sweet his backpack is. The Cosworth Electronics track guys get the same gear as the F1 track support guys. They get backpacks, shoes, shirts, shorts, travel bags, jerseys, etc. That's me behind the backpack drinking my 3rd Red Bull. They have a fridge stocked with Red Bull at all times. Back at Torrance, we drink NOS or Monster.
Cosworth rents a small office to work out of during races and shares this office with XTrac (the gearbox company). Here we soak up the A/C, drank mad Red Bull, and shoot the shit with Mark to see what kind of exciting stuff he was up to. To us normal people, supporting teams, drivers, engineers, etc. and working with some of the world's coolest race cars (ALMS, IRL, NASCAR, etc.) would seem really awesome, right? Well Mark actually thinks that what I do (playing with street cars turned race cars) is really cool. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.
After an hour or so of shooting the shit, Mark needs to go and do some more cool real race car stuff. Ken and I meet up with some the BW guys for lunch. After lunch, Ken and I look at each other and say almost simultaneously, “Back to the museum??”
This LeMans winning 1979 Porsche 935 K-3 was also on display. It won LeMans overall in 1979 making it the first modern production car to have won LeMans outright. It is powered by an air cooled 3.0L flat 6 making over 700bhp with a KKK turbo (KKK is now a BorgWarner brand).
Yes, that's an alminum roll cage. Safety was certainly a second priority to vehicle weight back then. The car weighs in at only 2139 lbs. or 972 kg. 700+ bhp and only 2139 lbs. It sounds like the perfect recipe for Time Attack actually, but the only difference is that this car can go full tilt for 24 hours instead of just one lap. What a difference budget can make.
The 935 still looks really good even by today's standards. Sure the dP wheels might date it a bit, but for the most part this car still looks extremely buff. One of these days I need to get myself an air cooled 911 turbo.
How's this for a radiator? You can see a lot of the trial and error these car builders must have went through back in the day. I'm guessing this setup didn't work too well since air couldn't actually flow through it. With the header tank on top and in front of the driver, I can tell you that things didn't go too well for the driver either when this car overheated!
