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Here is another close look at the tube mitering and weld detail. The wire harness hasn’t been fully routed yet but it will be held down with cushioned adel clamps as the car gets finished off. It’s not a mil-spec race car harness but it is still very serviceable and reliable.
This is some of the floor plate detail for the down tubes at the back of the car. The floor plates are attached directly to where the main support for the rear crossmember is. This is the strongest point at the rear of the car.
Here is some close detail of the forward tube juncture. A lot of tubes and major parts of the unibody converge at this point and it is all well thought out and very strong. The cage tubes are welded to the unibody wherever they come close. The floor plates all couple to the frame rails and are pushed as far outboard to the perimeter of the interior as possible at all points.
This shows some of the multi point seam welds of the cage tubes to the unibody. This makes the overall structure about 30% stiffer with no weight penalty.
The OEM dash bar although heavy was left in place to support the dash skin and steering column. The original intent was to run a racing steering column but it was decided that due to the complexity of the CANBUS in the car and possible issues with smart key and steering wheel encoders, that the stock steering column had to be maintained. The complexities of building a modern production based race car mean that it is often better to go with a motorsports ECU and wire harness but that would easily double the budget of the build! Also there are complexities of dealing with direct injection that require external injector drivers and other expensive bits when switching to a motorsports ECU. The cage ties into the OEM dash bar which makes this area very strong and the chassis should really protect the driver in a T-Bone or an offset frontal collision.
Having a clean interior means that many hours are spent cleaning up unused brackets and unibody parts. This is not apparent but the stock car has a lot of this stuff. This detail removes a lot of weight and eliminates a lot of sharp pokey stuff that can cause injury in an accident. If you were curious, the clean paint is Rustoleum stain black. Rustoleum paints are some of the most durable and chip resistant paints you can buy out of a can. It is more practical to use this sort of paint as it can be easily touched up and the interior is bound to get scratched when assembling the insides.
