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With the harness safely tucked out of the way and now sure we won’t be doing any more “planned” welding to the interior, we can start directing our attention to the details and steps to making the interior look good. Not because it’s a show car, but because we’re not slobs and having an immaculate race car will only help increase the amount of time driving the car as opposed to working on it. We already have a couple of Lemons cars in the garage and don’t need any more piles.
Any car that’s completely stripped will have a ton of extra tabs and mounting bolts protruding from the most inconvenient of places. These not only look ugly and weigh a fair amount – it adds up fast – but they are also dangerous. Without the dash, carpet and seats to cover them up, you can easily earn yourself a tetanus shot or worse. We made sure to cut all unnecessary tabs off and to grind them flat.
After cutting off the inside of the door skin we exposed the stock side impact beams. Since we have a “crash attenuator”, two side impact bars and no rear passengers – unless they were contortionists – the stock side impact protection is no longer necessary. These are pretty difficult to remove with regular garage tools due to their location and thickness. Not to worry though, because we were still at Revenge Motorsports and John fired up our favorite tool of persuasion: the oxygen-acetylene torch.
In order to keep the outer door skins from melting, we hosed the outside of the door down during the cutting to keep them relatively cool. Working slowly and periodically hosing the inside of the door, we eventually had all four side impact beams out of the car. The net weight savings from their removal was approximately 80 lbs, which is huge considering these 80lbs were in some of the worst possible locations on the car.
