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…and here's our Evo is ready to get its cage installed. Stripping the car as much as possible is a wise move. This helps lower cost and makes the builder's job easier. In retrospect, we'd go even further on a future build!The foundation for a great car is a great chassis. To make said great chassis, you better have a great roll cage. We put a lot of thought and research into the design and our cage builder took these ideas and improved upon them further. Here’s what we did with our cage, what makes a good design, what makes a poor design, and how we implemented everything for our ultimate time attack Evo. Hopefully this will make a solid blueprint for others to have their cages designed and constructed as well.
All Speed Innovation, located in Lebanon, OH, was the home for our cage build. The shop was confidence inspiring from the moment we walked through the door. The shop was extremely clean and organized with cool parts and tools to play with.Our cage designers and builders are the gentlemen at All Speed Innovations. We were lucky to have meet them a few years back and became friends, so after our crash at Road Atlanta, owner Pat Smith called immediately offering to help if and when we decided to rebuild. The shop has all the characteristics of a to work with, but you might wonder, what qualities make a good cage builder?
All Speed did a great job of listening to our ideas and concerns when we dropped the car off. Little did we know what they had in store for us to confirm they built the exact cage we wanted!
Right from the get go, we planned to have the driver's seat as far back as possible to both centralize mass and improve weight distribution.Examples of work, references and credentials are critical and probably the first items one should ask for when choosing a builder. The folks at All Speed Innovations are rally racers to the core, run a killer SRT-4 rally weapon to showcase their skills and have an FIA certified welder on staff. As far as credentials go, this is a good start in my opinion. Next, Pat Smith, the designer of the cage, is a mechanical engineer with experience in Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and software that allows mockup of the cage within a virtual chassis to be able to test rigidity of different designs as well as materials and tube sizing to ensure the structure is constructed in as efficient a manner as possible.
This is a prime example of All Speed Innovations organizational skills. Each car is given a set space dictaed by the taped off red and white stripe. A whiteboard is in each station with a list of what needs to be done, what parts are on order and what has been accomplished. On top of that, when working on body parts, everything is taped off to reduce the chance of chips and scratches.
