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Originally Posted by FRPGUY  Don, the chassis looks a lot better now than when I saw it at Lime Rock. I missed Ronnie when he dropped into a friends shop with Ben Levy when he was here in Massachusetts. |
Ronnie was running on quite a hectic schedule during his three week swing across the U.S. (coast to coast) and into Canada, so I'm not surprised that he had come and gone from your area before you knew it. Ronnie spent the past week with me, first in Orlando, from where we drove to Naples to the Collier Museum to look at Mk II #1031 (their other GT40, #1049, was still up in storage), and then in Maryland. I arranged to get Ronnie in to see #1072, after which he spent a half day poking through every nook and cranny of my GT40 tub. His opinion about its condition: "Remarkable!" He was amazed at how rust free it was, and how original--both of which I have been saying for years. The appearance of my #1040 at the SAAC convention at Lime Rock in July 2000 was an aberration. After being nicely cleaned to bare metal in 1989, it still looked great in 2000 until it got stuck out in my yard in a thunder storm about a week before the SAAC convention and developed a wonderful coating of surface rust by the time we hit Lime Rock. I will agree with what others have said about its appearance there: it looked like a rusted piece of junk. But, another light bead blasting got rid of the surface rust, and a paint job prevented any more of it from forming. At the SAAC convention in Charlotte in 2001, the tub looked great, just as it does now.