Do you really think that an authentic replica of a 60's race car is going to be at all competitive with almost any kind of modern race car?
I have closely inspected and driven one of these cars, they are very nice, but to even think that they could be competitive without a MAJOR amount of reworking - to the point of making the resulting car just a faint resemblance of what you started with anyway - would be an expensive joke.
I take it that you race or have raced?
You bring up good points.
The SPF GT40 is not a replica but is properly described as a continuation of production of the originals as it's being manufactured according to Ford's original engineering blueprints. 90%+ of the cars components can reportedly be exchanged with the originals, with the remaining obsolete, no longer available parts and components replaceable with those designed and manufactured with 21st-century technology.
This is off the top of my head, but the Mark II was clocked at 220 mph on the Mulsanne Straight at, I think, the 1966 Le Mans trials. (I know the car could do 210 mph on the shorter straights of Ford's test track in Michigan.) Even in this day and age, that's still very good race car performance --- given that the ACO (the governing body of Le Mans) required that sports-racing cars of the era to be genuinely streetable with decent ground clearance and spare tires. (And they were. The LMP classes of today are nothing of the sort and a complete joke.) So the SPF item clearly has a lot of performance potential.
But you also must remember that Ford was committed to win Le Mans at all cost and threw however much money into the effort that was required, acquiring the best technology, engineers, designers, team managers, wrenchers and drivers. Bottom line
: This is the difference between Ford's racing GT40's and what we get from Superformance with, in my view, sorting out the car's handling being, far and away, the biggest challenge for good track performance for amateur motorsport activities.
No, I don't race, but in a year or so I'm going to get something high-performance and run it, in SCCA time trials (our local chapter has about a half-dozen a year, overwhelmingly attended by Corvettes) and perhaps the Silver State Classic (formerly known as the Eastern Nevada Road Race, 70 miles.
Homepage Main Menu: Flat Out On A Public Highway! (home.htm)) These events don't require the heavy safety-related modifications that SCCA requires for head-to-head racing (more below as per the SPF item). My first choice would be, far and away, a SPF Mark II, but it's performance has to be sorted out to be competitive with the much less expensive competition which, as I posted yesterday in this thread, presently appears to be a nearly unsurmountable.
A more pressing question, and not just for SPF GT40s, under what sanctioning body are you going to race it? There are numerous threads on that topic on the forum. In summary in the US there are few options.
NASA has some KC classes (Kit Car), KC1 through KC5. However, there is little action in these on any given weekend. In some parts of the country the NASA franchise doesn't even run the KC classes.
SCCA has more action in most parts of the country. But in the SCCA SPO is about the only class that fits - Super Production Over, a catch all anything goes class. In this case it is doubtful an owner would be willing to make the necessary modifications to make the fuel system legal and structure to accommodate an SCCA legal cage.
And, HSR is out since the car is not a vintage automobile thus not accepted (at least not accepted via the writen rules) in this organization. I think they frown upon reproductions, particularly since their members are racing the real deal, wouldn't be quite fair.
So what to do? One can prep it for racing but I'm not sure exactly where it'll race.
I don't recall the SCCA classes that were discussed in the thread on this forum that I alluded to in my posting yesterday; you would have to track down the discussion. But both amateur racing organizations would accomodate you somewhere, although the competition in the classes might not be very large or challenging.
But, far and away, the greatest problem would be making a GT40 safety-legal in SCCA. Among other issues, the fuel tank is required to be separated from the cockpit by a bulkhead. Now a typical street car has the fuel tank outside and under the car's body and so automatically meets that criteria. But a GT40's full tanks are the sills in the cockpit (which are also structural members of the chassis). I suppose that the sills could be enclosed in substantial sheet metal enclosures to satisfy the bulkhead separation requirement, if there would still be room for the driver. But it wouldn't be easy. One racer's constructor suggested installing a fuel tank on the floor of the passenger-side of the cockpit and constructing a bulkhead between the passenger and driver's side to satisfy the requirement. Again, not something that you would probably want to do. And the roll cage: To construct an SCCA-legal roll cage in a GT40, aside from being a technical nightmare, would make it very difficult and slow to enter and exit the already snug cockpit; not palatable if you envision a crash and flameout where you would want to get out in a hurry. (Ford began installing roll cages in the GT40 after Walt Hansgen flipped one and was killed at one of the Le Mans trials, but I doubt if they were anything nearly approaching SCCA requirements.) Fuel cells: Assuming that you could satisfy the bulkhead requirement, accessing the sill fuel tanks in a fully-constructed SPF item to install them and having them custom-made would be mucho $$$$$. And on and on and on . . . . . . . .
Given the safety-modification issues and race classification problems, this isn't a direction I would want to try to go, and have never entertained doing so.
Vintage sports-racing is another issue altogether as the cars are only required to have the safety features of their era, which were in many cases almost negligible compare to what SCCA requires. When the SPF GT40's first appeared I queried one of the officials of our local vintage racing organization (HMSA), inquiring about and envisioning a class just for replicas of or continuations of vintage race cars and which would not compete against vintage race cars. Nope. Not interested. Vintage racers only. It's possible that some of the smaller of the dozen-odd vintage racing organizations in the U.S. and Canada might be interested in such a class, to boost overall participation in their organization,s if nothing else. But haven't heard of such yet.
This is certainly true in our case.
We do have a traqmate unit in the GT & GT40 to record data, but without some one who really knows how to tune the car the data retrieved is difficult to analyze. I plan to get a friend out to the track who knows the hot setup on the original GT40's (and other race cars, modern & vintage) with the expectation of getting the settings close to where they should be.
Anyone up for a SPF track day? :thumbsup: We could get my guy out there and work with setups?
You and your Dad keep up the good work, and keep us posted as to what develops. So far you guys' track experience is all that's been posted on the the subject of this thread.
