Forget rat look, this is go-kart look!

The one thing that we were not happy with at Dubfreeze was the look of the rear wheels, they were sticking out way too far from under our nice new fibreglass wings (kindly supplied by Day Mouldings 01205 460584) This was due to the fact that the centrelines we are running on the back have very little offset so once bolted up to our normal length race axles, the result is the "go-kart" look you see below! Unfortunately, this was only found out the day before the show so it was too late to do anything about it.

We now have two options.... either replace the brand new wings with a pair of oversize fibreglass wings which are pretty hard (and expensive) to get hold of, or replace the race axles with some earlier shorter ones. Unfortunately, both solutions will end up costing money but after careful consideration we decided on the latter. We ideally want to keep the rear wings in proportion with the rest of the car so, if you know of anyone with a spare set of > 64 race axles lying around.... give us a shout!

To ensure this replacement would do the trick we first decided to trial fit an earlier box that had shorter axles already fitted to it to see if we actually gained enough clearance to make it worthwhile. This meant whipping the box out that had been in the car for just 5 days!

Swapping the Splitty nose cone we had fitted to the 5 day box.

And fitting the earlier box back in.

(By the way, the box we will actually be building to race with will look a lot cleaner than the one shown above! Here's the case that I spent a couple of hours cleaning in the parts washer with a wire brush

Apart from the shortened race axles, we have so far acculmilated most of the bits needed to build a pretty strong box, strengthened side plates, racing diff etc so hopefully our reinforced unit will outlast the normally weak Beetle gearbox.

Once fitted, the earlier box tucked the rear wheels in much further than before, however, there is still a chance the tyres may foul the arches on heavy launches from the line so we have also decided to flare the rear arches a little to give adequate space. Watch out for the next blog update to see how we do it ;-)