Keeping things cool during a hot Memorial Day Weekend.

Even though we are skipping the race in two weeks in Joliet to focus on Road America, we realized that race is sneaking up on us, so thought we should probably start fixing the Cutlass Ciera.

Of course the first step to any repair work for us is to make a huge mess on my driveway.

With that done it was time to start focus on actually doing some actual work.  The main problem we had after the last race was that the in radiator trans cooler started leaking.  So we yank that out and find underneath it were 20 years of dirt, old leaves and dead bugs.

We also figured it was time to finally remove the air conditioning.  I know we should have ditched from the start but we finally had the ac delete pulley so we could get rid of the compressor and still have the water pump work.  So out goes the compressor condenser and other parts that we no longer needed.  Of course to take the compressor out we found out the oil filter was in the way so an oil changed became necessary so a trip to get oil and a filter.  And of course even after that we found out that AC bypass pulley didn't come with nuts which we needed to hold it in place so Ace to get a nut, but eventually we got it all out and the pulley back in.

Of course once we got it out we realized he all that water weighs alot, imagine how much faster we'd be if we ran it without a radiator or water.  So why don't we just do it without any of it and have run the old 2.8 as an air cooled engine.

So then we were done.

Well ok we decided that maybe it wasn't a good idea to run it air cooled since all the good teams seem to have radiators (most of the not good teams also have radiators too) and we had already paid for a replacement one so in the new radiator went.

Nice and shiny and without the condenser it looks pretty significantly further back  than it did with the condenser.  Of course we weren't quite done yet, first someone who remains nameless that likes breaking parts broke the bolt that goes into the dogbone.  The fact that the bolt was rated 10.9 didn't seem to bother him.  So off to True Value since it has a better bolt selection.  We couldn't find a metric bolt that would work but for a Grade 8 bolt that would work.  After that we put the fluids back in and are pretty much ready to race.  Think they would notice an extra car on the track in a couple weeks?