WE'RE IN....IT'S OUT

WE'RE IN!!!

First news first...we were officially accepted into the 2009 Gator-Fest LeMons race in Houston for February 28th. The team, on hearing the great news, celebrated by drinking a lot of Egg Nog spiked with tequila, hoping the pain from the last race would not be repeated. I took the Tequinog drinks as a sign of happiness on their part. But I am not sure. Nor are they.

We've set our goals very high for Race #2.






FINISH.




WITH ALL CYLINDERS FIRING.



Given the history on other Saabs finishing these races around the country...this is like asking Brad Pitt to win an Oscar. We'll be competing against 1-2 other Saabs in this race....one from a team out West who has a significant amount of experience watching Saabs break and the other from the local Saab 9000 team (who lasted, ohhhh, 1 lap last year). Tough competition for the Fastest Svede award.

ITS OUT!

Work on the car has progressed at a speed which would make the original Saab engineers happy. Slow and steady. Dave and I spent most of an evening labelling every hose, connector, pipe, and vacuum tube with blue paint tape and magic marker. We used very obvious words and numbers, all of which have rubbed off, are unreadable, or generally make no sense whatsoever to anyone including us. We also took a bunch of hi-res photos of the engine bay in case, you know, we want to photoshop what a real engine would look like in this car. So the likelihood of this car ever starting again are up there with this group of chrome domes growing hair.



On Tuesday of this week, the engine officially came out of the car. Here is a picture of the 3 Norwegians laughing at the empty engine bay.


Q - "Why is there no rust in here?"
A - "its been covered in oil for 25 years!"

Q - "Thing a Chevy V8 will fit in here?"
A - "Yep. And the engine would go on strike immediately for the poor working environment."

Q - "Is that undertray bent from the two-wheeled excursion?"
A - silence.



(its not bent)


Anyway - here are some pictures from the work session. Next step is to get the heads ported and polished, block bored out, pistons ordered, cam ordered, and to figure out why this 113hp wonder-engine (as in "I wonder how this thing even runs") broke in the first place (and no Bruce...being Swedish is not the reason.)