I’m made a race car

Here’s where it started. I bought a 1986 chevette with a couple friends with the goal of building a car for the 24 hours of lemons. (Like Le Mans, but for shitty cars). It was gloriously terrible and had a stellar 0-60 time of 24 seconds. The brakes hardly worked, and the seatbelts didn’t actually lock up. Super safe!

Naturally, step one was making it faster. I made a custom exhaust manifold to allow the mounting of a Subaru turbo.

I had a $20 4 barrel carburetor that I had sitting around so I decided to use that upstream of the turbo rather than modifying a smaller carburetor to run downstream of the turbo. The first iteration of this setup took about a day to make and increased power significantly. It brought the 0-60 time into the 7 second range. There was some tweaking and modifying done to increase power, and durability, but it’s not worth diving into.

Showing off at a local cars and coffee meet. The roof rack came off of my brother’s montero. We thought It looked funny so we threw it on.

It happened to win an award for “most unique car” at the show. Here it is posing with the trophy

It turns out that when you more than double the power of a car things like to break. “No worries, I’ll just throw a stronger clutch in.”

See that pile of black stuff in the corner? That’s clutch.

Shortly after fixing that issue the engine decided that it wasn’t happy either. I rebuilt the engine, and then it decided to melt a piston shortly after. I repeated this process 2 more times. Settling for less power was no option

I eventually got sick of rebuilding chevette engines, so I pulled it out in search for something better.

I searched Craigslist and Facebook for a while until I came across this piece of art. It’s the engine and transmission from a 1979 Volvo 240. Highly sought after as the epitome of racing performance... (heavy sarcasm)
I got it for free, so I can’t really complain.

The 1979 Volvo engine had a terrible k-jet fuel injection system that I didn’t want to mess with, so I bought a newer Volvo engine. This one was from a 1991 Volvo (still bolts right up to the 1979 transmission)

I don’t have any pictures of the instillation process, but it basically involved making engine mounts, a trans brace, and bashing the firewall and transmission tunnel unit everything fit. Simple

Next step: turbocharging! Everything is better with boost.

The complete manifold bolted to the engine

With turbo bolted on.

Started the intake plumbing and installed a slight larger turbo. The intercooler is from Subaru wed and the turbo is from a 2015 STI.

Finished the intake plumbing.

Don’t really have a good place to put it, so here will work. The engine management is done with a customs Megasquirt ecu. It’s fully tunable and customizable. I had a lot of headache setting it up, but now that it’s working I love it.

Next was making a template for a driveshaft that connects a Volvo transmission to a chevette rear axle. I used driveshafts from both and some exhaust tubing to make something the right size.

I took that template to a driveshaft shop and they made me this shiny new one that’s exactly what I needed.

The next step was to start bracing the chassis and preparing it for a roll cage. I started by bracing the length of the car with 2”x4” steel tubing.

Cont. you can also see the holes in the floor from where it rusted through

New floor pans going in.

Instant roll cage! Didn’t take any pictures of the process. Sorry

Fancy new racing seat. It cost more than the car itself (not saying much tbh)

Finally time to upgrade the brakes. Custom hubs and brackets were made to use bmw brakes.

Almost driving!

Finally ready for a drive.

This was its first time moving under its own power in many months.

Made it to work even!

Took it to a friend that has a car scale. It only weighs 2171 lbs. that means that it only need 310 hp to have the same power to weight ratio as a corvette. (Easy to do with this engine btw)

Got a new hood from the junkyard because I was tired of the huge hole in the old one. The brown paint goes nicely with the rust!

Had to cut a small hole for the turbo to peek out of.

This is going to be the next step. Volvo transmissions are known to be incredibly weak while their engines can hold up to a remarkable amount of abuse. This is a 5 speed transmission from a foxbody mustang, they’re much stronger and you can get an adapter kit to bolt it to a Volvo transmission.

I’m also going to replace the rear axle with the independent rear suspension from a Miata with a limited slip differential. I hope to swap the front suspension over too.

First drive when we originally turbocharged it: https://youtu.be/4gAJIjO_7E4

Having fun with the exhaust and the Volvo engine: https://youtu.be/1Ss7gVAAQ4c

Here’s the website for the greatest racing series in the world if you’re interested. https://24hoursoflemons.com/

I’ve owned the car for just under 2 years and have been putting actual effort into it for about 1 year. It’s been a great project and it should be ready to race this summer.

FP edit: send race cars!