good friend of mine Greg Pye who also races in DTRC in a silver Alfa sudsprint bought a second alfasud to race while his number one sud was having serious and seriously long winded engine rebuild with an alfa specialist, although mechanically fairly std the car performed well until that too suffered an engine failure, not wishing to loose his number 2 car for over a year (told you his other car was having a long winded engine rebuild) sent the car up to me to sort the engine and do a bit of welding.
the car turned out so rotten it was beyond repair! floors innner/outer sills, chassis rails, inner wings, front chassis rails, screen pillars, bulkhead, inner and outer A pillars, infact the only thing holding the car together was the rollcage, so i stripped the car and scrapped the shell.
fast forward 18months!!!!, greg finds a shell in a breakers yard it was an insurance write off, having been subject to a fire, which took out the interior and most of the wiring loom, and lots of under bonnet bits.
now you see where the project gets its name its climbing out of the ashes literally.
the plan was for a simple reshell, but although far better than the first shell this car still needed a considerable amount of welding.
project aim from gregs view point,
on a tight budget build a tidy, cheap spare race car from parts we already had.
project aim from my view point,
on a tight budget build a strong race car which is faster/better than gregs number one car, which might be a tall order given its being built out of cast off bits, but unlike the no1 car this wont be road legal and so will be lighter, and to be honest i'm not sure the set up on the no1 car really suits gregs driving style
below are pics of the origonal shell, looks good you would of never known it was a death trap structurally, apparently it handled well, but i think that was merely the body flexing allowing perfectly flat cornering
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