The LabRat receives it’s fresh new silver skin- all in Rustoleum Hammered silver finish and satin black. Kelley and Scott performed painting duties after Laura, John and brent swarmed over it the night before, masking areas to not paint. Here’s the progression: All done! those black things are rat ears. You'll see. 🙂
Author: Brent Picasso
Messy business
Messy messy… Working on cars is often a messy business. Pretending our leaky, neglected and abused LabRat is a race car just adds to the fun! Here’s a gem we just had to share. Scott asks me for an oil pan to catch drips from the disconnected oil drain. Not a drop went into the…
Turbo mutiny
Tie me up! Tie Me Down! We’ve decided the turbo definitely has a hate-hate relationship with our car. Shortly after the track day testing we also discovered a turbo completely loose from the manifold. This was the same exact problem that kept this car out of commission at 2008 Thunderhill LeMons! Then, it was nuts…
Skylights and Cherrybombs
A view from the top In our last installment we showed how we augmented the roll cage to accommodate our ‘over-height’ drivers. Actually, we’re all fairly normal (bodies, not brains) – average Americans driving a small Japanese roadster. So what are we to do for protection against late October elements since we can count on…
Playing it safe with the LabRat
We’ve been working full tilt on the LabRat miata, so we’ve neglected the updates. Uh huh, likely story. Let’s catch up. The following is light on wit and dense on information. Lots to share! Cage Modifications Since we have a wide variety of body sizes and shapes fitting into one miata cockpit, we had to…
You get what you pay for
Shortly following our work party we screwed up the nerve to fire up our Miata. We would like to apologize in advance for what you will have to endure here. Furthermore, we want to stress- this Miata contains no technology produced by Autosport Labs. Not yet, at least..
Shock Therapy
The more we dig into this piece of junk the more we start regretting this endeavor. But anything can be compensated for by adding drink and food! Our recent work party was partly a chance for the rest of the team to acquaint themselves with the piece of crap I foisted upon them, extract some…
Team Benetton barfed on our race car!
Our first bit of work on the Miata before deciding to enter it in ChumpCar was to do a quick sanity check- perform a brief mechanical inspection, and try to replace the door that was crushed up against the roll cage, lovingly received from a talent-starved competitor at LeMons Thunderhill 2008. Our friend Vadim joined…
Chump Car world series!
We’re sure we’ll look back thinking- why o why did we do this?! But humans aren’t typically good at learning from other’s mistakes- and we’re sure as hell no exception! So we are entering a wheezy, beat up Mazda Miata with a cobbled together turbo kit into the inaugural ChumpCar World Series- an endurance event…
I Like Cheese! And Technology.. and Race Cars.. Fast Women.. ARM processors.. and Mojitos…
Woo! I got first post! Wait- it’s my blog. Oh… right. So, here’s the inaugural post of the Autosport Labs Blog. While most would assume it will be some sour mechanism for broadcasting what technology we’re designing, when we’re making it available, what features it has, why it’s so cool, blah,blah blah- the reality is…