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Once the transmission & clutch parts were all back together I thought we were done with the rear main seal repairs. Not so much. Turns out a slight leak in the clutch hydraulic system developed that refused to cooperate. Bleeding and bleeding just resulted in a mess on the shop floor from a tiny leak that couldn't be found. So we replaced the stock plastic hydraulic line (shown below) with a commonly used stainless steel hard line (FMS-M-7512-A, $229, that technically is for the 2005-10 Mustang, but it can be
tweaked slightly to fit the '11-14 6-spd), as we thought there might be a crack in the plastic line. That wasn't the issue and the pedal's hydraulic feel was still crap, with a tiny yet invisible leak. Don't waste your money on that metal clutch hard line unless : you have the system apart already, don't want the plastic line anymore, and don't mind tweaking the hard line to fit.
The leak was later finally chased down to a 90° plastic quick-connect elbow on one end of the hard line that had "sprung its spring". It dripped down the line and was in an inaccessible spot that was very hard to see. This meant we had to buy yet
another clutch line to get the new elbow,the OEM plastic piece (which comes with this elbow). That fix turned this little leak repair into into another $300 worth of parts and another few hours of investigations and several clutch bleeding attempts - but that seems to finally be fixed as well. Lesson learned: always be suspect of plastic quick connects! Good grief, what I wouldn't give for a regular threaded fitting sometimes; we could have made a new line that actually fit this chassis better for about $40 in parts.
This whole crankcase vacuum / rear main seal snafu snowballed quite a bit, and is honestly a little embarrassing, but I have to chalk it up it was a learning experience. It never left is stranded and didn't "break" per se, and we caught the flywheel bolt damage while we were in fixing the rear main seal issues
we caused. I took poor advice on the PCV system routing that I now know to be wrong, but in the end we finally got our system laid out correctly. The guys also found and fixed a broken exhaust mount while the exhaust was off, too (probably due to the off track excursion I had at Turn 6 at TWS), which made the lone rattle on the car disappear.
Please, if you have read this far, learn from our mistakes. Always question any advice on aftermarket mods, do your research, and plan for the worst when you get your car apart - don't plan on a 6 hour fix when it could turn into a multi-day parts chasing mess. What I thought would be a 1 day repair with $11 in parts ended up spanning two weeks and involving $800 worth of consumables - none of which made the car any faster, ugh. But now I can say that the car is at least fixed right and we avoided a potentially spectacular clutch system failure.
Somebody Buy Our Black 2013 Mustang GT...
So I've had potential buyers sniffing around both Mustangs, but the vast majority have been looking at the less costly and more stock-like
black 2013 GT shown below. The black GT will sell soon, I can feel it. But the Red 2011 Mustang seems to have no takers. Why is that? Maybe the car looks too radical to be street driven - it isn't, but it has that perception. Yet it isn't radical enough to be a full "race car" for others. And of course the graphics are a bit over the top and the front flares are admittedly ugly. If we sell this car we won't have a replacement track car/race car ready for the next few months because we are too busy at the shop working on customer cars, which means we will miss the first few NASA Texas events for the season.
Instead of de-modding and dumbing down the 2011 GT we're now going to concentrate harder on selling the black 2013 Mustang GT instead. Again, that car is pristine, has 6K miles, and has been garaged every day of its life. I've almost had it sold so many times (and once again last night), came within $500 of closing the deal once, so its
almost there. Here are the details:
Classified ad page: http://www.vorshlag.com/cars-2013gt.php
Price: $26.5K obo!
Odometer: 5,9XX miles
VIN: 1ZVBP8CF2D5247691
Engine: Coyote 5.0L DOHC Aluminum V8, 420 hp (dyno'd at 377 whp , 365 wtq)
Drivetrain: Getrag MT-82 6-speed manual, Rear Wheel Drive, 8.8" rear axle with Limited Slip and 3.55:1 rear gears
Colors: Black exterior, Black Cloth interior
Upgrades include:
Optional upgrades to the black 2013 GT
Of course if you want to customize this Mustang we have lots and lots of parts we can put onto this car, both new and used. We will sweeten the deal and discount the parts and labor on a number of parts, to help sell this car. Here are a couple of things we could add to incentivize the right buyer, with the discounted costs shown:
- AST coilovers + springs + camber plates for +$1800. We have a set of used set of 4100s that have the Grand Am DDP pistons, were custom valved, and were used on our red 2011 GT for a year and a half before we went to Motons. These became the prototypes for the 4150. This set-up new would cost $2839 + the custom revalving.
- Wider wheels and tires (shown above): The 2013 GT already has the upgraded factory 19x9" wheels and 255 Pirellis that come on the Track Pack/Brembo cars. For +$1000 we would upgrade to the 18x10" D-Force LTW5 wheels and 295/35/18 Nitto NT-05 tires (used). This set-up new would cost ($1236 for 4 wheels + $248/ea for tires) $2240.
Again, get it touch with us if you are thinking about buying a 2012-14 Mustang, as we can make this one customized for YOU, many banks will still give new car financing on a car this new, and the
5 year/60K warranty has a majority of its life left.
2011 Mustang Development - Not Quite Dead Yet...?
My point is, if we could just sell this 2013 GT we would likely
keep the red 2011 GT and continue to develop it and race it in the 2014 season. Why not - nobody wants to buy it! I've talked with Amy and she doesn't really want to sell the red Mustang, and for once would rather keep one of our long term project cars. After we buy the 2015 Mustang and had it race ready, in the future, she would love to make the red 2011 GT a street car/daily driver again. I also think that this S197 still has a lot of untapped performance potential in TT3, as we never got around to trying a few things I wanted to test or develop further.
We have yet to find the limit of "bigger is better" when it comes to tires on the heavy S197
What things? Wider tires than the 315mm Hoosiers we ran in all of 2013 season. Because it is
very heavy, makes a decent amount of power, and in testing it has gotten faster after every single tire width upgrade we've done since 2010.
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