Carrol Smith's Books

Yes. Highly recommended.

Not light reading.

Coincidentally - Somebody just wrote a review of the first book (Prepare to Win) in this month's POCA newsletter.

The "practical take-away" for us Pantera owners are the discussions of reliability. There is also a lot of discussion on fabrication, welding and lots of topics with a direct relevance to our cars. Plus a lot of "engineering backstory", including strength of materials, and material properties).

Regards -

Rocky

And if you're building yourself a reference library on performance car handling, there are others; two I like are:

"Race Car Engineering & Mechanics", written by Paul Van Valkenburg, ex-GM-Tech engineer and long-time Tech Editor of the late-lamented Sports Car Graphic magazine

"Competition Car Suspension, a Practical Handbook" by Allan Staniforth, who lays out (in 200 pages) what he went through to scratch-build his championship-winning open wheel racer.

The problem is, the Pantera was built around DeTomaso's '69 F-2 open-wheel pro-racer and the Mangusta came directly from a pro sports-racer chassis, so they've already got state-of-the-art-1970 racecar suspension and all the adjustments they need to win pro road-races. Most of these books either are written for people trying to improve a big sloppy Galaxie or Chevelle suspension, or else a real single-seat open-wheel racer- with a sponsored budget. We're poor boys somewhere in the middle, so the books take a LOT of careful reading to correctly apply to our cars. For me, they work best if I read them & digest the info for a while before running out to the shop to 'improve' something.

quote:

Originally posted by Bosswrench:
...these books either are written for people trying to improve a big sloppy Galaxie or Chevelle suspension, or else a real single-seat open-wheel racer- with a sponsored budget.
...

Well neither of those reason would apply, I just want to get an education into what goes into the design and construction of a performance road car. I am one that needs to see the math or be able to model something to understand it. hopefully his books will help reduce any errors should I try to tweak the exisiting design.

so I paid my money and will take my chances.