Weight watchers

Back to rally prep on BRP.

Here's all the dashboard stripped out so that the heater can be removed.

This needs repairs to the pipework and we are going to deploy a Bryce rally mod - making it only able to have screen demist. The idea is to simplify things and we don't need the crew heating - the car and seeing through the screen comes first!

Meanwhile I have been removing sound deadening applied by good old BL. Actually they were really trying back then in a good way, there's lots of good design ideas and clearly they were aiming in this area to produce something more refined than had been the case before.

They were targeting drivers of Porsche 924s no less!

For my purposes though this is unnecessary weight - again the performance of the car comes before the comfort of the crew.

Pics show it being removed with a wood chisel and mallet - there's a huge bit chiselled off the transmission tunnnel here and fallen onto the floor.

It must be 5mm thick!

Without this and the carpets we'll certainly here that LT77 working.

Then there's the foam backed insulation on the front bulkhead - it's not pictured here but it is perfect for trapping moisture against the bulkhead!

That's come off too.

About halfway there now and here it's all collected in a bag - having weighed it there's 8kgs here!

Another 8 kg to go I reckon plus I gained 10 kgs by cutting out the centre sections of the front and rear bumpers plus another 10kgs or so from getting rid of the radio cassette, door speakers and CDs etc.

That's a good 40kgs which using http://www.mintylamb.co.uk/powerweight and based on 140BHP in an 1100 kg car is worth an extra 5BHP.