Sunday, March 18, 2007

Dauntless Racing Shows Bodywork

Dauntless Racing brought fresh fiberglass to the Thunderhill, CA, National races to show off their handy work. The P2007.d envelope which was previously referred to as the Clayton bodywork, covered a first generation Stohr DSR chassis.

The bodywork started with a set of full length tunnels patterned after those from a Ralt Formula Atlantic car, which were then modified to accommodate the sports racer underbody rules.

Dauntless Racing consists of Rennie and Stan Clayton, along with authorized reseller Kevin Mitz. While the group still has a lot of work ahead, they have made huge progress for the "total engineering effort" and garage fabrication work. Rennie said, "After pulling pieces out of the moulds and doing the very basic prototype fitment, we managed to throw a bit of primer on it right at the last minute [the prior night] before taking it out to the track and putting it on display.



Dauntless plans to sell the P2007.d as a retrofit kit for first generation Stohr cars, and make it available for owners of other DSRs to customize for their chassis. They are also working on a widened and stretched P2007.c Ralt RT-40/41 version of the body for CSR cars, modeling it on the Clayton's Ralt Formula Atlantic chassis (shown in progress below). "That bodywork will make its debut later in the year."



Rennie explains, "The bodywork for the Ralt is much more modular because there is so much more room to work with on the Atlantics. If you're installing this body to an Atlantic chassis, your original tunnels can be retained (with a leading edge extension to keep you legal within the 45% undertray rule), and part of our kit will include a set of flat honeycomb sandwich panels to extend the horizontal lip of your tunnels out to the side of the car. You can see the fenders & sidepod sitting on our prototype fiberglass / honeycomb panels here in this shot where we are doing the cutting & sectioning fitment to the Ralt.

The full undertray and all of the mechanical bits, exhaust, radiators, hoses, etc., have been installed to the car for doing fitment. As you can see, there are no vertical clearance issues with the tunnels at the rear of the bodywork (the tunnel exits on our Stohr bodywork are the same dimensions as an Atlantic, so there were no modifications needed there). In fact, the reason we needed to raise the bodywork at all was to fit the Ralt radiator height and those massive rear tyres.

Production costs are not yet finalized, but we are confident we will be able to offer very complete kits (including hardware) for prices below those of current Stohr/West bodyworks costs."

[ Gallery of Dauntless bodywork ]

[ Dauntless Racing web site ]


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