Miller Welders hooked the teams up with one of their world-class welders to install their roll cages and fabricate any necessary parts for their cars.
Miller Welders came onboard to support every single team with welding gear, which was used to tack up and final install the Rhodes cages. In total, Miller provided four 210 Syncro Wave TIG welders, two 211 MIG welders, and two 215 Multimatic (MIG) welders plus spool gun kits, gloves, some badass-looking helmets and masks, and jackets. The teams were well equipped, to say the least. The Miller stuff was a life-saver and gave every team what they needed for the builds.
Another safety item,
Baer Brakes provided a set of their high-performance brakes for each car, so the teams wouldn’t be inclined to rely on the stock binders to stop from their potential 150 mph passes. Suffice it to say, these might be the shiniest item on these cars that are otherwise chock full of old, dilapidated parts. We’ll dive more into the brakes when we do the builds in a secondary episode.
The teams have been burning up the Summit Racing Equipment website to price and compare parts. With $7,000 at their disposal, the lion’s share of the new parts that will go onto these cars will come from Summit, which had even extended next-day delivery to the teams to get the parts in-hand and on the cars as quickly as possible.
despite the extra work on their plates, made some solid progress in the opening days of the build, as they removed the entire front clip up to the shock towers to lighten the car and removed the rearend and axles to begin work on beefing things up. The crew, led by Eric Yost, also went to the drawing board on their engine combination, deciding they would likely be going the GM LS route with a turbocharger. The LS combination, like the real-world, is a popular choice given how cheap and reliable the engines are, and, as you’ll see, more than one of these teams exploited that very fact during the $10K Drag Shootout.