Geo's  Page

Spare Tire Racing    
I have always wanted to own a Porsche.  I've also always wanted to own my own race car.  Who would guess that my first race car would be my first Porsche?  This page is about my 1984 944 that I bought with the single purpose of building into an SCCA ITS race car.

We figured we would have little to no trouble finding information on turning the 944 into an ITS race car, afterall, Porsches are very popular race cars.  Shortly after buying the car, we discovered that there are actually rather few resources on the web covering this.  So we will be covering the stripping and building of the car and eventually some of the racing.

We didn't start out with the intention of buying/building a race car.  We've been driving/racing Grover Pickering's SCCA ITS 1991 Sentra SE-R.  We've been working on the development and tuning of that car and since it was available to us to race, we weren't looking for a race car.  In November, 2001 I came across a 1984 Porsche 944 in a small salvage yard.  The car had been sitting there for over a year and had been sitting for at least a couple of years before the salvage yard picked it up at auction.  Surprisingly, the car was straight and complete.  We have no idea if the engine even runs or not.  If it does, that's great, and if not, we'll deal with it.

For now we have the following priorities:

1.  Interior
2.  Suspension
3.  Engine

For now all we have are some initial photos of the car in the early stages of being stripped.  We'll take a number of these photos away as we begin to show some real progress.  For now, just enjoy these.  The paint looks better in the photos than it actually is (it's completely oxidized).
 

        Well, as you can see below, we've begun stripping the interior. It's a long process of course.  The interior panels, headliner, carpet, and sound deadening must be removed.  It seems Porsche essentially glued the interior of the car together, so we also have to remove a great deal of old adhesive.  For that we are using 3M adhesive remover.  We sourced ours from the local auto parts store.  We've also found out that this is different from the 3M adhesive remover you can get from your local home store.  We cannot tell you which is better however.
 
To remove the old sound deadening tar paper, we first tried the dry ice trick of placing crushed dry ice on the tar and then hitting it with a hammer.  It is supposed to break up the tar paper and make the process easy.  We went through 40 pounds of dry ice and it didn't do anything.  So, we used the tried and true heat gun.  That worked like a charm  The only problem is the residue it left.  For that we used the 3M adhesive remover again.  As you can see in the photos below, it works quite well.
 
There's not much more to report at this time.  Next time we should have some photos of the car 99% stripped.  We basically have to remove the heater and the wiring harness and we'll be ready to install the cage.                         

Text and photos copyright George D. Roffe 2002