Did you know that Saabs United is sponsoring the build and the running of a historic Saab race car? This effort is being chronicled over at the Saabs United Historic Rally Team website.
Work continues on the preparation of our Stig Blomqvist replica Saab 99 Turbo for the 2010 Midnight Sun Rally in Sweden.
Since the last update was posted here at Saabs United, the car has been totally stripped down and has undergone a fascinating process called Dry Ice Blasting. It completely removes all of the paint leaving you with a totally clean body to work your graphical magic on.
You can view the ‘before’ videos here and the all important ‘after’ video here. The car is now ready to have it’s roll cage installed and Jorgen called in on the guys who’ll be doing that work last week.
Jorgen also attended a huge Saab swap meet and picked up some much-needed and hard-to-find parts for the car (we have a huge parts list that needs to be filled).
And finally, I had the good fortune to call in at 99T headquarters and meet Jorgen personally during my brief trip to Sweden a few weeks ago. The competition car was away getting blasted, but it was good to see where it all happens. There’s nothing like a little person-to-person face time to get your perspective right.
You could follow all of those links individually, or you could just click through and see all those entries on the Saabs United Historic Rally Team website (It’s a site layout and a project that I’m quite proud of, actually)
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It seems we’ve selected the right car at the right time and there might be several 99Turbos competing in next year’s Midnattssolsrallyt. the dominant car of the era was actually the Audi Quattro, but the early Quattros had a poor fuel injection system that didn’t allow them to be really competitive until later on, when the system was modified. As last year’s (disqualified) winner knows, you can’t run a newer injection system on an older car.
So 99T’s will be very competitive for the next couple of years. How competitive? Well, we’ve got a pretty good idea that the man we’re modelling our car after is actually in the process of building one himself – yes, Stig Blomqvist.
(The) Stig’s been racing Ford Escorts for some time now, but we’ve got it under pretty good authority that he’s taking a step back in time and reuniting with a 99T just like the one he ran back in 1978.
No wonder he wished us luck in finding parts for ours – he’s probably had the parts locked up for some time 🙂
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