Horsepower & Heels Blog

Its been a roller coaster lately, with the 2 week thrash-fest on the car, the terrible loss, and the far too brief family & friend visits, but I will be headed home to Alabama tomorrow.

With the interior of the car painted, today we decided to go ahead and start putting the interior back together. Normally, I’d wait until the exterior was painted, but since we have only 2 weeks until the PRI show, and since I’ll be going home Sunday, we need to have as much done as possible.

Josue finished off all the cage/engine carriage painting. We’ll be letting it dry overnight and tomorrow while we wait on the powdercoater and the front end to be done at the body shop. Then, we’ll start assembling the interior of the car again while Josue starts prepping the body for paint.

Its getting stressful now. With the tragedy bringing down the entire shop, and the upcoming funeral, I’m just running out of time on the car. Josue will continue on next week without me, but I have to head back to Alabama this Sunday. I feel so helpless, and I don’t like it.

Tomorrow will be a long day, so we’re calling it an early night at the shop (10:30pm) and getting some rest.

Amidst everything going on here in Orlando, we decided to try and get some more accomplished on the racecar while things were in “waiting mode”.

This morning, we arrived and pulled the rear end and 4 link out from the car to get ready to spray the rear clip. Josue (painter), was not able to come until the evening, so we used the time to sand, clean, and prepare the surfaces. Once that was done, we starting cleaning the grime off the parts so everything will be like-new upon reassembly and getting the sheet metal ready for the powder coater tomorrow morning. That plastic they use on sheetmetal is a PAIN to get off!

Its 11pm, and I’m in the office while Josue finishes spraying the interior. I think I’m high on paint fumes, but I’m super excited because its actually starting to look like a decent car again! After the interior dries overnight, they’ll be prepping the exterior for paint. I feel helpless right now, because there’s not much I can do, but it’ll be back at it once the paint dries trying to assemble it for the PRI!

Well, car updates came to a hault yesterday.

I have been down in Orlando working on the car at Excessive Engineering, which is my ex-husband’s, (and still best friend) shop. Dennis is the one I always give all the credit for what I have learned in motorsports and how far I have gone. We have a relationship many do not understand: even though he and I are divorced, we have remained the best of friends.

Dennis and his wife Tina, recently welcomed their first son, Aiden Lope Lugo on October 8th. He was a month early, but everything was going great. Proud Papa and Momma were doing great, and knowing how long he had wanted to be a father, I was so very happy for him and his new family.

However, yesterday Dennis and Tina took little Aiden to the hospital while in North Carolina with a fever. No one was braced for what would follow a mere hour later… Aiden suddenly became critical and stopped breathing. At his small size, the hospital tried to save him, but were unsuccessful.

Words cannot explain how devastated I am for Dennis and Tina. Its times like this that make you really aware how precious life is and how inconsequential other small stuff really is in comparison. I cannot imagine the pain that they are enduring now, and feel so helpless to ease their sorrow in any way.

What was to be a two week, all important, labor-intensive thrash on my racecar has now turned into a time of sorrow and condolences. What is important right now, is my best friend and his family and doing whatever I can to try and help them bear this weight on their hearts.

For friends and family of the Lugos, please email me for arrangement information. We are collecting small donations to help offset the funeral arrangement costs of bringing Aiden home to Florida. If you would like to help, please email me at ericao [at] horsepowerandheels [dot] com.

Remember how precious life is, and how trivial all the day-to-day problems truly are in the grand scheme of things.

Well today, the painter had to work elsewhere, so there wasn’t much I could do at the shop until he returns tomorrow to spray the interior paint. That’s good, because it gave me a chance to take Mami out for lunch and shopping. We ran some errands for her, and ate at Anthony’s Pizza in Avalon Park.

Tonight, I’m headed to my old high school stomping grounds for dinner with my Lake Howell friends at Pretzel’s. Frankie works at Pretzel’s on the weekends, so we’ll all get together down there, and if I can make it, we’ll after party when the bar closes. (I usually turn into a pumpkin and go to bed.)

Tomorrow, it will be back to work…. but for now, I’m enjoying my day of rest and relaxation.

Back at the shop by 11am to continue sanding and prepping for paint. I finished cutting off all unused tabs and grinding away old bar stubs left over from the many years of modifications. My good buddy Frankie came over to lend a hand with the sanding on his day off. Talk about a good friend! Sanding is about the least favorite chore of getting the car ready for paint, and having to climb through all the “monkey bars” isn’t too fun either. By about 3pm, Frankie and I had the entire cage sanded, and decided to go grab a bite to eat.

Meanwhile, Eddie continued fabrication on fixing the seat belt mounting points and positioning the seat. The car never really fit me too well, so we lowered the seat, moved it as far right as possible so that my head no longer hit the roll cage and was centered in the driver’s encapsulation. We shortened the steering shaft to get the steering wheel in a lower, more comfortable position. He also finished welding up the supports to the rear motor plate and tied it back into the chassis, and cut and modified the body for the tow hook to the top of the cage.

Josue arrived later to start getting ready to spray the primer. But first, I had to go back across all those bars and wipe them clean with lacquer thinner to make sure there was no grease or dirt left on any of the surfaces. Given that this chassis was built in 1988 originally by Gateway Racecars, there is a lot of gunk accumulated on the bars and the floor pan. I finally get it all ready, and Josue starts spraying the yellow primer all over the cage. Unfortunately, the gun we had here at the shop didn’t have an air regulator, and the pressure was too high and wasting a lot of primer. So after the front clip was primed, Josue opted to wait until he brought his personal spray gun from home.

Tomorrow, I’ll get to scruff up the primer and get ready for the paint to go on. Its progress! I’m so excited!

Well, the Lights, Motors, Action audition was a blast. The cars are little 1200lbs. fiberglass bodied cars with hiyabusa engines. They drive 100% different than anything I’ve ever driven before. As far as the audition goes, I’m pretty sure I bombed it, but personally speaking I think I did great. Considering that I have never done many of those manuvers before EVER, I was actually proud of myself for some of the attempts I made at left and right 90s, 180s, rollbacks and drifting. I absolutely blew the doughnuts, and the rest of the audition wasn’t great either, but for me personally, it was a big achievement. I just hope my uncle doesn’t get too embarassed that I didn’t live up to any of the hype that they might have thought a “professional class” driver should.

Afterwards, I headed over to the shop, but since I hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch, and had sat in a fire suit and full nomex undergarments for several hours, I wasn’t feeling that great. I rushed to Subway for a meatball sub and some soup, but it wasn’t in time to stop the migraine that came with that hunger nausea, and I spent a few hours in the office with the lights off and my eyes closed.

After it finally went away it was back to finalizing fabrication to the chassis before paint. Eddie, Dennis and I fixed the throttle cable/pedal, added bars to the rear motorplate mount, remounted the seat, shortened and lowered the steering wheel, and ground off the rest of the old and no longer in use tabs, etc. Tomorrow, we’ll make an aluminum cover for the firewall to help cover all the holes in the exsisting wall.

Exhausted, and still not feeling all that great, I arrived home around 2:33 am.

After watching the season closing race for the TARE team this weekend in Holt, FL’s Heads-Up Nationals, I headed down to Orlando with a pick-up truck full of racecar parts on a mission.

Day One:

The biggest undertaking is going to be getting the body work done on the car and getting it ready for paint. So I’ve spent all today stripping the car down to nothing and removing the sheet metal work so that it can get sent out to powder coating. Meanwhile, Josue has gone out to get some fiberglass resin and the rest of the paint prep supplies so we can get the interior painted and prep the body for the exterior paint.

The fiberglass body is thin in some areas, so we reinforced those areas and mated the body to the chassis mounts. The doors will need some fitting work as well as the front end. After disassembling everything from the car, including pulling the mock up block, I moved the car outside and took a bucket of degreaser to all the bars and engine carriage. Once it was dry, I went to work cutting out old tabs that were no longer in use and grinding down spots where things had been moved, cut out or replaced so it was all smooth.