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" When I picked up the fully restored frame for my Crossle 32F Formula Ford a couple of months ago, my old friend Pat Prince\u2014who is the owner of Prince Racecar Engineering\u2014said: &amp;quot;Just remember when you put this thing back together, the goal is to make the car look as if it has half as many parts as it really does. Keep it clean and simple.&amp;quot;   As I rumbled home on the back roads of Illinois and Wisconsin with the pristine frame resting majestically on a fine piece of iridescent green indoor/outdoor carpet (nothing is too good for a pristine frame) in the back of my Ford van, I thought about Pat&amp;#039;s parting words. Interesting advice, though I&amp;#039;d never heard it put that way. Half as many parts... It&amp;#039;s a nice clear image of what has to be done.   But then I think all of us who wrench on or restore racing cars probably try to follow that advice instinctively, even if we haven&amp;#039;t formalized it into a useful maxim. In fact, you might say this reductionist tendency is almost a genetic prerequisite to wanting to work on race cars at all. It started early for most of us, and the warning signs were always there.   We are the kids who took the chain guards and fenders off our bicycles when we were 10 to make them &amp;quot;sportier.&amp;quot; Never mind that we caught our cuffs in the chain and left big greasy sprocket stains on our blue jeans, or had dirty wet skunk stripes down our backs from riding in the rain. This was the price of blazing speed down Main Street. Or past Lee Ann Fowler&amp;#039;s house, in case she was home and happened to be looking out the window.   This &amp;quot;remove stuff&amp;quot; ethic seems to have been adopted by the automotive world almost the minute cars appeared on earth. You can see it in the opening scenes of the silent movie Wings, in which our future WWI fighter pilot strips down an early Model T in his backyard to make a speedster out of it\u2014nothing but an abbreviated body and single seat on a frame. Girl-next-door Clara Bow paints a classic shooting star emblem on the engine cowl. Early hot rodding, caught on film. The instinct to rip superfluous parts off a vehicle and throw them away is apparently timeless.   My own favorite racing cars when I was a kid were Indy roadsters of the &amp;#039;50s, as they appeared to be just two rails and four tires carrying an engine. Big steering wheel, a tapered gas tank in the tail and a seat with snap-in upholstery. Purposeful, fast and handsome.   Unfortunately, Indy cars didn&amp;#039;t race anywhere near my home, so when I was about 15 I started crewing (gophering, actually) for a local stock car driver named Bucky Linhart. I soon noticed that the fastest stock cars were always extremely sanitary\u2014nicely painted, with straight bodywork, stark interiors (usually painted white or battleship gray) and carefully routed plumbing, while the slow guys had cars with a lot of raw edges, almost like corrugated tin chicken sheds on wheels. Tetanus shot material. My buddy Denny Jensen and I used to wander around the infield paddock and point out cars that were done the way we would do them. If we had any money, or a driver&amp;#039;s license. Or a car. And if our homework was done.   Once I discovered cars, I must say that I really hated being a kid. And once I made my first trip to the June Sprints at Elkhart Lake in 1962 and discovered sports car racing, the discontent and sanitation indexes rose even higher.   The SCCA had an extremely strict code of appearance and cleanliness for competition cars, almost to the point of fetish. There were no patches of primer on fenders or childishly scrawled numbers on doors in this club. Getting through tech inspection was a serious business, almost like applying for a foreign travel visa in the Soviet Union; there was every chance that you might fail. No corrugated tin chicken sheds need apply. There was a profound and shared sense of how things should be done, what was cool and what was not cool. Forget singing along with Mitch Miller; this was the Miles Davis side of motorsport.   So, throughout the &amp;#039;60s and early &amp;#039;70s my buddies and I kept returning to Road America, and we would walk through the paddock and do our own checking on the &amp;quot;rightness&amp;quot; of cars. And I must say that nothing impressed our young minds quite as much as the British Leyland-sponsored Group 44 Triumphs and MGs, the Bob Tullius-run team out of Falls Church, Virginia.            They were gleaming white with green trim, and everything about them was as clean as a brand-new enameled stove. Yes, if you spilled something, you really could eat off them. (Better not, though.) The cockpits and engine compartments were meticulously laid out, everything in its place. No duct tape, empty bolt holes or old carpet glue stuck to the footwell. Joe Huffaker&amp;#039;s jet black Leyland cars and Kas Kastner&amp;#039;s Triumphs from the West Coast were similarly inspirational, but the Group 44 cars stand out more vividly in my memory, perhaps because they were white and you could see all their mechanical parts in full contrast.   When I bought my first race car, an H-Production Sprite, in 1973, I was relieved to see the previous owner had already painted the interior in white epoxy enamel, so I didn&amp;#039;t have to. My fellow Sprite racer Wayne Chapman, who helped me get my own car ready to race, had built himself an Arctic White car that was almost a replica of a Group 44 team car. Done in bulletproof Imron paint, it was clean and simple as an eggshell with a motor in it.   To this day, I still see people in vintage racing (including me), who emulate the look of those cars. Same with the black Huffaker Engineering team cars. When I bought my own vintage Formula Ford last year, the owner also had a black MG Midget, and both cars looked as if they&amp;#039;d rolled right off a Huffaker team trailer.   So why did I bother re-restoring my car? Well, one of my private (some would say dangerously obsessive) reasons\u2014other than fixing a slightly bent chassis tube\u2014was that I wanted the chassis powder-coated in light gray instead of black. Why? Because light gray shows the dirt better, and is almost like its own source of light under the bodywork. If something&amp;#039;s leaking oil or brake fluid, you can see it. And if there&amp;#039;s a crack forming on the frame, you can see that, too. All of us have some strategy for dealing with the chaos of the world, and this is mine. However pathetic it may be.   So I started with a clean gray frame last spring, and\u2014following Pat&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;half as many parts&amp;quot; dictum\u2014spent about a month of 14-hour days putting it together. I made a real effort to avoid clutter, bundling wires and grouping hoses and lines so they followed some kind of relaxed and natural flow. And this isn&amp;#039;t always easy on a formula car, where a lot of stuff is packed into a fairly slim envelope.   Somehow, you have to route the following items down the sides of the driver&amp;#039;s compartment: Brake and clutch lines, throttle cable, emergency battery switch cable, articulated gearshift rod, fire suppression system pipes, oil pressure line, oil and water temp lines, and wires to the starter motor, coil and rain light. And, once you get to the engine compartment, all bets are off: fuel lines, oil hoses, coolant lines, etc.   But, slowly and painstakingly, they all went back on the car and the thing got finished in time for the Hawk vintage weekend at Road America. After a few shakedown adjustments, everything worked, the car ran well and I had a great time. And I think it looks good. Maybe not Group 44 perfect, but not bad.   So. Does the Crossle now appear to have half as many parts?   Well, it does to me, but then I&amp;#039;m almost blind in my left eye at the moment. I&amp;#039;m scheduled for cataract surgery tomorrow, which is Monday morning. I&amp;#039;ll let you know on Tuesday how the car turned out. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a18409/sanitation-and-the-racing-car/>