Remember the Valkyrie?

The mid-engine V-8 kit-car Don McKee built and drove 20 years ago. It looked something like this:



That’s not a picture of his car. I don’t have any pictures from then. He drove his car hard on Autocross courses and a road course outside Aspen. Hard enough that the fiberglass rear-end caught on fire once from the heat. It has fallen into disrepair in the years since and hasn’t left the garage. Now it looks like this:



It hasn’t been forgotten, though. There is a new project underway. A Lincoln Mark VIII motor mounted to a custom racing transaxle, being prepped for installation.

Don is working on the tuned exhaust. The effort is to match the length and turns of each tube so each cylinder breathes the same as the others.



The orange tubes shown here are like Leggos.

They’re a bunch of interchangeable plastic pieces. Instead of trial and error, welding and discarding many different tubes until you get it right, you can play with plastic pieces, matching up lengths and radii, until it all works, then assemble and weld your own tubes just once.

That’s life at the McKees.