OK here is what I know that works.
Chuck runs the 1.5 with CIS type injection. We feel that the weight advantage is worth the small displacement penalty.
Getting to weight however is NOT easy. Orange 54 runs very light carbon fiber hood, fenders, quarters, hatch, air dam, splitter. Also all lexan, significantly lightened doors, and lots of attention to detail finding the lightest components for each and every area of the car - no stone is unturned. As an aside, I talked to Rob over the weekend, and he would be willing to make more fender sets for those interested - price $2k.
Make sure that the gearing is optimum for the track you are at that weekend - get creative if you need to (which you must if sticking with a VW trans).
The small valves and small throttle bodies present a challenge with this motor. The way to make power on a small motor is to spin it fast, and we do, but you must have top notch head work to make this work. Jose at
www.porttuning.com did all of the headwork for Chuck's car, and I beleive offers a 1.5/1.6 GP VW head now. It is not an off the shelf delivery - there is some waiting involved. Even with all the nice parts in the world, you have to make them work right. This car has probably spent as much or more time on a dyno as on the track.
Take advantage of the allowances in the rules to get the suspension to work for you in an effort to get the suspension working right and making tire wear a non-issue.
There are 4 solid years of dedicated development in that car (along with on winter of reconstrutive surgury to the RF) to get it where it sits now. I definitely think that someone else can do this, but just want to warn you that it can be a long, slow, frustrating process.
Even at that, many beleive that the car only won due to weather, and they might be right. Hopefully, we can find out with good Topeka weather in October, or get an idea running against Ken Bs fast 510 at the June Sprints this month.
On the cost front - IMO a fully developed LP car is very close to the cost of a fully developed full prep GP car. You still have lots of motor machine work to do, still have lots of bodywork to do, still have lots of dyno development time to invest, still have lots of suspension development time to invest. The numbers quoted above are only possible if you can do damn near everything yourself, and even then are tight. Still, I think Chuck has invested a fraction of what some think you have to spend for a competitive Prod car simply because of the skillset that he and the team as a whole already have - machining, composites, electronics, engineering, fabrication. But then again we don't count our time when we add things up....
As it sits now, I was considering a jump to FP in my Golf down the road, simply because the Golf is not fairly classed as an LP GP. If it moved to LP HP I may reconsider. Due to the current state of Production in general, I will keep running in IT for the moment and see where the chips fall.
