[JML68]

Ah the clutch saga, such fond memories! The guys with the external slave cylinders want clutch cables and the ones with the cables want slave cylinders!

The correct way to do it is a traditional racing slave cylinder in the bellhousing operating directly on the pressure plate. This requires more effort to set it up correctly and will only work reliably with quality components like Tilton or Quartermaster (the GTS program tried if for a while but didn't use the Tilton or Quartermaster slave cylinder and consequently had reliability issues). The down side is that if you don't get it set up right, you get to pull the transmission out and do it over. This arrangement is on the Historic Stock Cars that I prepare during my non-Panoz work, and are quite reliable.

The school converted most of their cars over to a conventional cable arragnement to get rid of the external slave cylinder. Unfortunately they didn't do any engineering and just cobbled up a solution that yielded an extremely high pedal effort, was prone to breaking cables, and looked "beautiful" as it rusts away (most didn't even get a coat of Krylon!) on the firewall.

When we built the cars for the Marlboro Penske Racing Experience, (the 10 actual cars, not the 4-5 GT-RA's they borrowed and painted up like their other cars) we worked out a proper cable arrangement that had a nice feel to it, looked like it was supposed to be there, and worked reliably. Unfortunately, it was not cheap so it has never found its way onto anything else. There's not enough demand to productionize the solution right now, unless we run out of other tasks.

I may have a solution for the external slave cylinders but I need to test it first. I've installed it on my father-in-laws GT-RA which we'll run at a driver's school/Regional race in Memphis in two weeks. It has so far survived the winter without puking it's fluid on the floor from sitting, so I'm cautiously optimistic. It will also be a very economical update if it works so I'll update everyone when I have some data to support it.