Race advice from the LeMons mail list, courtesy of “fishdood1234″. Read at your own risk:
“Me and a few friends wrote this “book” back in 2004 when we started racing off-road trucks and most of it applies to Lemons cars also so I thought I would post it here for everyone to see.
It is 100% true and it all happened over our years of racing….
Well, I’m excited as he-double-hockey-sticks to get going this weekend. Here’s the plan, Stan:
The bender and notcher are scheduled for delivery to Jesse’s house today. He was planning to go out to the shop yesterday to get some setup done for where he wants to mount the bender to the floor and where he wants to set up the floor drill press that will run the notcher. Don’t know if he made it out there or not.
Once the gear is delivered, Jesse is going to phone me and I’m going to drive out to the shop to meet him there and help him get the new gear set up so that we’ll be ready to work come Saturday morning. I might tinker around on the car some, too. Or maybe just put the seat in it and make racing sounds like the dad in Breaking Away. I’m going to rack out at the shop overnight tonight. Hopefully the sound of my snoring will keep the coyotes at bay.
Tomorrow will dawn bright and beautiful and we will get the roll cage done! As well as pretty much everything else on the list that’s not done already (except for the coolant flush/fill) that would prevent us from running the car on the track on the 15th.
BTW, I made up a big pot of Texas Red that’s sitting in the fridge right now. I’m going to bring that out for us for lunch on Saturday. After it sits in the Crock Pot for a few hours it’ll be good to go.
Jesse called on the phone earlier today and informed me that he and Grayson have worked it out so that we will have a new tube bender at the shop on Saturday. This is what we in the industry call very good news! Jesse also said that while they were at it they picked up a specialized fishmouth rig. This is not used to catch bluegill in the tank outside the shop, but rather works to cut the ends of the tubes where they meet. I didn’t get all the details about manufacturers, etc., as I was so relieved to hear the news that everything will be delivered by Friday. Heck, if Jesse would let me I would go out there on Friday to help get the new equipment setup and just sleep in the shop overnight so that we’re not working on tool setup on Saturday but rather can jump right on getting the cage done.
In other news, I re-ordered the seat mounting hardware today; it’s being shipped from someplace in Oklahoma so it’s a lock to be in my grubby hands before I go out to the shop on Friday/Saturday.
Not to get too optimistic or anything, but we could have this thing running and on wheels by Saturday night…
The good people at Motorsport Ranch–just up the street from Jesse’s place–have agreed to give us track time and driving instruction gratis.
The details: 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 15th.
We’ll need to bring the MR2 and another car with a stick shift to take out on the track. Why two cars? We’ll need two vehicles to accommodate all of the drivers.
Side note: Jack Pharr, the guy who runs Motorsports Ranch, will be one of our instructors. And he just might be competing against us in Houston. Intrigue!
This also means we really have to get cracking on the car.
We got a lot done on the car yesterday, despite a minor setback on our major goal. I don’t really see this as a good news/bad news post because the setback was just that and not really bad news, per se. But I’m going to start with the “good news” anyway. For a full view of what’s done and what needs to be done, team members can log onto our Google Docs spreadsheet and take a look.
I got a little later start than anticipated yesterday owing to the slow kick-in of the coffee. Yeah, I’ll blame the coffee. But I’d failed to load up the truck on Friday night, so I had to do it in the morning before leaving. After packing my tools, warm jacket, work boots, etc., I decided to go ahead and throw the 6 new tires, 4 race wheels and 4 race wheels in the back of the truck too. That put me late over to Brad’s house, which led to a phone call from him advising me to “get the lead out.” The Missus took that phone call and relayed it to me as I was loading the wheels and tires into the truck. It occurs to me now that perhaps Brad actually said “get the Led out” because he wanted me to get to work on squeezing this LeMon car. Although if our MR2 drips juice down my leg, I’ll be really, really concerned. I sure hope our blog audience is familiar with that Led Zeppelin song or else I’m just going to seem to be really out there.
Success!
One of my jobs was to find a sponsor for those stickers so our car will look like a TARP NASCAR. Today, Steve Brom of Doozywraps agreed to help us out. (Hat tip to Pat for pointing me in Doozywraps’ direction from the get-go.)
Specifically, I asked for two types of stickers:
1) Ones of logos of bailout companies–namely, Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, PNC Financial Services Group, U.S. Bancorp, GMAC Financial Services, Chrysler, Capital One Financial, American Express, and Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
2) Ones of the car’s number. In this case, that could be $700 Billion or $700,000,000,000. That, I think, adds up to $700 billion. Those stickers would go on the doors and the roof.
We should be able to get these by mid-February.
Here’s the team update from last Saturday. Progress on the car has really slowed due to moving it down to Jesse’s shop. The upside is that they have all the welding stuff down there plus kick-a$$ air tools and a lot of space so several of us can be working on the car at the same time. So what did we do? You can see the photos and read more scintillating text after the jump:
We got a lot done on the car this week without actually working on, you know, the car. Here’s a brief rundown:
Brad, Jesse, and I are meeting at Jesse’s shop tomorrow around 10:00 for a workday. On the agenda are to fabricate and install the perches, bend the conduit steel to form the roll cage template, work on rewiring the dash electronics, maybe route some brake cooling tubes made from air dryer duct, finish installing the Cherry Bomb exhaust, drain, flush, & refill the cooling system, do an oil job, and drain & refill the transmission (if we can get the bolts off, which is probably a 50-50 proposition at best). And I really, really want to learn to use the plasma cutter, which would be perfect for fabricating the perches. Must watch more YouTube video between now and then.
In today’s edition of the LeMons Video Documentary Series, we see the footage that the Group of Foolz put together starring their e30 at the Thunderhill race. As you can see, there is plenty of foolery for the entire family! That course does look like it would be fun to drive, what with the elevation changes and all. MSR Houston looks like it’s about as flat as a schoolgirl. Cue the video:
Advice from Other Teams, Driving Tips, Knowing Is Half of the Battle!, Videos
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