TARP Blog

Bill got his heavily-modified Renault Dauphine to the race on Saturday; unfortunately, it never left the trailer. Seems he blew out his right-side custom half-shaft earlier in the week on its maiden voyage and couldn’t get it back together for the race. The car was incredible in every way. One example: it’s painted in 5 gallons of donated runway paint. Nearly all that’s left of the original car is the body shell, as the rest of it was rusted away. Apparently the floorpans dissolved into a pile of rust when they tried to start cleaning the car out in prep for caging it. Bill is resolved to getting it on the track for the Yee-Haw It’s Texas race at MSR-Houston in September and I hope that he makes it.

The car is carrying a Mercury Sable motor and transaxle. In the back seat. The periscope (shown below) is the cold air intake — thus the Yellow Submarine title of the car. The fender flares are from Tractor Supply — one each for the rear and one split down the middle and shared on the front. These photos really don’t do the car justice, as it’s totally, completely awesome.  I think it’s safe to say that everyone who saw this car (including Jay and Nick, who have to be about as jaded as any two guys on the planet at this point to the novelty of crazy swaps) found the Dauphine to be completely and totally over the top. It makes me want to buy a total crapbucket and build a project from it. However, as I’d also like to remain married, I’m sticking with the MR2 for the time being. Ok, now on with the photos (click on each photo for a larger version):

Dauphine on the trailer. It’s low enough that the rock guard on the front is completely necessary:

(jump for more photos of this spectacular ride)

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Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were Author: Pat

Yours truly was driving the TARP Clown Car for the start of the race on Day 1 of North Dallas Hooptie. When the race went green flag, we were on the back part of the course. Coming into Turn 11 — the last turn on the course, also a double-apex hairpin) I was gaining ground on the pack in front of me when a black car in front of me lunched its engine. Full boom! Bottom end exploded, huge holes in the block. I saw the accessory belt depart the car and an oil mist go up and immediately thought to myself, “self, this does not end well.” And it didn’t, as you can see from the video below. Keep an eye on the rear-view camera, that’s me spinning off into the infield Spy Hunter-style thanks to the oil slick laid down by the car that has the video:

Unfortunately, our onboard camera got knocked to full-zoom for my first run, so we don’t have video from our camera for this incident. After I discovered that error, our camera went great for the rest of the race. I need to compile a highlights video at some point…

Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were, Videos Author: Pat

Wow, what a day. I’m pretty tired and need to get some sleep rather than blogging, but I want to at least get down some thoughts that I can come back and fill in later this week.

We had a great day today, and yesterday too. The guys at Jalopnik liked our car enough to feature it in their first post about the North Dallas Hooptie race. I’ve got a bunch of photos that I need to edit, but here’s one good one from Jalopnik:

All the credit for the car decoration goes to Rachel. A couple of weeks ago I came into the house and asked her if she could come up with some good theme ideas, and boy did she ever. It looks tons better than I ever would have thought. Everybody who sees the car loves it!

We got out on the track for quite awhile today, and had some mishaps too. I’m going to just hit some bullet points to fill in details about later:

• First green lap, Integra lunches its engine right in front of me. His accessory belt goes flying while his car barfed oil all over the track, my windshield and car, and sent me spinning into the infield. Fortunately, nobody hurt and I didn’t even get black flagged.
• I spun it and got a black flag, Matt spun it and got two black flags, and Erik missed a shift, got rear-ended (very lightly) and just missed a black flag.  So we parked it early since 4 black flags in 1 day means you’re done for the weekend. We get to start clean on Sunday
• We did an alignment on the car in the garage for about an hour on Saturday. Not too hard to do, I should write it up as an Instructable. After that, it handled much better. Matt still spun it though

Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were, Race Analysis

The Top 51 Lemons of the Detroit Irony 24 Hours of Lemons feature on Jalopnik this weekend opens with this scintillating photo of TARP North’s Topless Asset MR2 leading the pack around a turn:

I’m no expert on the firesuit/helmet combos of the drivers up there, but I’m speculating that’s PK. I know that Stevo and Doug both have red suits, and I remember that PK’s has some white on it. I think that Big Pete’s suit is all black, but I could be wrong about that. Pretty cool to have the lead photo on the Jalopnik, though. Here’s another action photo of the Topless Asset in action, I think this is PK too:

That car really does just get better looking every time I see it. I especially like the non-matching wheels, that’s just strong, Lemon-y goodness right there.

Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were Author: Pat

Our Northern Division team competed at the American Irony Detroit-ish LeMons race last weekend and had a marvelous and successful time. Here’s a photo of what the car looked like as it was going out on the track on Saturday:

(click the photo for a bigger version)

And here’s one of Doug on the track:

They rebuilt the motor that we blew up (and by we I mean me) at Nelson Ledges last fall. Apparently Stevo got a penalty on Sunday (he claims it was the other guy’s fault, LOL) and the judges made him dress up in drag, including 3″ stilettos, and engage in a footrace versus the other driver to see who got to go out on track and who had to serve the penalty. The other guy was in flats and won, but I’m surprised after the Pinewood Derby at Infineon that Stevo didn’t think of just knocking him over and then cruising to the win. Here’s a cellphone photo that one of the guys took of Mark in his Sunday best, reclining on the hood of the car:

Stevo wrote the following report and sent it out via email last night, and I’m republishing it in its entirety below, without his permission. That’s what he gets for taunting me about not sending me the swirl pot. I haven’t read it all the way through, so I hope that it’s not too blue:

American Irony is done.  We placed 19th, but more importantly, we finished a race and learned a lot of valuable lessons.   Little things like transponder placement and big things like the new fender rule. The new motor ran flawlessly.  The oil cooling, swirlpot-ing, dethermostating cooling combination is POTENT.  A huge big thanks to Bender and Stick Figure Racing.  Murl, I don’t hardly want to give that can up.  I’ll ask Big Pete if he wants to copy it before we send or if we can wait to get it back.  At the least I’ll draw a plan of it.  Our short race summary:  the car was fabulous, black flag disease owned us.  I myself racked up 2.  I’ll say I deserved them at Infineon.  I cooked into a chicane x2 and got my just desserts. Gingerman was me driving good clean stints and getting hit by cars trying dumb passes.

Wow, what fun.  Big Pete said he reached to shift gears driving into work this morning.  Little Pete says he’s feeling it today where the car beat up on him all over.  My shifting arm is a bit sore from the seat support on that side.  I can’t complain though.  The seat is comfy for this frame as long as the belts are good’n'tight.  Wow, I picked some sucky restaurant food up there.  Mega thanks to Dusty for riding up and supporting the team in a whole lot of different ways on the weekend.

Ginger Man rocked.  Not bumpy as advertised.  Did I have that mixed up with Gratten?  Some complained of the surface nuking their tires. We had no tire or brake issues. Still need to look over the brakes postrace.  It looks like we used up most of that set that is on the car.  We could go back there.

MyLaps has the race data but we can’t log in and we don’t have our transponder number.  Even if we get the # it may be hard to log in with it depending on its status.  I have an email in with Nick at Lemons and a post on the forum trying to get some help.

I haven’t had enough time to go thru films yet.  Day one there is just one film about 25 minutes long.  It is yellow pace laps, then 4 jackasses trying to move a transponder around on the car.  Right at the end Pete is driving his fisrt green lap and the video stops at turn 7.  Thanks to PK hooking up some juice for us, we have most of day 2.  Dusty, Doug and I watched some of Big Pete’s runs from day 2 over dinner on the way home.  Big Pete is superbly competent at many things.  Driving tops that list.  I have watched my vid. Unfortunately stops before I get pegged in turn 10 by the #11 car, it may very well be JUST before and the camera shuts down from the knock.  Anyway, you wouldn’t be able to see a shot from behind given the current camera position which brings me to another idea.

If you think of ideas to do things differently next go, let me know. Try to jot them down now while its fresh.  A few of mine:  More mirrors.  A camera bracket that runs way out back behind the spoiler at the driver’s eye level.  We should get a wider view forward, a look at the steering wheel, tach,  AND rearview if we find the sweet spot. Sweet Jesus, you have no idea what I plan to write on the back of the car for the next race.  Also, we need a new theme idea.  Bonus points if it includes a lot of Kubota Orange rattle can.

Ok, I gotta go to bed and do more work and Dad stuff tomorrow.  The whole set of films is 8.5GBish, LMK if you want the whole set.  How hard is it to host ginormous files for free on the internets?  Or if you are local go buy a keychain flash drive if you don’t already have one.  I’ll try to edit things down but it will be SEVERAL days for that finished product.  That will prolly hit YouTube for your ease of consumption.

Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were, Race Analysis Author: Pat

There are not too many good shots of me in the car at Infineon, but here’s one. This is the DeathMobile going through Turn 2 on Saturday, March 6. Just before our precious victory in the Traditionally Powered Division of the Pinewood Deby

Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were Author: Pat

Got back yesterday from the Sears Pointless trip at Infineon. In a word, it was awesome. I don’t have videos or photos of the car in action (yet), but should have some soon. There are lots of stories to tell but I’m still too worn out to document them. Here’s a picture of the team as we went through tech in our Animal House costumes. The judges loved our theme and said that although several other teams had done it before, nobody had done it as well as we did and nobody had ever dressed in costume for it before, either.

(L-to-R) Judy as Mrs. Dean (Marion) Wormer; Paul as D-Day; yours truly as Bluto (popping out of the turret with sword in hand); Bill as (?), and Stevo as Stork. Stevo’s drum major baton is topped with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch; the theme for this car at its last race was a Holy Grail theme, so this was keeping some continuity.

We ran all day on Saturday and almost all day on Sunday. By the end of the day on Sunday, we’d picked up 7 black flags, all but two for non-contact driver errors. Stevo got one for contact when he was gently punted from behind (!) early on Sunday, and then our last black flag of the weekend was for minor contact, although the driver claimed to not have made any and we couldn’t find any new paint scratches. I got a solid body check to the entire driver’s side from the Krider Racing team late on Sunday but didn’t get flagged for it; I’m waiting to see video before I proudly claim it was all their fault.

Although we had a couple of very minor mechanical issues during the weekend (right rear brake was sticking necessitating a caliper and pad change, small coolant issues, etc.), nothing major crept up and we spent most of the time out on the track. Other than the 1-hour penalty when Stevo and Paul combined for 3 black flags in 15 minutes mid-day on Sunday. Paul and Bill and their crew in Salt Lake City did a great job getting the car ready to race this weekend and they should be (and are hereby) soundly commended for their car prep. It was great to go a whole race without major failure. This is what we need to replicate!

The track was awesome and the racing was a lot of fun but extremely crazy toward the end of the day on Sunday. Way too many cars making way too many bad choices. Except for us. When it was all said and done, we ended up in 89th place.

Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were Author: Pat

Over the weekend, Judge Murilee wrote a post for Jalopnik chronicling the penalties of the Yee-Haw It’s Texas LeMons. Of course, our haiku penalty made the photo-essay! For those who don’t know, when our second driver looped the car (this was before the first engine blew up), we got this penalty. Stevo and I had to compose a haiku poem (fortunately, we were already familiar with the form — in fact, at one point we’d contemplated doing the entire TARP North application for Nelson Ledges in haiku), then paint it on the back of the car. We wrote the draft out on the roof of the car to make it easier to paint rather than trying to compose on the fly. Check it out:

It’s kind of hard to make out, but here’s what it says:

Car loops many times/Driver error always, why?/We are dumbasses.

The funniest part of it was that after we had it painted on, Judge Jonny came by to check our work and said that the last line didn’t have 5 syllables, until we pointed out that “dumbasses” is 3 syllables. Then he slunk away and let us get back on track.

Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were Author: Pat

So here are some photos of the carnage that is the dead smallport motor. Based on these photos and some gripping narrative from yours truly, Senor Lamm agreed to give us a $75 residual value for the next race. So at least we can go out and get a motor for the car now. Enjoy the photos, most of them are clickable for larger size views:

That’s Stevo standing in the engine bay after they’d dropped the smallport motor out of the car on Saturday afternoon. Dad and I were well on the way to Fort Worth at this point. More after the jump:

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Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were Author: Pat

Here it is, in all its glory, the 2009 Yee-Haw It’s Texas LeMons Heroic Fix Trophy:

Misty Watercolored Memories of the Way We Were Author: Pat