Home of the Tobacco Advocacy Racing Program (f/k/a Toxic Asset Racing Program)! Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale about the misfit owners of a derelict Toyota MR2 and their mostly ill-informed attempts to un-derelict the car in an almost certainly futile attempt to enter it into an endurance race.
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.
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.
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:
Our team was awarded the Heroic Fix Trophy at Yee-Haw It’s Texas LeMons 2009 last weekend at MSR-Houston. It was a team effort, but it was really more than that. I suspect that Hillary Clinton will never have a book ghostwritten about the experience, but if she did, it could be called “It Takes A Village to Successfully Swap Motors on an MR2 in Less Than 6 Hours.” So I want to take a minute to thank everyone who helped us out.
For those of you who don’t know the story, here’s the brief version. On Friday during Break and Tune, we determined that we were getting compression of ~170psi on cylinders 1, 2, and 4, but only 25 on cylinder 3. We were creating excessive crankcase pressure, leading to a lot of oil mist coming out of the intake valve cover. We knew that if we didn’t do something, the oil smoke from the car would get us black flagged over and over again on Saturday, an outcome we wanted to avoid. So we decided to pull the spark plug and injector control wire and run on 3 cylinders for as long as we could. It didn’t last long like that (roughly 8 laps total over 3 drivers) before we developed an obnoxious rod knock. Pulling the spark plugs revealed about a 1/16 clearance on our rod bearings on the 1 & 4 cylinders; when we pulled the bottom end, the rod bearings on both ends were flat and burned, the crankshaft scored, and the motor was done. Turns out the #3 cylinder had a really nasty hole in it. See dramatic photo after the break:
Thanks to the ever sainted Mrs. Mulry, I spent the better part of the weekend under the TARP Special and the ‘87 out in the driveway trying to figure out how and why the inboard joint tulip went bye-bye during the race. That’s the part of the car that disappeared during Dave’s drive on Sunday morning.
After fooling around with the remaining functional half shafts on the other two cars, it became abundantly clear that the joint tulip failure wasn’t caused by Dave’s getting run over by that 280z. The reason that the inboard joint disappeared is most likely due to a crappy bolt-up by the prior owner when he “fixed” the transmission oil seal leak. We know that he’d done a bunch of work on that side, probably even going so far as to at least attempt to drop the transmission and differential from the car. We know that because he did a crappy job bolting the transmission back up to the rest of the car, including the engine mount on the left side of the car, among other critical failures.
It never occured to me that he might have failed to bolt in the inboard joint to spec, and it’s not like it’s hard to do, either. My speculation at this point is that he didn’t wrench the bolts hard enough to get the heads to seat (they’re splined, so you do neeed to apply some force to get them to seat properly). And if that’s the case, then it was just a failure waiting to happen. Which it did.
In other TARP-related news, I just got the post-race valuation back from Chief Perp Jay Lamm. I think he must have just finished off his morning crack pipe smoking, as he valued the car at $400. I guess we’ll have to duct tape it back together for the next race to stay under the $500 cap.
Thanks to uber-dedicated crew member Stevo, the first highlights videos of our first LeMons race are up and on YouTube. He broke it up into three parts; the first one is embedded below, but here are links to videos two and three. Enjoy!
Our photographer, Erin Trieb, just uploaded about 500 photos she took of us to her website; we’ll use a few of them in the article. Here’s how to see them:
1) Go to www.erintrieb.com.
2) Click on Private Galleries.
3) Enter Spirit for the login and Spirit for the password.
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