[ED: While working the penalty Box at LeMons, Team Sunday Funday managed to rack up enough infractions to incur the wrath of the Hooniverse Slave Labor Penalty, writing this post]
“THAT WOULD BE AWESOME!”
It was a drunken New Year’s Eve that spawned our horrible decision. 1 a.m. talk of Canon Ball Run, rental car rallying and the like got us inevitably to 24 Hours of LeMons.
“I’ve wanted to do that for years!”
It was the beginning of the end.
I must have inherited it from my dad – the love of junk and cars and junk cars – because I can’t remember a time when our garage wasn’t full of either Citroen DS’s, 2CV’s, or Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40’s. Not to mention the Volvos and Saabs that came and went.
But that was years ago. Today on the other hand we’ve had 3 black flags in nearly as many hours. How’d we get here?
The car we found to run was a bargain basement deal from another LeMon’s team. Dustin from Sub Par Motorsports had an extra 1988 Honda CRX that he was going to make as a second car to his older CRX. But, things being as they are he’d found other projects. Lucky for us. The car was stripped of it’s interior already, had a great motor swap done and just needed a bunch of safety gear.
“Lucky” for me, one of the guys who drunkenly raised his hand to race as well as put the car together works in a materials inspection company full of welding gear, grinders, and all the tools we’d need to make this happen. He’s also a bit more ambitious with his welding prowess than he is patient for large projects. But, after arranging with Evil Genius to fabricate – but not install – our roll cage we set out for home to put it all together.
As the time ticked by and little things started getting done we tried to source a lift so we could easily remove the gas tank to weld in one of the roll cage plates. More time ticked by as we kept looking for a lift. And it ticked, and ticked and ticked. 2 months later we were staring the Sears Pointless race day in the face and almost no closer to having a race-able car than we were when we bought it.
Finally, with 2 weeks to go, the tank was removed and welding began. And then stopped. 1 hour into the build we realized the horrible mistake we’d made in thinking we could possible do the cage ourselves. A call to Evil Genius was once again made, and John came through once again to build us the super high and tight cage we never could have.
That left us with 1 week to install everything else: seat, tank, belts, radios, battery box, foam, this, that, everything!
What that didn’t leave time for was looking at anything related to the engine or suspension.
“It runs, it rolls, we’ll figure anything else out once we’re there and pass tech.”
Wrong.
Apparently that approach gets you a blog post on Hooniverse.com. My dad will be so proud.
–Aaron, Team Sunday Funday
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