A slight detour

Progress may be pretty slow in the next couple of months as I divert my attention to a pressing automotive matter...competing in the prestigious 24 Hours of LeMons!

My days of cooking for the team and wearing the mechanics coveralls are over! I'm driving baby! This will be my first experience driving in anger, so I figure it's best spent going wheel-to-wheel in a crapcan Merkur.

Unfortunately, it's also a pretty big drain on both time and automotive hobby funds, so I'm temporarily slowing progress on the build to compete. I hope I don't have to stop completely, but certainly this will delay the start of frame building a bit.

P.S. - Can you tell I'm stoked about my helmet and firesuit?

LeMons South 2008

If you're wondering why I've been so quiet lately, it's been because I've been a little distracted. After much waiting, I was elated to hear that the 24 Hours of LeMons was coming to the South! From this pivotal event, Team Turbo Schnitzel was born!

We scoured Craigslist.org for available cars, and decided (somewhat brazenly) to compete with a Merkur XR4ti. The car was someone else's project car, which helped us learn a valuable LeMons lesson: NEVER BUY SOMEONE'S PROJECT.

We spent the better part of three months trying to figure out all the different hacks this guy did to make his Merkur "run better". In the end even when we returned the car to stock it still had all kinds of issues. But I guess that's the point.

Here's the team. I'm third from the left, but you knew that already. I didn't do any driving this year, but functioned as support crew and cook for our traveling band of racers. Next year, I'm going racing.

I've been following Jalopnik's coverage of the 24 Hours of LeMons since the first race in California two years ago. Needless to say I'm a big fan. When I arrived at the race, I was completely shocked to find out that two of Jalopnik's finest were judging the race. As a hack blogger and car nut, I took the opportunity to hang with guys who were living the dream. As it was, they ended up spending quite a bit of time in our paddock, and were both really cool individuals. It was in the middle of Jonny's story about how he got to drive a Seven through the hills of Southern California that I realized his job was probably much cooler than mine.

Alas, the race wasn't all schmoozing with faux-celebrities and glorious speed. About two hours into the race we suffered a blown head gasket. That knocked us out for most of Saturday. Sunday saw us running strong until the engine started to overheat, the exhaust started to come off and until we started to lose a wheel bearing (which made the brake fluid boil, thus taking out our brakes). I guess you get what you pay for.

In the end our 63rd place didn't lessen our enthusiasm for the event. Neither did our untimely end a scant five minutes before the checker flew. No, we left South Carolina determined to come back next year with the old #44, and possibly even a "new" #45.

Fahrt Schnell!

P.S. - Here's my photo gallery on Flickr
P.P.S. - Fahrt Schnell means "Drive Fast" in our butchered German

2008 12 Hours of Sebring

Last weekend I made my first trip to see the ALMS 12 hours of Sebring. What a blast! The racing was excellent and both the starting grid and the infield were full of awesome cars.

I didn't realize that it was spring break, and we made the mistake of camping in the middle of 20,000 drunken college students. That doesn't make for good sleeping. The facilites at Sebring are also atrocious, so I think the next time I go to the race it will be in an RV.

Here's a GT2-class Corvette heading out in the morning for its recon laps. While the full-power GT1 cars are neat, GT2 is where it's at. There is so much diversity in the lower class this year and it makes for pretty awesome racing, even if some of the newer cars are moving chicanes.

The biggest reason I wanted to go to this race was to catch the only North American appearance for Peugeot's LeMans diesels. Even though they dropped out early, they're still stunning cars and a lot of fun to watch.

I've posted the best of my pictures on my Flickr site. Here's a slideshow:

2007 Petit Le Mans

This last weekend I traveled up to Road Atlanta to catch the 2007 Petit Le Mans endurance race. What an experience!

The ALMS is my favorite racing series. The cars are very cool (and totally gorgeous), the racing is always tight and the venues are some of the best in the country. I'm fortunate that I live a scant hour from this marque venue.

From a locost perspective, none of the fabulous machines on display are anywhere near my future two-seater. There's nothing locost about them! Still, it's pretty cool to see what hardware should look like for a serious racing car.

This event also just gets me really pumped up for designing and building my own car. There was so much awesome engineering on display. That, and there were a lot of louvers, winglets and cool details.

What I need is access to carbon fiber bits for my car. When the top teams use CF to make brackets and fairings for antennae, you know that their composites budget is pretty big.

On a more casual note, races like this one are a blast to photo. There's so much to see, it's like your camera can't possibly take a bad picture. I took tons, and they're up on my Flickr site.