I went to Gainesville, Florida from my home near Washington, DC this past weekend to race a car that my friends and I built. At the end of the event, we finished 10th overall out of 62 cars and first in class, as well as having spent less money than our competitors. As a point of comparison, the Ferrari Formula 1 team’s annual budget is estimated at around $400 M per season, or roughly $23.5 M per race. We spent a grand total of $963.93 building our car and getting it ready to run like the wind (unless it broke). However, we knew we were not facing Michael Schumacher and the Ferrari F1 guys in Gainesville.
As with any enterprise, the keys to successful racing come back to the three Ps: Planning and Preparation equals Performance. Remarkably, we managed to employ the three Ps of our own for some degree of success: Procrastination, then Panic and Paroxysms.
Lest you think that we did no Planning and Preparation over the 16-month lead time we had for the race, I feel compelled to point out that Plan A took about a year’s worth of time and preparation before it was discarded due to resource constraints (that is, Significant Other People wanted us doing Other Things), while Plan B was discarded after a month due to it being about as realistic as an episode of “24” and would have required both Jack Bauer and Angus MacGyver to build in the 3 months we had left before the race.
So, the first step for our More Realistic and Intelligent Plan P involved acquiring the best possible platform for our race car. This turned out to be a dented, rusting Dodge that had stopped running at some point during the first Clinton Administration and was rolled to the far side of a barn to become a sort of above-ground coral reef for rural fauna.
We brought Plan P back to the house, rolled it into the garage, and shut the door. And open it back up immediately to roll it into the yard as plagues of wasps, ants, and mice begin streaming from the car like rats off of a sinking ship.
Once the pest control situation was in hand, we brought it back into the garage and disassembled what was left of the car. We were immediately encouraged by what we found. A lighter car is a faster car, and natural weathering and metal oxidation processes had been working on our racer to reduce its mass significantly. Once we scraped it all off and swept it up from the floor, we found we’d reduced the chassis’ weight by about 18 pounds (not counting what was in our noses and lungs), all of it through environmentally friendly natural means. I cannot tell you how happy I was at this discovery.
Once we had achieved maximum entropy in the process – that is, the mechanical components scattered in thousands of pieces on the garage floor, in buckets, on shelves, other cars in the garage, etc. – we cleaned and painted everything we could, and set about dechaosizing it (look for “dechaosizing” at your next Bush Administration presser, right next to “onboarding”, “outboarding”, and “waterboarding”).
The dechaosization process went well, and with 2 weeks left before the race we were ready to fire it up for the first time. It started with a few seconds of cranking, and once we set the initial timing, it idled reasonably well on 3 of the 4 cylinders. While MeatLoaf might not think that was bad, we weren’t ready to give up on 25% of our engine power. A quick compression check revealed that the exhaust valve on #2 cylinder was hanging open, revealing itself as we turned the engine over by hand with an audible wheezing sound like Karl Rove reading poll results. Fortunately, a cheap parts car in the back of the garage had a similar cylinder head, so we swapped it in. To give you some appreciation of the work involved, dear reader, the previous 21-word sentence was actually a 6+ hour process. This is what racers mean by “thrash”.
Once everything was bolted back together, it fired right up, but when we tried to rev the engine, it stumbled and stalled like John Kerry trying to recite a bit of Chris Rock standup material, or Presidente Arbusto trying to read “Fox in Socks” aloud.
That’s right, kids – the racer’s nightmare – intermittent electrical problems.
So, we battled the electrical dragons, armed only with test lights and prehistoric multimeters. Back and forth the conflict raged. Every time, we found a poor connection or a break in a sensor lead and soldered a new wire in, some other problem cropped up; an ignition miss at idle, the tachometer stopped working. Day turned into night into day in a blur of frayed wires and nerves. There was also this bucket of inadvertent weight reduction; nuts, bolts, brackets, and covers that were forgotten or deemed to be off of the critical path of getting the car running. Things we thought we’d get back to later, when we had more time. Ha!
Finally, with two days left before the race and the car still not running right, we had a decision to make: Do we paint the car, and try to continue diagnosis down in Gainesville, or keep working the problems and call it quits if we can’t get it running?
We decided to take a break from the electrical nightmare, and paint the car by hand. Using brushes and quart cans of Rustoleum purchased at Home Despot for $5.00 a can. Really.
It would made for a nice break from the unsuccessful troubleshooting, and even if the car ran like crap, it would look… interesting, anyway.
So, my friend’s daughter Sharpied a paint–by-numbers jigsaw puzzle on the car (intended to camouflage a dent on the passenger side door), and we set about filling the pieces in with the Rustoleum and all the Zen we could muster. When the last piece was filled in, and the accent striping done, we shut the door of the garage and went to bed; woozy from the paint fumes and exhausted, but determined. 6 hours later, we had the car loaded onto the trailer and were crossing the Woodrow Wilson bridge from MD into VA. 12.5 hours and 900 miles after that, we were parking the rig at our hotel in Gainesville, too tired to do anything but eat and go to bed.
The first race day dawned and we dragged ourselves out of bed and made our way to the Complimentary Continental Breakfast. But we returned to our room quickly upon realizing that breakfast would probably go better if we were wearing more than our Underoos. Also, we could liberate and store more food upon our persons if we wore clothes that actually had pockets. We arrived at the track as they were opening the gates to competitors, and we quickly found a paddock spot. We unloaded the race car, careful not to crush the Krispy Kremes and blueberry muffins lining our pockets.
When we arrived at the track, we decided to take a flyer on solving the car’s electronic eccentricities by putting a monster ground wire from the engine block to the chassis, an electric equivalent of swatting a gnat with a frying pan. After an hour of drilling, cursing and tool-throwing tantrums, we crossed our fingers and hit the starter.
It came to life immediately, roaring with the crispness of a camshaft ground from Excalibur itself, and belching exhaust flames straight from an Elvish forge. No prehistoric flora or fauna could ask for a more glorious transition from hydrocarbon to greenhouse gas than by ignition in our mighty combustion chambers!
And then the next chapter of panic set in, since we’d never run or tested the car before, and we were expected to RACE IT RIGHT NOW.
So, I screwed the headlights into the car, put the racing tires on it, dumped a couple of gallons of gas into the tank, shut the battery box, and headed out onto the autocross course. The tachometer still didn’t work, so we’d have to shift it by ear.
And actually, it was much better than I expected. It lost power in the faster corners, due (we think) to the fact that it cornered so hard that the couple of gallons of fuel onboard actually sloshed away from the fuel pickup in the tank under significant lateral g-loads (note to self: put at least 10 gallons in the tank next time). It turned in and took a nice set through the corners though it had a little bit of a pull to the right in transitions.
When we brought it back into out paddock after the runs (a mere 2 sec behind the leader, despite the lack of engine power in the fast sections), we looked at the front end alignment, which resembled nothing so much as a close up of the late Marty Feldman. The driver’s side tire was pointing straight, while the passenger side tire was pointing roughly 20 degrees to starboard.
A spectator asked me how long we’d been testing our car, and I laughed and replied, “What time is it?”
Racing was over for the first day and we buttoned the car up as tightly as we could for the night, as a severe rainstorm was expected before morning. And rain it did.
When we arrived at the track the next morning, we remembered that bucket o’ inadvertent weight reduction on the garage floor, which included a cover for the car’s ventilation system. Upon opening the car’s doors, we found two new freshwater lakes in the car’s footwells. Fortunately, a cordless drill and 5 minutes worth of work allowed us to drain the majority of the rainwater through two new and oh-so-carefully thought out holes drilled in the floorpan (Don’t hit a wire! Be careful of the brake lines! Watch the fuel lines!). Another 20 minutes worth of sopping and squeezing removed the worst of the water, and we just left it open to dry out as much as possible until it was time to race.
We quickly aligned the front end of the car to a conventional configuration (i.e. the tires pointing more or less the same direction) before the drag racing event using a piece of nylon rope liberated from a sponsorship sign as a gauge - who needs bubble levels and laser alignment tables? The first easy pass was a 14.27 second Elapsed Time at 96 MPH, and after a few rounds of tuning (e.g. adjusting the timing, increasing the turbo boost, etc.) we were rewarded with a nice 13.49 sec. ET at 103.9 MPH, and the car even went where you pointed it.
That night at the awards banquet, when the event organizers called us up to the stage to receive our trophies to a nice round of applause from our competitors, they noted that we had only spent $964 dollars.
I’m told that the applause rang even louder, but I didn’t hear it. I was thinking about fixing that stupid tachometer.
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