Leon Races!!

How did we do you ask?
Well, lets just say that we had reasonable expectations and we succeeded in our number 1 goal. Everyone on the team got to drive...
Here I am getting into the car. That suit is so damn hot. It was unbelievable. Yes, I am climbing in through the passenger side window. Believe it or not, that was much easier. The gap between the wheel, the seat and the roll bar is small that I cannot get my fat thighs in or out. Next year, we are going to make a removeable steering wheel...

Here is the tow truck pushing our car off the track and back to our pit. Unfortunately, this was not a rare occurance. We would stand by the big hairpin corner, not far from our pit. You can tell by the other cars on the track roughly when to expect your own. Car should be here any time... oh, there it is. And repeat. Until you start thinking, it really ought to be here now.... it REALLY ought to be here now! And then the tow truck comes racing by, out of pit row and out on to the track. D'oh!!!

Here I am under the car fixing the alternator. That was one of the simpler problems.. We probably got pushed off the track 3 or 4 times.

The final incident had our last driver behind the wheel. He heard a number of pops, like fire crackers. That is NOT good at all. I checked the temp on the car after he was pushed back to us, it was still overheated and in the red. That is not good either. Certainly not his fault though. The guages ended up in a position where the temp guage could not really be seen.

We could not get it to restart. But we had had that problem all afternoon between alternator and battery problems. So we pulled a plug and tried to start the car. Everyone within 10 feet got wet... the car was shooting water out of the engine block. That is pretty well dead... the general opinion of the assembled crowd was that we had blown our head gasket. Joe and I (and a random collection of drunks who stopped to "help") worked on the car until close to 10pm. We wanted to strip it all the way down to the head gasket to see if that was the problem. Instead, we bent the hell out of our engine pulley. Whoops. Oh well, time to give up... Below you can see Joe and one of the volunteers trying to get that pulley off.

A word about the rules.

There are rules... if your team breaks the rules, you get black flagged. Lose control of your car and spin out, black flag. Put any tires on the dirt and off the pavement, black flag. Lose parts of your car during racing, black flag. Speeding in the pits, black flag. Ferral children, black flag.
If you get black flagged, you head over the judges area for punishment. Pictures of punishments below.
Here is Ross doing the walk of shame. He passed while under a yellow flag for caution... he was black flagged, pulled from the track and forced to mime his crime as punishment.
This vixen is bound to the post in clear plastic.
The Swiss Cheese car was put in the penalty box for a while and then forced to drive with that flag. I am not sure what they did, but if I had to guess it would be tires on dirt. They really had trouble with those S turns. These folks got what was known as the Bart Simpson penalty repeatedly... They were required to do what Bart does during each episode. They wrote what they would not do again 100 times.

I will not go 4 wheels off 1

I will not go 4 wheels off 2

and so on.

They had listed a requirement to go to driving school before coming back to a lemons race.

They were not going to pass under a yellow caution flag again.

As you can see, the whole car was covered with writing

I am not sure what crime this vixon committed either. But she was forced to dance on the roof of her car waving this flag.

Now that is a nice car!

If you are a car junkie, what better place to show off your ride than a car race?

This is one seriously pimped viper.

Real Cobra or a kit? I have no idea how to tell... probably a kit.

How about this one? What a bummer it must be to own a car like this and show up only to find another at the same race.

Yes, that is a 4 door Porsche... It looks like a 4 door 911. Very cool car, I had never seen one outside of a magazine. There is some serious money in automotives here.

The Neighbors

The poor folks next to us failed tech and spent the next 24 hours trying to pass. By the time their car passed tech it was 4pm on Saturday. They were 7 hours behind the rest of the field... not that they finished even close to last. They had a banner day on Sunday.

Lets take a closer look at that car. I love the old, faded pain job and all the chrome. Pretty damn bad ass. What is it you ask? Well it was a 50s Renault they said.. but "was" is the key word in that sentence. Look inside...

That is the engine about where the back seat ought to be. You can also see that they welded on a little extra metal to make their wheel wells wider. Check out the picture below and you can also see that they moved the steering wheel and seat to the middle of the car. I am impressed... though I would have been more impressed if they had passed tech before the racing started.

Team Spiderman

They had the spider theme going ON! See the inflatable spider on the trailer roof?

The car is covered in webs and little platic spiders.

On the hood, you get the Spidey eyes and the big welded spider...as well as plenty more little ones.

More fun "race cars"

This team was called Kelly's Gyros. They drove around in this RX-7 (I think that is what it was) that was made to look like a tank. That cannon on top fired T-Shirts just like at a sporting event. They spend friday evening driving around the pits, blasting Bon Jovi out of that speaker (located where there used to be a headlight), and firing T-Shirts into the crowd.
These guys were called the road crew. That truck was suprisingly fast. It cornered a little rough but it generally performed better than I would ever have expected. Unfortunately, they got the max number of black flags allowed in a day and were kicked out of the race. Mostly for skidding around corners, drifting is not allowed... though I am not sure how you race a pickup truck without a little skidding.

This RX-7 ended up being the eventual winner.

Below you can see a number of other cars, making their way around the hairpin turn. The M626 is the multi colored car entering the corner. It was part M Series BMW but mostly a Mazda 626. It is followed by Marvin the Martin, a 9000 series Saab. Marvin was a REALLY fast car. It spent all day on Saturday in the lead. With 45 minutes to go on Saturday, they blew a rod and were done for the race. Behind Marvin is the Starship Enterprise on a Mazda Miata. The Mazda actually has a turbo sticking out of the hood. The rest of the pipes around the turbo are all PVC tubes! It is sight to see... and fast as hell as well.

This is my favorite car (other than Leon of course).

The Cheese car was probably the coolest, most creative one out there. It is an AMC Marlin... if you have any idea what that is. Yes, those are all holes in the car. If you look closely, you can also see the masks that they wore to inspection... mice masks. It was really something to see.

Here is a closer picture of all of their holes... in varying sizes. The car had plenty of muscle, but it cornered like a boat. I saw them sliding in corners and clipping dirt on the edges of the S turns a few times. Still, it was a really cool car.

This Volvo was the mustache car. Their slogan was "who wants mustache ride?" However, it was not their verbal creativity that impressed me the most. Check out that hood scoop located in the roof. Nice ventilation for the driver! It was so hot in those fire suits.... I am jealous. That is some good thinking!

What kind of car would Superman drive?

Not pretty is it? They run oval tracks normally so the car is actually designed to turn only one way properly. They had to bend a strut with a hammer to get it drive straight. If you look closely at this picture, you can tell which side of the car the wall is on. They hit the wall in a recent oval competition. That same wreck, I was told, drove that passenger side tire right through the fire wall and into the passenger compartment. They tried to beat most of the hole closed with some hammers. If you look back in the wheel well in the picture below, you can see the scraps Superman used to weld the rest of the hole shut so they could get back to racing. At this point you can probably understand how bending a strut with a hammer might be considered a handling improvement in this car.