Topics

Bill's idea:

Redneck Ricers Hillbily Delux

• Race in overalls, and show up to inspection carrying shotguns.
• Glue ZZ Top beards to our helmets.
• Run the car on ethanol.
• Put the letters XXX over the fuel filler.
• Paint a sign "Powered by lightnin'".
• Put a stuffed pig in the back looking at the drivers behind us
• Put straw down in the pit area. We can all talk like hillbillies.
• Put a mock up still in the back of the car, run a tube around the exhaust, and run a little water through it. Make the still look operational.
• Need to get a dukes of hazard dixie horn, or a porky's pig horn

Ok,

I looked up pricing info on the MicroSquirt and it's gonna be around $300 - $400 new. I will definitely be getting one for my MR2, so maybe a month in advance I could pull it out and run my stock Toyota ECU, and then get the FX16 on the Dyno and get it tuned for the LeMons race.

So in other words, I'll donate this for the race :D

Originally posted in this thread, here are the pictures of the fully programmable and dyno tunable MicroSquirt:



And here is a stock 4A-GE computer that we'll install it into:

Bill made some good comments:

Regarding vented rear brakes (upgraded rear brakes), not so necessary with the FX16 since it's not a mid-engine like the MR2. The front brakes will be doing more of the work.

We need to figure out if we can find some larger front rotors for the FX16. Maybe Supra rotors or something from a heavier Toyota with the same 4-bolt wheel pattern?

Here is the story on the FX16:

We will buy it from his daughter-in-law for $200.

We'll flatten the tires and put it out in ditch bank, dump some oil all over the engine and take some pictures of it all nasty and ugly, like it's been there for a couple of years, etcetera...

Then we'll all have the same story that when we got the car home and pulled the valve covers, it had some aftermarket cams and when we pulled the engine out it had a light weight flywheel already.

Bill has the following great suspension ideas:


Get some Supra springs from a wrecking yard. They have a higher spring rate than the Corolla springs, and we can chop the Supra springs down a bit to lower the car 1" or so.

Okay, here is my idea:

Let's dress the FX16 to look like a Bugatti Veyron. The key element will be a brake activated rear spoiler.

Here is the Veyron's spoiler at normal position:


And here is the Veyron's spoiler while braking:


Many Supercars are doing this now-a-days. Major advantages I can see are:
1) Add rear downforce to help prevent rear wheel lock-up.
2) Add rear downforce to help reduce brake dive and give the car a more neutral feel while braking.
3) Add massive amounts of drag to help the brakes slow the car down.

This will be extremely simple to build. I already have a stepper motor large enough for this and I can easily build brackets with a very large mechanical advantage so the motor won't have to work as hard.

My idea to make this sound super cool for the judges is something like this:



HOW COOL IS THAT?? A BRAKE ACTIVATED LEMON SPOILER!!! The judges will LOVE IT!!!

The lemon will sit flat on the roof of the FX when not in use and will most likely extend out beyond the body line above the rear hatch window.

Here is an excellent YouTube video to show exactly what I am talking about:

http://www.youtube.com/v/mvfG_jEXosw&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999

I am already planning on doing this to my MR2, but I am going to use a BASIC Stamp Microcontroller with an accelerometer so that the spoiler will only deploy under HEAVY deceleration.

The mustang in the above video simply has it connected to the brake lights basically. Touch the brake pedal even slightly and the spoiler deploys. We don't have to do it this way, we can do to the FX16 what I am planning on doing to my MR2, but the BASIC Stamp retails for about $100 (I already own two of them) so the judges might have a fit with that.

SO, what we can do is this: We can KEEP IT SIMPLE by having an additional trigger:
1) Brake switch is trigger #1
2) Have a simple switch attached to the front suspension that is only activated when the suspension compresses 3/4 (or whatever) of the way.

So the condition would be that you must be both on the brakes and have brake dive in order for the Lemon to deploy. This wouldn't require any fancy accelerometer or microcontroller at all, just simple push button switches from Radio Shack.

hahahahahahah

Clicky: http://jalopnik.com/photogallery/Alt0811/

[1. Get Your Papers In Order]

Those of you who read Judge Loverman's account of serving on the 24 Hours of LeMons South Supreme Court might be telling yourselves "That's interesting, but I really want to know how to give my alleged 500-buck race car an unfair advantage at the next race and get away with it!" Of course you do, because- in the the immortal words of my uncle and early gearhead influence, Dirty Duck: "There's two kinds of racers- losers... and cheaters!"



Back in the 60s and 70s, Dirty Duck was crew chief for quite a few dirt-track racers in rural Minnesota and Wisconsin, and a staple of my childhood was hearing his tales on how he'd discourage any idea of claiming a $5,000 car under a thousand-buck claimer rule. One particularly effective approach was the installation of a steel plate that could be made to scrape on the driveshaft with the pull of a lever. The driver would wait for the last few laps of race (at which point he'd have a huge lead), pull the lever, and limp around the track trailing a hundred-foot comet-tail of sparks and deafening the audience with the sound of a grenaded transmission. When coupled with a windshield-washer pump spraying diesel and/or water into the exhaust system and simulating a garbooned engine, there was no way in hell anybody was going to claim that car.



Of course, the difference between those races and the 24 Hours of LeMons is that there was real prize money to take home in the former; in the latter, you get bragging rights and a hernia-inducing load of nickels. That means there's no point in hardcore cheating in LeMons racing, especially since word on the street is that Chief Perpetrator Jay Lamm is gearing up to claim a not-so-legit entrant for 500 bucks (as the rules permit) very soon, something that very nearly happened with a certain Miata at LeMons South. But say you've gone just a few bucks over the limit, and you don't want those mean ol' judges to hammer you with a lot of lap penalties just because we figured out the recipe for your car's secret sauce. Or let's say your car really was built for under $500- suuuuure you did!- and you need to prove it? What do you do then? Either way, Judge Murilee has some tips for ya!


1. Get Your Papers In Order



I can't overemphasize how important this one is. If you show up with no receipts, no list of what you spent on and/or sold off the car, no nothing... well, we're going to go over your car with a relentless "guilty until proven innocent" attitude. That means I'm not going to believe word one of your tale about finding those nice Bilsteins at the junkyard, and it's just going to go downhill from there. The best possible approach is to show up with an inch-thick stack of parts receipts, printouts of eBay pages for the stuff you claim you sold, and a spreadsheet detailing the incoming and outgoing dollars. Even if you've faked every single page- and, yes, we know how much stuff is worth- we'll still cut you some slack, because going to the trouble of Photoshopping up a bunch of fake receipts shows respect for the judges. Second best approach is to have a sheet showing expenditures and parts sales; even with no receipts, you're still better off showing us something (scrawling a list in Sharpie on a shard of cardboard torn from a cereal box after you've had 19 beers is a very distant third-best approach, but still better than nothing at all).


2. All Small-Block Chevy (And Ford) Engines Are Cheating



You know it and we know it- you can build a 400-horsepower small-block for next to nothing, and they all look more or less the same on the outside. Why, then, do you need to lie about A) its displacement, B) that bad-ass lumpy cam, or C) its 12:1 compression? Just provide receipts showing how you bought them hot-rod parts for dirt cheap and we might just believe you. Even if it really is a 305- for some unfathomable reason- just say it's a 350 anyway, because "Thisyer thang got a 305" means "this 406 looks very convincing with cast-iron exhaust manifolds and junkyard valve covers, doesn't it?" in race-speak.
Keep in mind, we've got internet-enabled laptops at the track and we will go online and check head and/or block casting numbers!


3. Old Guys Know All The Tricks



I can just imagine the thought processes at work with some of the teams that sent their oldest members to speak for them at the BS Inspection: "They'll believe good ol' Joe, because he looks so trustworthy!" You gotta be shittin' me! When we see a gnarled-looking 70-year-old with a lifetime of grease-tattooed scar tissue on his knuckles and a honky-tonk road map of every racetrack in the country on his face, we know we're looking at a veteran cheater, a crafty bastid who never found a rule he couldn't stretch beyond recognition. We assume that a team full of old guys- especially old guys who clam up when asked the simplest questions about the car- is a team full of lies, and we approach their car accordingly.

4. Don't Claim Expertise




At least a half-dozen times during the LeMons South BS Inspection, a member of a team whose car was being subjected to what he felt was unfairly intense scrutiny piped up indignantly with a statement like "Hey, don't tell me that's not a factory part- I'm the president of the North American [car make/model] club and I've got a dozen of them in my back yard!" Big mistake. Now we know you know every possible way to hot-rod the living crap out of that car, and we're going to assume your club members dug into their stashes and pooled together $3,000 worth of go-fast parts for the glorious LeMons effort.


5. Have A Good Theme



If your car is fully decorated with some twisted theme, and- better still- the team is dressed up in costumes appropriate for that theme (see the Eyesore Pimpin' CRX), we'll be way more likely to overlook those suspiciously clean-looking suspension bushings and not-so-skinny swaybars. It goes the other way, too; if you've got a lame-ass cardboard shark fin taped to your full-race Miata (we're not mentioning any names) as your last-second attempt to get into the spirit of the 24 Hours of LeMons, we're going to take that as a sign of disrespect.


6. Bring A Hopelessly Slow Car



If we think you're going for the Index Of Effluency trophy (which goes to the team with the car that exceeds all expectations given its utter crapitude and is, in the minds of LeMons purists, the most prestigious prize of the event) and not the overall win, we'll put on some rose-colored glasses when we get under your car and start poking around the engine compartment. In fact, if the car looks really hopeless (e.g., the Karmann Geddon Golf Diesel), we might even skip the BS Inspection altogether!

7. Bribe The Judges



That Bribe Jar was there for a reason, because LeMons justice is neither blind nor expensive! Cash, beer, barbecue, and team T-shirts all do an excellent job of lubricating the gears of the LeMons legal system; even a sixer of Milwaukee's Best sends a message. While you probably can't afford a bribe of the magnitude necessary to convince us that your rusty Corolla "just came with" that 4A-GZE under the hood, you might be able to persuade us to refrain from dishing out lap penalties just because your team has a vague, can't-put-my-finger-on-it air of cheating about it. Maybe.

8. Get Your Lies Straight



We don't mind being lied to during the BS Inspection- hell, we know you're all lying- but we want to hear good lies, and we want to see teams that have put the time in to coordinate their stories. If each member of a trio of smacked-out liquor-store heisters can tell the same phony alibi to the cops after being busted with a getaway car full of needles and rusty .22s, we expect no less from your team! You see, a good, consistent tapestry of lies shows respect for the LeMons Supreme Court (and makes our jobs way more fun). So if one team member says he bought that turbo kit for $75 on Craigslist, another says it was "just lying around" his garage, and a third claims it was $50 at the junkyard, you're going to spend most of the first day just getting your lap count up to zero.


9. Suspension Modifications Arouse More Suspicion Than Anything Else



You might think that we'd be looking hardest for engine cheats, but the reality of the 24 Hours of LeMons is such that added engine power doesn't help much; in fact, those extra horses make it all the more likely that your engine will blow up and/or you'll break stuff, because only Smokey Himself could hide all the other components you need to beef up in order to make the car survive with a hot engine. That's why we always take a good hard look at your car's underpinnings. We're going to look for big swaybars, high-buck strut tower braces (the homemade ones bring smiles to our faces; see the photo above), adjustable coil-overs, top-shelf shocks, and so on. Sure, you can find some of that stuff in the junkyard, if you're lucky... but you'd better have proof!


10. Other Teams Will Be Watching You



If your car's pencil-diameter swaybars magically become thick as baseball bats after the BS Inspection, and those 200-treadwear tires turn into gooey racing slicks (hey, it's happened), someone from another team is going to notice... and they'll rat you out to us right away! Word spreads fast in the pits, and eyes are everywhere... so think twice before you try a component switcheroo.


(edit: Fixed the incorrect bold text)

Schumacher Taxi: American Samurai, Toyota MR2











http://www.youtube.com/v/x_Z9Jk4s3dM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999

Someone entered a Turbo Supra:

From http://jalopnik.com/tag/24-hours-of-lemons-texas/?id=5162119



Does that Corolla look familiar? It should! Yes, team Schwing (winner of the last Texas LeMons race) grabbed the lead early today and has hung on through the first few hours.

Yes, they've painted their car white and given it a Ghostbusters theme, but it's the same car and same drivers. How is it that Team SCHWING is so good at LeMons? Basically, they don't get black flags; unlike damn near everyone else in the race, we haven't seen them in the punishment area all day. And, speaking of punishments, the reason I haven't had a chance to do any live coverage is due to the endless series of miscreants we've had to discipline. We've got some new punishments, including the Habitat For Dogmanity, the Studs & Spurs, the Mime Your Crime, and the Bob Ross Hood Painting.

Here is another picture:





Also, here is another FX16 that did a good job
source: http://jalopnik.com/5188845/the-24-hours-of-lemons-n00bs-race-car-selection-guide



LeMons Good Car Choice #1: Toyota Corolla FX16. The big danger with a front-driver is that you'll fry the clutch and then get knocked out for five hours while you disassemble the suspension, pull the transmission, etc. However, it's worth taking that chance with an FX16, because it's impressively fast, handles predictably (very important if you don't want to talk to me and Justice Lieberman in the Penalty Box) and has proven to be a reliable LeMons machine. Plus, that engine sounds incredible; check out this video from the Schumacher Taxi Service FX16 at LeMons South '08:

http://www.youtube.com/v/VL7RyW8R6cE&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999