The time has now come. The rustbucket is completed and ready to face the largest collection of race ready junk to ever hit a course at one time. I’m talking 24hrs of Lemons, New England. Event being held at Stafford Motor Speedway in Stafford Springs CT(about 2.5hrs away), Saturday and Sunday. The team who completes the most laps over the two days in their pile that survives the longest, wins $1500…in nickles.
Shitbox, as I have recently branded as such, started life as a 1991 Nissan 240. As with all cars who live their lives in NYS, time has not been good. You’ll hear talks about rusted 240’s. How their floorboards rot. How frame rails get thin and fall apart. How they love to leak oil like a sive. Ladies and gentlemen, this 240 is the definition of such a rotted 240. Purchased for a measly $200, all seemed rather well until prep work began on the car mere weeks ago. Four weeks, 120+ hours of work, and a pile of shit junk scrap steel later the car was “race ready”. I wouldn’t exactly call it race ready, as this thing would NEVER pass a normal tech inspection. Even our wonderful Tom Hansen would likely flag it off the course!
Car was stripped and put up on stands where it immediately twisted and sunk. Front rear subframe mounts cam up through the floor, chassis tweaked hard enough that the pass dor would not open and when it finally did(with persuasion) the roof buckled slightly :eek3. Front left tower assembly and forward rails about to fall off the car. Was a complete mess and should have been scrapped then and there but it was too late to turn back. AFter a couple weeks of patching up portions of the frame rails and straightening the car out, I caged it beyond the regs for the series. The cage is now the chassis, supporting a majority of the flex and weight of the car front to rear! (mind you this is NOT one of my cages, just a shit S+W that I beefed up and added in a host of other supports for the event. Was not about to do a $4K rollcage in this POS for this 70mph event)
All cars entered must have some sort of theme and this one was no different. My sister, along with Robert Dubbler from Switzerland came up with a theme to paint and mask the car as one of Roberts chocolate Mohrenkopf’s…www.mohrenkopf.com Robert Dubbler owns Dubbler Chocolate in Switzerland, and is a long time vintage racer. Owns a C5R on top of a host of other cars including the Renualt Clio Cup that my sister currently campains in Europe…with that said I enlisted the assistance of Jin Nowles and proceeded to give the car a lovely shade of shit brown latex interior paint, for that chocolate textured look. Also applied were portions of expandafoam, painted white to simulate the cream filling of the Mohrenkopf. Finishing touch…I took my plasma cutter to the hood for some well deserved props to some people that came by the shop to lend a hand and support, or provide parts in a pinch when shit broke quick(Steve(ninetyone2forty) you are on there, added your name this afternoon, big thanks to you!!!). I also couldn’t go without a shout to the folks here, and as such proudly burned Shift 518 into the hood. The result was priceless, and drew more attention of public officials in my area from some “not so legal” road testing this morning than I’m accustomed to in this area :lol
In the end I hope it makes it through the entire event for the team. This, while a seeminlg ycheap event(see main website for regs) is VERY expensive for what it’s worth. Actual billed for the legal allowed stuff came to $417 including the price of the car. Safety equipment(cage, seat, brake, etc) and labor for such doesn’t count towards the $500 limit and remains undiclosed at this time. I won’t post what the total would have been if i had billed for every hour put into the car…not until after the race. Let’s just say for the sake of the legallity of the race, I did alot for free…
Vlad will be covering the event this weekend with video and photos/interviews. The team will be providing in-cabin footage of the event. “People’s Curse”, where the racers vote for one of the cars to be destroyed, will also be covered. Any way it goes down, it’s gonna be good Looks for Vlads article soon and all cheer Shitbox, the biggest pile of shit to ever grace the the roads of the greater capitol region! :number1
rofl:rofl:rofl