150DollarRacer

The miazda kinda took advantage of the rules. Total budget is $800. They bought the car for 860 and sold like 150 in parts off of it to buy brake parts. the wheels and tires were donated but I think they had to give them back which doesnt quite count anyway. Thats ok, the mr2 won the event but had a semi-professional driver anyway. It was fun and quite honestly I didnt care who won.

For the painting, I used 4 18oz cans of white primer, 8 12oz cans of orange, and 2 12oz cans of black for the car. All purchased at OSH.

200,422 as it sits in the driveway right now. I've put about 500 miles on it since i've owned it. I really want to get rid of the whole car but if it comes down to parting it out, you can have dibs on the engine.

Also, I am willing to sell the car for $500 obo. I still have most of the interior parts stashed away in the garage. This car can be:

*Mobile parts car
*Race Car
*Lawn Ornament

Your choice! I checked the rules and it still fits into the Honda Challenge H5 category. Despite the beating, it still runes though I imagine anyone serious about raciing would rebuild the engine or find a cheap junkyard replacement. I'd like to get rid of it by the end of July and am willing to negotiate. Its got current registration for Colorado till September but I have removed all the smog equipment and I doubt anyone would be interested in trying to reinstall all those darn vac lines.

E-mail me at warped(at)umail.ucsb.edu with any questions.

Well, the car made it back in one piece. Mostly.

The first major issue of the weekend was actually before we arrived at the track. We decided to load the car up with extra tires BEFORE driving it only the trailer. Bad move. With 9 wheel/tire sets in the car, the ride height drops like 3 inches which was enough for the exhaust to catch on the trailer as I drove it up. Result: The exhaust system ripped off the car. It was only my first time welding and apparently I did some pretty crappy welds.

By this time the car was on the trailer with an exhaust system only held on by the header. So I zip-tied the exhaust onto the bottom of the car and we trailered it to a friends house who had MIG welder. 1 hour later I re-welded everything and this time loaded the car onto the trailer prior to loading up the car. Didn't have any more exhaust issues the whole weekend.

We arrive at Lone Pine early evening in time for the tech inspection. Renee exclaimed that the civic was one of the ugliest cars she's ever seen and thought it was great. Everything else passed tech no problem so thats cool.

We left Lone Pine to set up camp at the track:





Saturday Morning, Matt decides that it would be fun to wake us all up by starting up the civic but was unable to locate the keys to the car:



Luckily, for once, I did not leave the key in the ignition so we got to sleep in till 7.


Here are the other cars that ran in the challenge:








IMO, the mustang was the only other car that adhered to the true beater essence. The SAAB I guess counted too, but it was its 3rd year with victories from the previous two years and effectively went over budget but was allowed since the extraneous funds were for maintenance items. It finally died this year. There was much rejoicing.

The weather for the day was right around 100 with a slight breeze which almost made it tolerable. The civic performed flawlessly and I had a blast driving it. I'm sorry to say I don't have many pictures of the car in action as I was mostly busy driving it. I did manage to convince my girlfriend to sign up for the weekend so here she is on her first run with me as co-pilot:



I believe her best time of the day was a 176. On Saturday I believe the best times were in the 120s while the better drivers in my car club, with real track experience, were getting mid 130s to low 140s. My times for the day were like 167 165 and 165. The car handled pretty well considered what it was. It was very predicable and I probably would have done much better if I had the balls to drive it harder. I tend to be very very easy on tires it seems.

Saturday night was the first annual beater drag racing event. Of the competing cars, mine was the slowest but ran just about the same as the Miazda which was kinda neat.



Sunday rolled around. Tires weren't looking so good. One of my team drivers didn't have a chance to go out yesterday so she went first. After her second run I noticed a huge flat spot on one of the front tires that had worn through the inner steel belt(It seems Victoracers have an outer nylon belt and then an inner steel belt). Crap. Well, I really wanted to get at least one run in before this thing completely crapped itself. Luckily we brought 2 street tires for it. So in about 10 minutes I managed to swap the "good" crap race tires from the rear to the front and swap street tires in the rear and went out for my Sunday run.

Sunday the track is reversed and is typically a bit faster. This might also be due to less sand and gravel on the track due to usage. I clocked a 164 on my first one and jumped out to check the tires. They seemed to look the same. Ok, one more run. This time I drove the snot out of the car knowing that if it broke, we still had a trailer to get it home so that's ok. I was shifting at 500rpm over redline and I don't think the engine saw anything lower than 5000rpm the entire run. The street tires drove like crap but made for a very "tray-like" experienced. If the car was pushing, letting up on the throttle brought the back end around. It was kinda fun and though it slide, it was very easy to control. I ran a personal best that run with a 151.

If more pictures of the car surface I'll try to post them. I'm already thinking about next year and have been scouring the classifieds for junk sports cars for next year.

Till then I'll have to beat on my Celica. I just got a new ECU in the mail last week and hope to take the car to Willow Springs in July since my NASA membership expires in September.

Finished painting the beast today: