Grassroots Motorsports

Even though the budget cap was set at $2002 total, Mike wanted to take it a step further and build the best car for only a grand—as in $1000. Total.

What to Build?

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Mike raced factory-backed Nissan products during the ’80s and ’90s in SCCA and IMSA competition, so it was natural for him to gravitate toward them when considering a race car project.

He got a lucky break: Six months before the 2002 event was announced, he learned of three mid-’80s 300ZXs that were targeted by the local police department as part of a code enforcement action. The derelict cars were untagged, considered by some as eyesores, and the owners had been requested to remove them before legal action would be taken.

Mike quickly made a deal to purchase them en masse for the princely sum of $300.

“Originally, I was offered the cars for free, but the owners had recently put four new tires on the car that ran, and they wanted to get the $300 they spent on the tires back,” Mike relates, a bit ruefully.

Thus, the cars were christened “343”—as in three for $300.

Another part of the code enforcement action had to do with the fact that chickens on the property had adopted the open cars as mobile homes—so “Coop” was added to the budding creation’s name. Mike now had the makings of a 343 Coop.

Of the three cars Mike acquired, two were towed back to the Clownwerkes, and the running car was driven there, albeit very slowly.

“The driveshaft was hitting the muffler heat shield and making a very loud banging,” Mike recalls. “I couldn’t manage more than about 20 mph without being afraid that I’d break the car to pieces.”

Hatching a Plan

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Once back at home, Mike assessed what he had.

“Working,” was one of only two good things that could have been said about the car that Mike drove home. There were many other points on the “con” side of the equation: Aside from the moldy, wet, bug-infested condition of the interior-cum-chicken-coop due to the windows having been left open for two months during Florida’s foul—or, in this case, fowl—weather, the car had been used as an off-road toy by the previous owners. The bodywork, floor pan, transmission and suspension had been nearly pounded to their breaking points.

Still, the engine seemed to run reasonably well, and the timing belt, radiator, fuel injectors and master cylinder had all been replaced within the previous owner’s memory.

The other good thing about the “working” car was that it was better than the other two, which were not running and had been left open for years. One was a manual transmission car, and the other was one of the unloved 2+2 automatics.

Where others might only see a couple of piles of junk, however, Mike Guido and his team saw dollar signs. Any parts that were not destined to go onto the final Challenge car went into the “sell” pile to help replenish the budget, as the GRM Challenge event rules allow participants to zero their budget by selling off unneeded parts. However, nothing can ever become “better than free,” so Mike could recoup a maximum of $300, the amount he had originally spent on the pile. (According to the rules, any amount that is earned back over the original expenditure may not be counted toward the budget, but “If you do turn a profit on selling parts off the car, we suggest you take your significant other out to dinner to compensate them for having a $2000 car hanging around the house.”)

Mike and his team printed up flyers and distributed them around their Palm Bay, Fla., community, advertising the parts for sale. When asked why he didn’t use eBay to sell the excess, Mike confesses: “I honestly don’t think I knew of eBay when we built this car; now it’s a no brainer. Denny Crabill and the Mongrels gave us all a lesson on this,” he concludes, referring to fellow Challenge competitors who have mastered the system.

Mike’s plan was not to make his car a technological wonder, but to take what was there and improve it as much as possible within the budget. Additionally, Mike had been practicing his powder coating skills with a $50 used kitchen oven he purchased for his garage. He was well aware of the scoring potential of a Challenge car that was as visually sharp as it was fast.

An interesting side benefit of Mike having the race car project going on in his driveway was that local teens, some of whom had worked on the MG, were intrigued by the effort going on in plain view. Mike wasted no time in drafting them for duty.

He also used this opportunity to buy a welder, realizing that there was going to be some serious fabrication required to put these three Humpty Dumpties back together again. What Mike didn’t realize was that his wife, Rhonnie, would pick up the welder herself, and lead the fabrication of several components.

Chassis and Suspension

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Of the three cars, Mike felt that it would be easier to use the “working” one as the foundation for the Challenge entry, and use the other two for parts.

“We used the off-road car due to the fact that the windows were down for only a few months compared to the other cars that had way more roaches, chickens and rot inside,” Mike recalls. “This car also had less rust and needed less major body work.”

Mike and his team stripped the chassis of everything that wasn’t needed: the sound deadening and metal covering saved 50 pounds, and the doors were cut to the skin and the glass removed, shedding another 40 pounds per door. He also tossed all of the interior parts, air conditioner, radio, carpeting, seats, interior paneling and so on.

The engine remained in place so the team could keep their underhood packaging correct. Doing so would also allow them to make sure the hood would clear the induction system. (More on that later.)

Additionally, inexpensive, lightweight substitutions were made where possible: The heavy factory seats were replaced by a single $10 used lightweight fiberglass go-kart bucket, clear plastic was employed to replace the heavy factory side glass, and the glove box was replaced with a plastic bag and some duct tape to hold the car’s registration and other documents.

The factory fuel tank was ditched and replaced with a 5-gallon Jerry Can “fuel cell” that now uses a factory Nissan in-tank fuel pump. The heavy seat belts and retractors were replaced by vintage five-point harness hardware, rewebbed by Safe-Quip to clown color specifications. In all, the team removed approximately 1000 pounds of stuff, which knocked the package’s weight down nearly 30 percent overall.

Not only did the team reduce the weight, but they also sought to redistribute what they had. Battery relocation to the rear is not unusual for racing where rules are somewhat liberal, but making the headlights removable and relocating them to the trunk for ballast purposes might strike some as extreme.

“We made sure that the lights could be put back to their original locations and still work,” Mike proudly states, as the event rules did require standard road equipment, including working head- and taillights. “If they ever have any Challenge events at night again, we’re ready.”

Interestingly, the team chose to leave the rear glass in the car rather than replace it with Lexan because they couldn’t justify the cost with regard to the budget. They also believed that the rearward weight bias would help with the drag launches as well as the car’s overall balance.

The three cars’ worth of pieces gave them some choices regarding what they wanted to fix: dents, scratches or rust. Two solid weeks of 18-hour days were spent fixing rust and dents and welding. When the time came to apply paint, they were rewarded with a beautiful finish—and remember, this car was built in a driveway.

Since the car had lost nearly a third of its weight, it looked the part of its former incarnation as an off-road vehicle: The ride height was now a couple of inches higher than stock. Mike ordered new Tokico struts for the front, and cut the stock springs nearly in half to lower it back down and raise the spring rate.

For the rear, Mike had some 11-year-old Koni shock absorbers that he hoped would do the job, but first he had to cut the saggy, off-road-abused springs to different lengths for each side in order to level the car.

The nice-looking Enkei wheels came with one of the parts cars, but their condition was initially awful. Some clever thinking took care of that: Mike placed a spare Nissan 240SX rear end on some jackstands and used that as a lathe to file and polish the rims. He notes that team members only forgot to remove the valve stem one time—the results, happily, did not require a trip to the hospital.

Mike originally used some ancient Toyo R-compound tires, but they have since been replaced by some Hoosiers sourced from a race track’s “discard” pile.

The Snorkel

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Given all of the other modifications on the car and the $1000 budget limit the team chose to instill upon themselves, they chose to cross their fingers and go with only intake and exhaust modifications to the 175,000-mile engine. In fact, they never removed the non-turbo, 3.0-liter V6 engine from the car.

In freeing up the intake system, however, Mike decided to think outside of the box—or outside of the hood, anyway. He noted that the intake manifold and induction system appeared to be quite restrictive in order to fit under the car’s low hood. He figured that the best way to improve the induction system was to make sure that the airflow into the engine was as smooth and direct as possible. So he decided to make an induction system that wasn’t limited by anything as inconsequential as a hood.

Since an aftermarket intake manifold was out of the question budget-wise, Mike decided to modify some of the stock pieces for better flow and air distribution. (Plus, he figured a nitrous oxide fogger system was in the cards one day.)

He cut one of the stock manifold plenums at the mounting plate, and made his own high-rise plenum upper half with a mounting point for an old 240SX throttle body. The mounting plate was ported and shaped for equal-length velocity stack runners and then bolted to the lower intake manifold. From the upper throttle body, Mike went with 3-inch PVC with a 90-degree turn forward. A stock airflow meter can be found at the front of the contraption.

PVC is not known for its structural integrity under severe noise, vibration and harshness conditions, so Mike fabricated a neat little gantry to locate and support the airflow meter from the intake manifold plenum. In order for the hood to clear the “tower of power” now poking out of their Nissan’s engine bay, the team had to fabricate new hood hinges for the lid to open forward.

As if that weren’t enough, the team worried that as the engine torqued around on its mounts it might bang the new custom plenum on the hood, so they adapted an air-conditioner engine bracket, some rubber grommets and some spare tie rod pieces to secure the engine to the chassis, all designed to limit the amount of twist of the engine in the bay.

Surmising that more air flowing into the engine would lead to a lean condition and possibly burn a valve or a piston, Mike also fabricated an adjustable fuel pressure regulator by cutting apart a stock one and adding a second, larger spring sourced for $2.07 at the local Ace hardware store. This second spring put pressure on the fuel pressure regulator diaphragm, and Mike added a bolt so he could adjust the tension on the springs. He then modified the cover to allow for the adjustment bolt and relocation of the vacuum fitting. Some pop rivets and silicone secure the cover, and violá, an adjustable fuel pressure regulator for less than $5.

Mike bought a $150 set of PaceSetter headers off of the Internet, and the engine expels everything through a $15 well-used SuperTrapp muffler.

The transmission in the “working” car would not engage reverse at all, so the team decided to look to the unit in the other five-speed car. They were somewhat concerned about what they found when they went to do the swap: “When we pulled the car out of the woods behind my house to get the tranny out, we found that there wasn’t a drop of oil in it, so it was a day-long gamble to see if it even worked,” Mike recalls. “We really lucked out.” The clutch from the parts car was also used, since it looked better than the one in their primary car.

Show Time

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One of the most striking things about the 343 Coop is the attention to detail. Mike and his team clearly adhere to what they call the 3Ps formula: polish, paint and powder coat.

Just about everything on the car—including the stuff under the hood and even underneath the car, and every nut, bolt, hinge and bracket—has been treated in some way to make it visually appealing.

Mike improved on his visual theme from the previous car by using even more bright colors, and initiating a comprehensive powder coating campaign on not only small pieces but larger parts like the valve covers and battery box. All were coated using an Eastwood kit.

To provide more sparkle, the team invested in regular-grade, stainless-steel fasteners and polished the steel to a chrome-like finish for the non-load-bearing underhood applications.

Besides the clown-spec, five-point belts and the kart seat, the team cleaned out attics and prowled junkyards and swap meets to come up with the interior appointments and gauges. The steering wheel and Wink mirror were swap meet finds for $10 and $3 respectively, while the oil pressure/water temperature gauge came out of a junked Mini. The fuel pressure gauge was an old used Auto Meter blower gauge. A team member handmade the shifter boot, and finished the assembly with a custom cover plate topped with a three-color blend of powdercoat.

Mike looked far and wide for an appropriate chin spoiler, and after coming up empty a few times he realized that another 300ZX nose placed upside down would do the trick. The upside-down headlight buckets make for some interesting underbody scoops, and it was straightforward to modify for drawing air into the radiator via an airdam. Oh, and did we mention that it was cheap? With the chin spoiler and airdam in place, Mike was able to fabricate some brake ducts out of plastic tubing purchased at a local hardware store’s “going out of business” sale.

While Mike is a racer, he’s also a clown, so he rigged the fuel filler door to launch spring snakes at unsuspecting concours judges.

Go Time

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Although the team had to work right down to the wire, completing the car at 3:00 the morning of the $2002 Challenge, it ran and showed quite well at the event. Mike and company claimed an impressive fourth-place overall finish and first in the under-$1000 class—and this was out of 60 teams who came from all points.

Falling rain canceled the drag race portion of the event that year, but Mike’s car still laid down some impressive times during a post-Challenge, for-fun drag day. The 343 Coop posted a nice 14.6-second quarter-mile elapsed time, about on par with what a new Nissan 350Z would run in stock condition.

Mike did notice some issues while running the car at the event that required some track-side tuning. “The airflow meter expects to draw air through the factory inlet system. When ours was up in the clean air over the hood and pointed directly into the airflow, the extra air caused it to spaz out and tell the engine computer to go full rich,” Mike explains. He also wasn’t happy with the excessive negative camber in the first iteration of the rear suspension, feeling that it was limiting the car’s drag strip launches.

For the $2003 Challenge, held the following year again in Central Florida, the team went for some bigger bang through the use of a nitrous oxide system that Mike cobbled together for $50. He also addressed the problems with the rear suspension, and went all-out on the appearance package, including a lawn sprinkler fire suppression system.

Mike again took the top sub-$1000 trophy while finishing fourth overall—and remember, for those overall honors he’s competing against cars that were built for huge money, like $2000. The drag race portion of the event wasn’t rained out in 2003, and Mike’s 343 Coop covered the quarter-mile in 13.64 seconds at that event, a very solid time for such a low-buck machine.

Mike brought the car back again for 2004, with all the dials turned up to “10” and a new “paddle shift-oar” system. He was looking for a solid top-five finish again when problems struck.

After finishing tied for fifth overall in the concours and cracking off a very strong 13.02-second run at the drags—we’re almost talking supercar acceleration rates—the 343 Coop had a fueling system problem surface at the autocross, preventing the car from running properly on all six cylinders. Despite being down on power, the team finished a very nice seventh overall, and again took the award for the highest-placing sub-$1000 car.

For the amount of money that some racers spend on a set of tires, Mike Guido and his team built a car that will turn heads at any show—he already has a fistful of trophies to prove it—and can run with cars that cost tens of times as much money.

But Why?

When asked why he keeps subjecting himself to these Challenge events, Mike has a ready answer: “It’s like a week at Disney World, but it’s cheaper, the rides are better, and so are the characters.”

The word on the street says Mike and company will debut a new car at this spring’s Kumho Tires Grassroots Motorsports $2005 Challenge Presented by CRC Industries. Keep an eye on the GRM message board at www.grassrootsmotorsports.com to see how much information Mike releases before the big day.