It all started with an innocent text.
Wait, let me back up a moment. The backstory is that I have been itching to go lemons racing again (I did a few races back in 09-10), and I've been complaining about it loudly to a select few fellow enablers. Most complaining was met with bench building. The good bench builds were turned into FB marketplace links, and then FB marketplace turned up other links that led to other bench builds of dubious integrity. All of the bench build were fast, and none of them sketchy. I like to call this phase of any project "planning".
After a lot of "planning", then, we come back to the text:
"Do either of you want a free RX8 shell"
Never in any of this planning did we ever mention RX8 - we're mostly interested in bench building "good" and "fast" cars. No plan survives first contact with the enemy.
The genesis of the next part of the idea is something I stole ruthlessly from Nocones. A few months back (in one "planning" session), he sent me a FB marketplace link to a 996 shell that was overpriced but within reach and said something like 'an air cooled VW motor in this would make a hilarious lemons car'. As if he willed a good idea to life, literally later that day I got a lemons email featuring another team who had done just that.
"A 12a rx8 is a sick lemons idea" I responded.
See? I just came up with a plan and it only took me like, what, ten seconds?
Nocones texted me the FB marketplace link. Which I promptly screenshot.
We connected with the seller (who Nocones happened to know, probably though other shady cheap car/parts deals). Everything was still normal for a few minutes until Gumby responded:
"Bring it over, with a pile of tubing. I'll start caging it"
Now, suddenly, we had everything in place, and no foreseeable ways to fail, so we couldn't possibly be making a bad decision, right?
I hereby present to you:
Project Bad Decision Triangles