pimpm3 wrote:
The car is safely parked in front of my house. I want to thank everyone who helped make this happen / enabled us. It is hard to believe that this was pulled off at all, let alone semi successfully.
I can honestly say that this was the most fun I have had in the five years I have done the challenge. If you had asked me Thursday night I would probably have given you a different answer, but in the end it was awesome.
I want to thank, Andrew, Chris, Derrick, Tod, Ted, TB, John, and Jonathan plus the countless others who pitched in, without your help and support this would not have worked out. And most importantly thank you to all the other competitors, and the GRM staff for putting up with us and hosting a great event.
^repeat of that, but also Jeremy was the real visionary of this project once he arrived and helped make it what it became. Really thankful it is in your yard and not my garage right now.
I will try to summarize the back story on the car.
10/9 noddaz posted the car in the classified, I had seen the add before and figured I better go look it over. The car was much more complicated than I was ready to handle.
Spinout007 Gene said "If that doesn't make it to the challenge I've lost all faith in you guys..."
Knowing I was going on a Road trip, which I had planned to be from 10/10-10/21, I offered to bring the car to the challenge with the help of others. I left it up to Gene to assemble at least a partial team of commitments before I committed to buying the car.
Knowing I was so excited to pick up the car I managed to put in some long days on the road, I cut three days out of my trip. I managed not to cut out any destinations, somehow managed to put on 6800 miles in 20 different states. Hit a deer in Oregon, still a little nervous driving at night now.
Luckily for me the PO check the compression the day before and got the car firing on all cylinders by putting in a used spark plug. I end up picking the car up on Monday October 20th.
Working on the car in the parking lot. Derek accomplished the suspension work, lowering the rear, and cutting the front springs, while Jeremy ruined the pretty exhuast. We were just full of bad ideas. After being unable to get it running on the megasquirt we did get it to fire and idle on the stock ECU at 10:45. After that, even with all of our expert knowledge and some people staying up trying to get it to work into the wee hours of the morning on the megasquirt, we had failed. Most of us had already gone to bed defeated. I know I was looking at cars on craigslist around 12 ready to just burn the Fiero to the ground in the hotel parking lot.
In the morning we switched to the factory ECU because we knew it would "run" and worked on finishing the paint job. Only one door had been painted the night before, we made the tuff call that the paint wouldn't dry enough to put the stickers on before they were necessary.
The car was able to make 1.7 ish Autocross passes before the head gasket blew and was shooting flames on the fuel line. For some reason Andy said it wouldn't be safe to run that way. It was back to the pits to try and get it fixed before the drag race, the exhaust manifold had also cracked at the same time. Yes, JB weld was involved in trying to hold it together. We pushed the car up to the staging area hoping it would hold long enough to make one pass, when the car was fired up the decision was made to pull the plug where the leak was and just run it on five cylinders. The first pass the car shut down 1/2 to 3/4 track and coasted to a 21.xx.
Thinking losing battery power was the issue since it seemed to be an issue Thursday night, we then swapped in the battery from the miata. Maybe that wasn't the problem. Couldn't even coast to the turnout and had to push it the last 100 yards to get it off the track.
The car went camping for the night at the end of the track. Until we came to get it Saturday morning.
One of he highlights of the weekend was the car starting back up and being able to be driven to concourse. Some people were buffing and waxing their cars, we were finishing up our paint job. It is amazing what can be done with $2x.xx of Rust-Oleum.
I would say this is the most fun I have had at a challenge to date and was very grateful for all of the helping hands and inspiration from all the other competitors. Although having a reliable car that ran would have been nice, this was a great bonding experience in getting to know the other competitors.
-Still a little upset we lost to the Echo.
