Story by Scott R. Lear, Photography as Credited
Fast cars for low bucks: It’s been our mantra for decades. Think going fast takes mounds of cash? It doesn’t.
Low-buck racing has enjoyed a boom in popularity since the turn of the millennium–particularly in the endurance racing space–but our $2000 Challenge remains the original event. For nearly 20 years it …
Good stuff, I remember seeing an RX8 bumper being taken inside the hotel, didn't realize it was freshly painted 
To say the Parking Lot Build's wiring harness "wasn't a plug and play job" is a severe understatement...we got the wiring diagrams for the 4AGZE and basically custom-built a harness from most of a 4AGE harness and bits of a 4AGZE harness. Even the ECU connectors were different, at one point we considered making connectors from scratch somehow, but then someone figured out that if we broke pieces off the 4AGE connectors, we could stuff them into the 4AGZE ECU in positions where they weren't originally meant to go, and use them as pigtails! One of the big things we messed up was the TPS. We could only see the wires going into the TPS itself because the boot was torn, and me and Robbie decided that the darker-colored signal cable must be the ground. We got that wrong (well actually we were right about the wire colors, but we didn't know that the 4AGZE TPS outputs a reverse signal to the 4AGE TPS!), and apparently inverting the polarity actually flipped the TPS signal, like in a low-budget sci-fi movie, rather than causing a more general fault as you would expect in real life 
Here's some of the footage I took:
Grand entrance of the Covered Corvette Wagon
Parking lot build Thursday time lapse (play alongside Benny Hill theme for full effect)
Pics I took at the $2018 Challenge (including some travel pics at the beginning and end)
That GD TPS (like the TPS was the only issue lol).
Looking back what we should have done as soon as we discovered that we had the wrong harness was to put the 4AGE back in the car (with the manual trans) and swap the head and supercharger over from the 4AGZE. I think the only thing wrong with the 4AGE in the car was a head gasket issue.
We could have run the 4AGE on low boost from the supercharger just by finding a rising rate fuel pressure regulator, which might've been hard but certainly possible. Plus, the 4AGE pistons plus 4AGZE head should actually have slightly higher compression than the 4AGZE. We still would've had the fuel pump issue, but that was solve-able. We might've even been able to use an inline pump to pull through the dead in-tank one.
oh well, hindsight is always slightly less blurry.
In reply to Robbie :
Higher compression, no oil squirters, some sort of calibrated boost leak, NA injectors and ECU, and an already compromised deck surface with a (probably used) head gasket could certainly have made for an interesting failure.
Honestly I liked the 1am no-start idea of putting a carb on the supercharger inlet.
the carb idea would have worked really well! probably.
Hey nice photo of the Team Tearoffguys truck. We really did buy the truck on the cheap after a Junk Car call for our salvage yard A&J Auto Salvage. The guy who popped his clutch <Died> had an Asian bride he bought on the internet. He was trying to keep up with her, Lifting weights and exercising. Still he died and she basically shut the curtains and never paid her property taxes. The day before the property was to change hands 90 k house for 6 k in property taxes we get the call. We loaded everything we could on tow truck and in his 6 by 8 enclosed trailer . $1400 in cash bought everything. The tires are wump wumps because thru the whole foreclosure the truck sat in the garage. Scott Lear checked the age of the tires I think he said 2005? Awesome deal Thanks GRM ! None of this is possible without Marie LaFollette.
Nice thanks for posting the videos of the covered wagon!
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