Garage Heroes (In Training)

Learning as we go. Come along with us and Enjoy the Ride!

Bill Fischer

Truck Theme for our New Racing Truck

or What to do with El Jeffe/The Boat

The Artist Formerly Known as the Boat
Picking up the new race truck.

With the Capri dead, the Mustang ready to go racing, and the new truck added to our team, we started working on the new design.  As always we have two goals with our car designs.  1) Stay within our “Garage Heroes” thematic lane and 2) Try to make a car better than any of our prior efforts.  So here we are, looking at our new (to us) Chevy S-10/Isuzu Hombre.  Mechanically, it seems in almost race ready condition.  We do have a clutch line bleeding issue to work through but even I should be able to get through that.  Any ideas on what our Chevy S-10 truck theme design could be or should be?

Complicating issues are that we don’t have a lot of time to work through this and we are weather dependent, as all our work is outside until we get another house with a garage.  Also, it is a race truck, so that lends to general direction and eliminates several design direction choices.  

Too Much?  Come on you know us by now

Enter Labor Day weekend.  We have our racing team mates / brother and sister in law’s family up for the long weekend.  Initially reason was for them to get away from home and spend some time with us and the new addition to our family.  Zoe Lemons Fischer.

Zoe Lemons Fischer posing for her profile picture

Far be it from me to push things along, but I wanted to get a new theme in place for our upcoming race at New Hampshire in 6 weeks.  After looking at the a 1997 Isuzu Hombre truck, we agreed on a theme and direction.  Now a little birthday guilt from me and the whole team was off to Home Depot to start working on our new theme.  The centerpiece was intended to mount onto the roof of the car.  We would also do our usual at home paint job and apply several decals to mostly finish up.  We like to try to leave some time for dialing in our themes with final additions and tweaks.

What is the theme for a super hero car that is actually a truck?  We thought immediately of the Hulk.  Our initial plan was to have a Hulk head on the cab of the truck and then have the body extend out the bed of the truck down to having some large Hulk feet at the end of the bed.  Was the Hulk captured, sleeping it off after a night of partying with Thor, getting a limo ride home from “Super Uber”, we weren’t sure at this point, but let’s not have a plan get in the way of progress.

We stated with three different paths to make a head.  One was to build it out of spray foam around a PVC tube and mounting bracket.  The second was to build it out of solid foam insialtion boards and then scuplt and/or foam as needed.  The last way was that we found a Halloween decoration head that we woudl use to build up a Hulk head onto it with spray foam insualtion.  with three ways of making it, one of them had to work.  How hard coudl it be?

If you remember, we made “Bondo” to drive along on top of the Mustang our of PVC tubing and spray foam.  However, the foam we used wasn’t great for detailed shaping since it had large open pores on the inside, kind of reminiscent of some overly rustic breads.  So this time, we tried a new spray foam that worked much better.  It was XXXXfddX spray foam.  It does not expand as much, but it does have a finer pore structure and is much more easily formed and shaped. than the old foam we tried earlier.

As most of you know, I have zero/negative artistic ability, so Jennifer and Vicki took the reigns on making the Hulk head and the rest of the truck theme design.  Progress was pretty quick.  We tried the new foam and it seemed to work great.  We used a variety of shaping techniques, some working better than others, but all making a huge mess, lol.  We ended up liking the Dremel with a barrel sander attachment as the best for fine work.  For larger material removal we went with a sure-form type of tool with a variety of sizes being handy.  We did end up purchasing a hot foam cutter set, but it wouldn’t arrive in time for this one.  we can report back on its use on our next project.

  • Initial Sculpting
  • Touch up required
  • Foam hair extensions

So the Hulk ended up taking about 2 days to fabricate including drying time.  The final product is to remain secret until the unveiling at our Lemons race in New Hampshire.

So here is the part of the story that may show the potential issue with running without a plan.  We started the head before we had the truck.  Unfortunately, the head we made was a bit too large for the truck.  I think we had in mind a full size truck and the truck is just a wee bit smaller.

  • Too much?
  • Too big?

New Truck Theme Ideas

Time for several team meetings, discussions, and minor disagreements.  The clock was ticking and we either had to change plans, start over, or leave the truck theme as is and run what we brung (or bought).  Our team may have a candidate for our new truck theme, but it may not be better than our last car and time is running out.

Any ideas or suggestions?  I think we have agreed on a plan but maybe there is a better idea.  We would love to hear from you on a potential truck theme you’d like to see us try.  Even if we don’t do it now, we may on our next car or when we redo our car theme or truck theme in the future.    Thanks again for following along.

Come Out with Us and Enjoy the Ride!

Learn to Race versus Learn to Drive a Race Car

Learning to Drive a Race Car

When we first went out on the race track, we expected to be slow relative to the other drivers.  We viewed our first race as an opportunity to learn to race a car.  We had all raced go carts, most of us many, many times.  But we weren’t expecting the amount of information that we were being presented.  Both the pace and volume of information was overwhelming.  There were “rumors” that some of us had already driven faster than we ever went on the race track but there we were on the track and we had to:

  • Drive safely
  • Drive quickly
  • Learn the track and plan our racing “line”
  • Watch out for traffic ahead of us
  • Watch out for faster traffic from behind
  • Monitor the track for debris
  • Modify line and speed as a result of any changes incurred from above
  • Learn to race other cars
We had a few items to process

And on top of that, we also had to monitor the “hidden” flag stations that were along the track.  This was simply no longer anything like rush hour traffic.  (Even though the Capri was travelling at fairly low speeds, at NJMP, rarely above 60 mph/100 kph)

What we did learn at our first race was considerable.  Eventually, things seemed to slow down, even though our car was going faster.  Race traffic wasn’t as large of a problem.  Racing line and the needed adjustments came a bit more naturally.  we even began to see every flag station on every single lap.  However, while we were faster, we still weren’t all that fast.   We ended the race almost in the exact middle, but it was largely a reflection of our car prep more than any driving “speed”.  There was a lot to learn and we started to look for ways to improve.  After all, we are Garage Heroes In Training, with the emphasis on the “In Training”.

Time to go aback to school

Admittedly, I like learning and I like books, so I went and looked into many books and bought a few.  Ross Bentley’s Speed Secret Series was recommended highly so we picked it up.  We also picked up a book by Ben Collins and another by Paul Gerrard  (maybe I have a thing for former “Stig’s”).  We also looked into YouTube resources, but they varied in quality and the information was less reliable on being correct on what we should do.  Another issue was that admittedly reading isn’t the most exciting thing to do and we all ended up getting sucked into the race car fixing and race weekend preparation throughout the summer and most of the pages have yet to see my eyes.  I also looked on audible and none of them seemed to be available on audio book formats.  Too bad, learning to drive while listening to the book while driving seems like an awesome way to do it.  (Open hint/request to the authors)

We also did some HPDE driving classes and go cart racing practices.  Both were good, but I still felt like there was more that could be done and it was obvious we had a lot of room to improve so we weren’t talking about the last little bit, we all had large open chunks of things we were doing wrong and plenty things to learn to race cars more efficiently and effectively, especially in traffic..

We are aiming to improve!

So what options remained?  Private coaching seemed like a good plan.  Cost, availability, travel requirements , restricted time availability made that a bit more challenging to perform frequently to really get better.  HPDE courses also fell into a similar list of restrictions.  What we were trying to avoid was reinforcing bad habits over and over, so like in golf bad practice is worse than no practice at all for reinforcing bad habits.  This concern has led to us towards discounting I-racing/simulators.  While we could see our lap times go down and potentially learn the race course, we could also reinforce bad habits that may impact our driving.  What we needed was a more frequent, higher repetition method that we could do at home or while driving regularly day to day.

Some more internet sleuthing and Google-Fu led to two things we are going to try.  The first is a digital track walk of an upcoming race track that I have never seen in person.  While the two in person track walks we have done with the Three Pedal Mafia have been tremendously helpful, and we will continue to do them at every track that we can, they can only transpire while we are both at a track and usually at the end of the practice day or first race day when the track allows us out there.  This video track walk looks to give us a large percentage of that experience, but we can view it at home, before we get to the track and even look at it repeatedly.  We wont have good feedback until we race at Road Atlanta in December, but I will definitely report back. 

Also, to augment this, we purchased two online video courses from Ross Bentley for Performance Driving 101 and Inner Speed Secrets 201 as a bundle.  These will hopefully help us identify what we are doing wrong or missing and reinforce what we are already doing correctly.  In addition, we can hopefully use these principals to practice on the road and maybe even while cart racing and on simulators.  Again, we don’t know how this will go, but for less than the cost of a single day at most High Performance Driving Education/Experience classes we are going to give it a shot.  I hope to report back in the coming weeks with our progress, in addition to the usual race summaries we have for our upcoming races at Hew Hampshire in October and Road Atlanta in December.  With both of these the goals remain the same.  We are all looking to learn to drive better and also to learn to race cars better.  

Graduation by ?

If you have any questions that I may not have covered already, please let us know.  I can add it into this article or respond through email.  There is even talk amongst our team of starting up a podcast to help everyone learn along with us.  Hopefully, we can help you to get into this sport we love with your friends and family.  Once you do, you will have a ton of new friends as well. 

So Come Out with Us and Enjoy the Ride!

Logo: A Real One

After my initial attempts at a logo, we decided to go get some help and develop a real one for our team/  Why do we need a logo?  No idea really, but it could be used on shirts and decals etc.  If we ever do decide to get into podcasting to chronicle our trials and tribulations (and learning) it could be helpful.  So, here goes.  (drum roll in background if you listen carefully)

New Garage Heroes In Training Logo. Our nee GHiT Logo.
Our New GHiT Logo

We also made a few other design options for special use/just in case we needed it.  

  • Wingless
  • Pistons
  • Wrenches

I think it came out great.  Hopefully, it will look good to you while your browsing through our website in the coming years.  

PS  If you ever see us around, please stop by and say hello.  We would love to meet you.  We hope to have stickers with us if you want one.  Great Christmas gifts, lol.  

Come Out with Us and Enjoy the Ride!

New Car Solution (s)

  • Kill it Off
  • Repair and Re-animate
  • Call Igor

So where are we now.  The Capri is currently dead and needs a new camshaft at least.  This was the original racing car of our team and it may not be able to be resuscitated.  We are now faced with a few alternatives that we must choose from.  So, what is our new car solution?  As we covered in our last post, we can either fix the Capri as it is, sell the Capri fixed or as is, or perform a drive train transplant.  If we go the transplant route, we have a lot of questions as to what engine and transmission to use and can our team even do it.

So, what would you do in our position?  We received a lot of feedback, email, and conversations over the past week or so and ended up doing what you may have guessed.  We ended up thinking that the best car solution for our team at this point was…….to do both.  We ended up buying a car from our friends at the Three Pedal Mafia that they had used for many races and had a proven track record.  But we are also going to rebuild the Capri with a new motor and transmission. 

Why choose, when you can do both!

New Car for the GHiT Team

In a former “Life”

The newest addition to the Garage Heroes In Training car family is a bit difficult to classify.  It began life at a 2003 Chevy S10 pickup truck but has been bonded with a 1997 Isuzu Hombre body.  After racing with 3PM for many years and under many themes, we are now underway with the process to re-theme it into our team.  One of the primary reasons we chose to go this way was that our team is at a point where we really need to maximize our track time and having a reliable car we can all race in is our primary concern at this point.  Since the car/truck/boat has shown to be reliable and many/most of the issues have already been ironed out, we took the leap and added another car to our team.  We can’t release the details of the new theme until we unveil the car at our next race in New Hampshire at NHMP for the 24 Hours of Lemons “Halloween Hooptie Fest”, but rest assured, we are trying to upgrade our theme effort and hope we can pull this off.  Stay tuned for a separate update.

“New” Capri for the Team

The more complicated item is what to do with the Capri.  We could replace the cam shaft and hope that is all that is wrong.  Right now, we are getting cam shaft prices at around $300.  Or go with a transplanted drive train.  The five top car solution choices we have at this point are:

  1. Put one of our spare 2.3-liter turbo four Mustang engines in so we have both the Capri and the Mustang are the same.  Pluses being same spare parts, but downside is that these are becoming harder to find if we need more. 
  2. Put in another 2.8-liter V6 Cologne engine but then we are still stuck with the weak 4 speed transmission and these are also not terribly easy to find. 
  3. Change to a Mustang 5.0-liter V8, cheap and plentiful but maybe a bit heavy.
  4. Change to a Chevy 3.8-liter V6 which should bump up the horsepower and be close to the same weight
  5. Change to a 351 Cleveland.  I am not too familiar, but it was also suggested. 

Well, we have our next race with the Capri in the spring of 2019, so we do have time, but we’d like to get started ASAP to make sure we can get this done in time and work all the bugs out.  Our team is divided at this point and still looking into the engine options.  Eventually, we will run out of turbo 4’s for the Mustang and switch it over to the same as we choose for the Capri, so the decision is important, and we haven’t finalized yet. 

Any opinions or other suggestions?  I have a personal favorite in the race but will remain silent at this point.  We would love to hear from you.  Thanks again for following along.   

Come Out with Us and Enjoy the Ride!

New Car Options

  • 1974 Capri at NJMP May 2018
  • 1974 Capri after Thompson Race August 2018

Some of you following along at home on our trials and tribulations in going from a true zero talent and zero knowledge amateur endurance racing team towards our eventual goal of living up to the first part of our name may have noticed we had a significant casualty to our team.  The original car we started with oh so long ago (ok, our first race was only last May) has had a heart attack and it may not be able to be resuscitated.  We are now faced with a few alternatives that we must choose from.  so what are our new car solutions?

Car Options Moving Forward

First, we can repair the Capri and start racing it again.  Advantages of this would include:

It’s Alive!
  • Probably the lowest cost
  • Not a lot of labor
  • Capri drives and handles pretty
  • Very communicative to the driver
  • Remains fairly stock

Disadvantages are:

  • Not sure that is the cam shaft is all we broke
  • Parts are getting harder and harder to find
  • Drive train weak spot would still remain the 4-speed transmission, especially third gear
  • Car still could use another 50 or so horsepower to be pretty special

Or we could do an engine and transmission (drive train) swap.

Keep on Running!

Advantages would include:

  • Stronger engine and transmission possible
  • Reduced cost and better availability of spare parts
  • More power possible

Disadvantages would be:

  • Not stock, likely to be a Frankenstein build
  • Team mechanical skill and are we up to it
  • May be higher cost, depends on the cost of the donor parts

The only other choice would be to put the Capri out to pasture and get another car.  

Much more than a flesh wound

Additional Info:

While we may end up changing the theme, we all tend to really like the car and would really like to keep it going and racing.  The Capri also seems to be a favorite amongst the paddock crowd.  Maybe they like it or maybe they want us to keep it racing so they don’t have to worry about us beating them?  Lol.

So here we are.  What should we do?  If we do the swap, what should we use?  Or should we let it go and get another car to race?  Are than any other options?  Please chime in and let us know what you think. 

PS we need to make a decision pretty quickly as we plan on racing in the 24 Hours of Lemons Halloweeen Fest race in New Hampshire in the mid -October (~5 weeks from now)

We will report back in on our progress and decision in the next week or less.  Tune in.  Same bat time.  Same bat channel.  

Enjoy the Ride!