Garage Heroes (In Training)

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

Cars, Mostly ours

GHIT 0039 EVO School – Seneca Falls

Our Teams Second Autocross School

Jennifer at Evo School
Jennifer about to head out for her runs at the Evo School in Seneca Falls NY

Jennifer, Liam, Vicki, and Bill attended the EVO School for Autocross this weekend in upstate NY near Seneca Falls.  It was Bill’s second time and the first time for everyone else.  We all agree that the instructing staff was awesome and the structure was excellent.  We all learned a ton and would recommend it to anyone interested in trying to push their driving limits in a safe environment for the first time to experienced racers and autocrossers.  The course is designed to help everyone progress from whatever level they are currently at.  In addition, there are two more levels of courses offered by the EVO School and we can’t wait to try those as soon as possible.   

GHIT 0039 EVO School – Seneca Falls

This follows up on our earlier episode when Alan and Bill attended the Evo School held at Giants Stadium earlier this year.

Earlier Episode Link

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GHiT 0029: HPDE Preparation

Or For Your First Track Day

Hooked On Driving with a Mini
We will be learning with the Hooked On Driving team this weekend!

Vicki and Bill go over what goes on at a high performance driving event (HPDE), how to prepare for the event, and what to bring etc. 

Our season kicks off with a weekend of HPDE at New Jersey Motorsports Park (NJMP) in Millville New Jersey this weekend.  We took a page from our friends at Everyone Racers podcast and “ran it live”.  We will likely have an update episode from the track this weekend.  If you are in the area, please stop by and say hello.  We would love to hear from you.   

Cars for the Weekend

We will be bringing 4 of our cars to the weekend. Our first choice is the Mazda MX-5 Miata that we have with a turbo and some other performance mods, mostly from Flyin’ Miata

Our Flyin’ Miata MX-5

Our second car will be the Toyota 86 with TRD equipment from the dealer and otherwise stock

Toyota 86 TRD
Liam at his First Track Day with the Toyota 86 TRD

Just in case the MX-5 has an issue with it being a convertible, we will also be bringing our John Cooper Works Mini Cooper as our first back up vehicle for the weekend.

Mini JCW with Mia
Our Mini JCW with our mini driver to be Mia

If things go really poorly and we have any unexpected issues, our final choice for the weekend with be our BMW M240i.

BMW M240i
BMW M240i

Car Selection Philosophy

Some of you may be asking why we have this as our preferred order and why we selected these cars instead of some of our purpose built cars we use with Lemons, AER, Lucky Dog, etc.

Lets discuss the race car question first. It comes down to reliability and current capability. We want to maximize our time on track and the instruction we can get while there. We have asked for coached to ride with us for the entire time on track. Most of our race cars only have one seat, so that isn’t the most comfortable idea for our coach. Its often referred to as right seat driving and most of our cars don’t have a right seat. Second, the race cars are either not ready to race yet or aren’t as reliable as we would expect from our road cars.

As far as the priority list above, well it all really comes down to our drivers levels and our team philosophy. We are more concerned with our driving ability improving than our actual lap times. (It is practice, not a race after all) So we would prefer int he following order:

  1. Manual Transmission
  2. Rear Wheel Drive
  3. Handling & Braking
  4. Acceleration
  5. Top Speed

Since all of our current racing cars and trucks are rear wheel drive with manual transmissions, the first two items allow us to most closely simulate racing conditions during our HPDE. We equally rate handling and braking as our top considerations for maximizing both learning and fun at the track. Much lower on our list is acceleration, but next to turns where you feel g-forces side to side, we do admit to liking the feel of the g-forces pushing us back into the seat.

The last/least important item on our list is the top speed. Think of it this way, is you are driving on a highway at 60 or 70 mph or in a commercial plane at 400-500 mph, it really doesn’t feel a whole lot different. Second, especially in a learning situation, all that the higher speed does is make things happen faster and therefore less time to adjust, react, and learn the differences during a turn or other maneuver. It is our thought that allowing for more time to learn, we will learn more, or at least have the possibility.

We hope Alan comes back to join us on the podcast soon.  But to be honest, we would rather have the Capri ready for our upcoming race, lol. 

Thanks again from the Garage Heroes In Training!

Here is a direct link to the show: 

GHiT 0029: Prepping for an HPDE or Your First Track Day

Garage Heroes In Training
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Episode 0009: Everyone Racers, no, not really or is it?

Everyone Racers Podcast is a must listen 

With our favorite racing podcast taking a week off break, we took a chance to fill the gap.  It took a bot over 24 times to get something “presentable”.  In this episode of our podcast, Alan, Vicki, and Bill try to make a podcast similar to theirs.  As you can guess, their’s is usually much better, but we had a good time and we hope you do too.   Special thanks to getting us racing and podcast must go out to our friends over at the Everyone Racers podcast.  

You can find the Everyone Racers podcast at the link below.  Please subscribe, its well worth it.  

The Everyone Racers Podcast Hosts

Our intended episode for this week (well really last week since we are late) is still in editing.  Due to a few recording issues, it is still not close to ready after 9+ hours of editing.  It may show up soon or we will have to re-record it.  we shall see.  

If there is anything that you would like to know that we may have left out, please send us an email using the link below or even better would be to leave a review on iTunes for our podcast and in the comments section enter any questions or topics you may be interested in us finding an answer for you.  Thanks again for coming. 

Podcast Episode 0009:  Our Everyone Racers FanCast

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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.

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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.   

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