24 hours of Lemons - Gingerman - October 10th-11th

Intel

TCG Elite Member
Oct 28, 2009
5,889
3,357
Palatine
Ran with the Badstench crew. Early 2000's Mazda3 with a 2.0 liter Duratec/MZR motor. We had transmission issues the last race and put a new to us transmission in it along with a newer clutch.

The old one was a little toast.

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Also managed to run a little late into arriving on friday night as my team members found an exhaust leak once the new transmission was in.


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Car finally arrived friday night and the crew jumped into action to get brakes bled, wheels torqued, exhaust hanger had to be fixed again. We were ready for what would turn out to be the best October race weather I have seen in 5 years.
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Got the car going in the morning and run through Tech inspection with only a minor issue where we had to fix something on our belts. Once that was resolved Charlie was ready to go for his first session in Dale.

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Charlie is a much faster driver than me with a ton of W2W and general racing experience. He quickly worked his way through the pack and moved us up to 2nd place in Class B. We also learned about 3 laps in that our "new" transmission lost third gear. Even with using only 2nd and 4th he managed very consistent times and kept us in the running.

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Video below. Charlie ran a 1:56 without 3rd gear.



Charlie had to come in once the transmission was hard to get into 4th gear. Unfortunately our weekend was cut short yet again by transmission issues. It seems this gearbox the G35m-r used in Mazda3, Mazda6, Mazda5 and older Proteges/Mazda Fords is renowned for flexing under stress causing the third gear to strip out. The "easiest" fix is to find a super cheap Mazdaspeed3 manual trans which will make it a lot tougher. There are plenty of Focuses... Foci? running in this series with the same motor as we have but they have an MTX 75 trans that holds up to the abuse.

Overall it was fun. Hoping we can resolve our issues and get a finish out of this car. I am the big guy on the right!

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Intel

TCG Elite Member
Oct 28, 2009
5,889
3,357
Palatine
Full album here of other cars.

General photos of other hoopties. Some of the highlights below.
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This used to be a 3rd gen F Body.
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Friday Night new motor swapping schenanigans.
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Spoiler tilts forward when braking.

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When you mix a Colorado and a Saturn Sky.
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OmniGLH

Regular
Apr 24, 2013
142
166
Huntley
I co-owned a Lemons team from 2010 through ~2017. Great fun, we had a lot of really good racing. Our car got better as we worked more of the bugs out of it, we had multiple overall podiums and a few wins.

One of our drivers eventually totaled the car out at an Autobahn event and we opted to hang it up vs. sink more money into it. When we started it really was a $500 car done on the cheap so it wouldn't hurt if we got chosen for the People's Curse. By the time we quit they no longer did The Curse and we probably had $10k into the car thanks to all their new rules and regs, and the series wasn't worth it anymore for us.
 
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Intel

TCG Elite Member
Oct 28, 2009
5,889
3,357
Palatine
I co-owned a Lemons team from 2010 through ~2017. Great fun, we had a lot of really good racing. Our car got better as we worked more of the bugs out of it, we had multiple overall podiums and a few wins.

One of our drivers eventually totaled the car out at an Autobahn event and we opted to hang it up vs. sink more money into it. When we started it really was a $500 car done on the cheap so it wouldn't hurt if we got chosen for the People's Curse. By the time we quit they no longer did The Curse and we probably had $10k into the car thanks to all their new rules and regs, and the series wasn't worth it anymore for us.

What car did you guys run? I used to run in a shitty red rx7 with a carbed rotary. We mostly ran autobahn races.
 
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