NYE update!

As we prepare to bid adieu to 2008 and say bonjour to 2009 (don't ask why I'm using French - Le Mans influence maybe?) I decided to take the SE-R to work today.  That's right, a bona-fide DAILY DRIVER.  Those two initials are a red badge of courage for a track car.  It means license and registration, smog testing and road worthiness.  It's easy to make an all out race car, but for endurance racing comfort is an important ingredient in the recipe for success.

I'm glad to report I made it to work in one piece!  Sure the plastic window was noisy at 80mph, but the car ran well, didn't overheat or anything catastrophic.  I think we'll have to do a basic tune-up, but overall this is a strong runner which won't require any miracles to run a 24hr race.

In other good news, our friend Chill from SR20-Forum.com dropped by FVD and picked up our Recaro race bucket for us.  He's dropped it off with Greyhound and it's on a bus (or two) across the country to it's rightful place as the throne of the Nissin GT-R!

Chill also added a little "bonus" package in the form of some AD22VF calipers he was selling.  We got a fair price on it and didn't have to pay any additional "shipping" since they'll also be going on the SE-R.  We just need some rotors, some track-capable pads and some stainless steel brake lines for good measure.  Going with all new hardware is nice, and since it's a safety item it doesn't count against our $500 budget.

Got some interest from a Craigslist post for our SE-R front seats.  Why would anyone want seats out of 15yr old car? The SE-R came with special sport seats that have additional bolsters on the sides which help keep the driver in place.  They actually are pretty nice, but we won't be needing them.  More funds for performance parts!  If I can sell the seats, wheels, trunk & hood, we might just make enough for some real suspension parts!

-Captain Ando 

1st Accounts Receivable (AR) entry - $50!

Packed up some parts today in odd-sized boxes.  Reminds me of the old Pelican Racing days.  Shipping and packaging was a particular talent of mine since I wanted to make sure my customers got their parts in excellent condition.  I know those monkeys in brown and purple are doing their best to destroy my packages, so I take extra special care in packing items up.

What may look like ordinary brown boxes to you actually took hours of time and effort to create and pad/cut/box/tape into their current form.  Doesn't seem worth the effort, but in the overall scheme of things, they're highly valuable.  $25 in profit per box (minus fees and shipping) means $50 cleared up under our $500 budget cap.  That will pay for the header and bank us $30 for future mods.  We're off to a great start!

-Hong 

Wrenching on Christmas evening.

What's car guy to do on this wonderful holiday evening?  Start stripping out the racecar of course!

I removed the door panels to get to some trim pieces that a SR20Forum.com member wanted to buy.  The speaker grilles ended up being part of the whole lower door trim (like 3' long) so I'll have to get creative shipping them out.  The guy's even buying the ashtray!

Another fellow wanted the foglights, even after I posted pictures showing that they were cracked.  He offered $30 which is NUTS because it took me over an hour to remove the dman things.  Still worth it because we cleared up some funds under the $500 spend cap and now can afford some performance parts.  Header and rear sway bar are on the top of my list.

Wrote a nice e-mail to Jay Lamm (guy who runs LeMons) and got a response on Christmas day!  I'm going to try and sell the stock 14" wheels/tires, but not sure who would actually want these!  They're all of 5.5" wide. Wow.  Thinking we should go to 15" x 6.5 or 7" width to run some 205 Azenis.  These appear to be the tire of choice for LeMons.  Time to draft a sponsorship proposal to Falken!

-Hong

The Racing Gods are looking down upon us.

Racing is about preparation, talent and a whole lotta luck.  Even the best drivers in the best cars can get beaten on a lucky SOB on race day.  That's just the way the cards fall.  I have a good feeling about our team's chances given some recent "car-ma" that came our way.

First I mentioned the $20 headers that one of the guys is going to pick up while on Christmas vacation in San Diego. It's a $3-400 item, with a small (repairable) crack.  There were others who wanted it, but the seller wasn't willing to ship.  I half-jokingly posted my status on Facebook as, "looking for someone to pick up a part in San Diego."  My friend Plato saw this and commented he was going down there!  What luck!  We get the header (later this week).

So we also won an auction for a $1500 Recaro racing seat for a mere $26.  Yes, two digits.  It was even used by Milka Duno at some point!  Again, the seller wasn't willing to ship, which helped keep the price low.  I figured we could find someone to pick it up, maybe on a car forum or I could hire a courier/mover off Craigslist.  Again I posted my dilemma on Facebook and AGAIN my teammate Plato came through.  Apparently his co-worker was in the right neighborhood in Florida and could pick up the seat for us!  What tremendous stroke of luck!

Now we've got a real FIA certified seat (albeit a bit expired), with some racing history (and luck?) in it's pads.  Doesn't hurt that our low-buck "race car" is really getting some nice low-buck parts for it.

-Hong

Wheelin and Dealin!

The unique constraints of trying to build up an enduro style race car on a pauper's budget forces you to reconsider what is necessary and what really constitutes a bargain.  The SE-R had a few small issues when we picked it up.  Given the $500 sale price, I didn't really have much to complain about.  The missing passenger window is the biggie, given that the car is supposed to be street-legal and also street parked.  I put a sheet of plastic in the interim to keep out the nasty "winter" we have here in NorCal (read: rain).

NB: We'll end up removing said window for the race, so it technically doesn't count towards our $500 cap, but I need it while the car is still on street duty.

A new window from the dealer would be more than 1/4th the price of the car.  That simply wouldn't do.  I called a few "recyclers" (aka junkyards) to see if they had any.  They did not and it would be around $45 if they did.  Though that's a much more reasonable asking price.  I went to the SR20forum.com and found a guy parting out his SE-R.  I asked him about the window and he said $30 shipped.  Wow!  I tried to bargain, but at $30 he would throw in the window crank as well since it was missing.  Done deal!  I should have the window in by next week.

Continuing on my search for bargains, I found a guy selling a cracked Hotshot header for $20!  Of course I had to have it, even though it would count against our budget ($520 now), but the extra HP will come in handy.  The seller didn't want to ship and he was all the way down in San Diego.  Fortunately for us, all the other interested parties where non-locals as well, so if we could pick it up, it was ours.  As luck would have it, one of the team members was heading down to SD for Christmas.  Score!  The seller was also giving away a bunch of parts which we are hoping to get as spares.  More details to follow on another post.

The biggest bargain to report thus far (and possibly for the rest of this project) is our racing seat.  While one is not specifically required, it is highly recommended and very important to our collective safety on track.  Having used Recaro seats in past cars, that was my top choice.  I even bought two Recaro carseats for my baby boy!  I found one on eBay at a silly $1 starting price.  Watching it all week, I was shocked to see it didn't garner any interest.  With 10 minutes to go it was still listed at $2.25!  The seat was worn and well used, but a new one retails at $1500!  To my delight we "won" the auction at $26. Holy Cow!!!  Shipping will be 2-3x that much, but it's worth it.  Again, as a safety item, this does not count towards our $500 build budget.

More bargain hunting to come I'm sure.  This is almost as fun as the actual racing. :)

-Captain Ando.

Drivers ready?

Back at work on Monday I sent out a few pictures and the link to the 24hrs of LeMons page to some co-workers.  These are some serious gearheads, but I was still surprised by the response.  A few guys want to participate and a few others are thinking about mounting their own $500 charge.

I've got 4 confirmed drivers already, but am now in the unenviable position of turning people down.  We can add two more drivers at most, or we can field two cars!

The Team name has been chosen (can you guess what it is?), but we've got to work on our whole theme to make sure our entry into the race is even accepted.  They limit the field to 90 teams and my guess is they have more entrants than grid spots.  More creative thinking needs to be done here.

-Captain Ando.

First mods

The best part about getting any "new" vehicle are the first mods you do to it to make it your own.  On my other cars I usually do some wheels/tires and other cosmetic upgrades.  In fact, I just added some bling to my family wagon tonight.

For the SE-R, the list of "mods" was a bit different.  Here's an example:

Yeah, that's some duct tape.  I didn't have any black gaffer's tape around, so I'll be sure to remedy the situation soon.  The previous owner had some nasty glue around the broken parts of the mirror, but duct tape is the obvious solution here.  And it works so well.

The power mirrors still work on this car!  

Not to mention the VLSD!  And the transmission does NOT have 5th gear pop-out.  We got really lucky because about 70% of the early cars had this problem.  I know my G20 did and it cost me more than $500 to get it fixed.  Clutch still feels good and holds well so I hope we don't need to do anything to it or the engine.  In an ideal world, this thing will drive for a year and last through the whole race it's destined for.

-Hong

You wanna race a Sentra?

Yeah, it sounds funny, but this isn't your ordinary econobox Sentra. It's a Sentra SE-R.  It was the pocket rocket of the 90's before Honda came along with their VTEC yo!

Some folks even consider it a Classic.

The motor revs like crazy and it's on black sludge oil.  I'll have to do a change soon and might even spring for the good stuff (Mobil 1).  She handles great even on two decent tires (two rears are crap).  Seats are comfy and have good bolstering, but they smell like crap and look like someone pissed on them.  Seating ergo is great and the shifter/clutch still feels good with over 200k on the clock.

Just your typical beater, but this one goes to 7500rpms!

-Hong

And so it starts.

All car guys want to race.  That's pretty much why we're "into cars".  But racing is usually expensive.  The old sayings, "speed costs", "cubic dollars" et al. capture this dilemma.  It only gets worse because racing is inherently dangerous and your car might get damaged on track.  That's why  I stopped doing HPDEs because I couldn't afford to wreck my daily driver.  Luckily, there's a race series where money *doesn't* win.  The cars are limited to just $500!  I bought a set of wheels that cost more than that.  And now I bought a "set of wheels" that cost just that.

Behold!  The Mighty Nissan GT... uh, I mean SE-R!

Shaun and I went down to Watsonville to pick her up.  The tow yard didn't care that it was a Gen-U-Wine SE-R, jut wanted the "sentra" out of their lot.  The car was straight and looked to be in decent running condition.  Some forum kid had written if off as a "smoking engine", but the lady told us the car was initially started with no dipstick so oil was everywhere, especially on the manifold.  We started her us and of course there was a little smoke.  But otherwise it was in good shape.  Took a little test drive and scared Shaun a bit.  I don't think he's used to rat-trap cars! ;)

Broke out the twenties and sealed the deal.  Went to the DMV to get a new title and then had some good Mexican food.

The drive back over 152 was actually FUN!  Sure we got held up by slower traffic in some parts, but having an Elise chase you down some twisties is always a good time.

Got the old girl home in one piece and started to clean her up.  It's gonna require a lot of work, but I can't complain for $500!

-Hong