April 10, 2011
1367305[/URL]"]1367305[/URL], member: 6059"]
Anyone here? Any details on the car and how you did? Cougar with unknown donor front cover, pistons on the roof, and nearly enough spoilers from the few pictures I have seen of it, with "phuckoff" plates
1367352[/URL]"]1367352[/URL], member: 8227"]
Sounds like MadMikeyL's car
Yeah that was me, just got back. The car was ridiculously fast in the straights, but we haven't spent any money on tires so we couldn't keep up in the corners. Also, because of the combination of those 2 things, our brakes were not up to the task. We were running the twin piston PBRs up front and stock discs in the rear, but on the straight we were taching out 4th gear which translates to 139mph! Then due to our crappy dry-rotted tires, we would have to slow down to about 45-50 for that first turn. We overheated the brakes so bad that it somehow welded the bakolite caliper pistons to the metal pad! After that, we put on new pads in the rear and new rotors, pads, and calipers in the front, and after only an hour on the track, we had already burned away the rubber boots on the calipers, so for today we had to back off and limit ourselves to 120mph on the straights just to keep the brakes alive! If you look at that last pic on the front of the hood we welded the destroyed pads. We have a running theme of adding the destroyed parts onto the car in some fashion, so this year we got a brake pad hood ornament! The pistons are from last year that the capitol offense where we won most heroic fix. What happened there is we spun the #7&8 rod bearings, and nobody had another small block ford motor that they were willing to sell, so we took it all apart, found the problem and that the crank was shot, so we came up with the idea of welding shut the oil holes for those 2 pistons, rebuilding the engine less 2 cylinders, and we ran it as a 6-cylinder, and put the 2 pistons on the roof. Also if you look closely on the antenna in both pics you can see the heater hose that we blew the first year. Our next race is Summit Point in WV in June, and the plan now is to spend some money on a hubswap, 13" cobra brakes, and 17" wheels with some wide sticky tires. Summit point is a slower track than this one (we were only hitting 115 last year) but if we could have kept up through the turns we would have been doing pretty good. As it is, with horrible tires and brakes that weren't up to the task, our best lap time was 1:27 compared to a 1:23 fastest lap time by anyone there, so like I said, if we could have stopped and turned as well, we would have done much better.
As for the details on the car now, it is an 89 cougar XR7 running stock sway bars and SC springs with 1.5 coils cut off all 4 springs. Like I said, we were running the twin piston PBRs but they failed miserably so we'll be going to cobra brakes for the next race. The motor is a 5.0 out of an explorer. The last 2 years we were running carburated, which sucked, so this year with the explorer as a donor, we ran EFI and OBD2. The sheet metal cowl hood was necessary to cover the hole left from the old air filter sticking out the hood, as well as to allow clearance for the explorer intake manifold. We have the quarterhorse for our own cars, so we reprogrammed the ECM to eliminate all the auto trans functions, raised the timing curves, and raised the rev limiter to 6K. The trans is an M5R2, and we're running a 3.27TL rear. The spoilers is another tradition we have where after every race we go around to any cars that people have abandoned and steal a spoiler off it and try to find somewhere on the car to attach it. The front bumper cover is actually off a GT500 mustang, hence the GT499 3/4 on top of the windshield. The story behind that is one of the team members has a friend who had the GT500, and someone backed into the car and put a 1" long gouge in the bumper, and he insisted it get replaced instead of repaired, so my friend grabbed the old bumper, put that sticker over top of the gouged spot, then took a ton of zip ties, and attached it to the front of our car, since our original bumper had gotten ripped off in the first race. If you look in the first pic, that chin spoiler thing is actually the top of the stock cougar bumper cut right above the body molding, then zip tied to the GT500 bumper. We had it on this year too when the race started, but one of the guys lost it and went into the dirt then hit a guard rail (see damage on left fender) and it got ripped off. We did get it back at the end of the race though, so we'll zip tie it on again for June.
Here's an in-race shot of us dicing it up with a MarkVIII!
This thread is to document my experience running an MN12 in the 24 Hours of Lemons endurance racing series. We built a car and ran it for 4 or 5 years, finding and addressing failure points along the way, all on as low a budget as possible! By the end of our run, the car had been wrecked and rebuilt a couple times, and was definitely worse for wear, and the prospect of building another car was more work than we were willing to put in, so in the end, the car got dismantled, parted out, and crushed, but we had a great time along the way, and learned a lot about what our cars are truly capable of.
