What happened next.... Labor Day weekend, 2009

Brian and I start going to town on the engine bay and lighting. $20 up front, $30 in the rear. We spend five days a week for the next six weeks working on the car. We all feel the stress, but somehow do not turn into whiners.


Most of the junkyard wiring harness. Katherine starts getting it connected to the car.

Why is the engine not coming? That motor mount bolt is stuck….. time for the SawzAll!

The engine and trans come out, finally.

We get very lucky here – no frame damage incurred, and quite a few parts off the old engine are salvageable. We debate the validity of selling it to the scrap metal yard to offset car costs, but don’t have time to break it down. This pays off later when we need the oil pump and exhaust manifold.The new ones go in. $195 goes into the car. Thank goodness the clutch is good. Compression on all cylinders is good, too.

Too bad we didn't check the oil pressure... That would come back to haunt us.

Blast from the past.... First week of May, 2009

Paul pays $150 (!) for it, Nico makes sure it is not a total piece of trash, and Johnny picks it up. Scirocket arrives in Katherine’s drive and is quickly branded the Shitrocket.

We start trying to sell the rallye tyres and extra wheels.

It sits there under a $29 car cover for several months.

Announcement date, 2009

The Scirocket leaves for Ohio, where it sits for a month, awaiting a new cage. Look at all of that water that pooled up in the cabin!



Crappy cage made out of welded tube. The cage builder in OH flaked on us, so we lost that four weeks. That hurts.



We continue to try to sell the wheels and tyres. No luck.

Theme time...

We're going back and forth between a cheesy 80s band thing - think Kraptwerk, the Musical, and some sort of Pokemon-inspired bit featuring Team sciRocket, the perennial losers on the kids' TV show. Hmmmm..... If we do the Pokemon thing, I get to wear thigh-high go-go boots....... And a big purple wig...... Hmmmm.......

Getting the team together

I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you about how we got together.

I wanted to do the LeMons thing, so I started asking people who I thought might be like-minded. Ideally, everyone would know something about VWs, because that's what I know most about. Paul, Joe, and Brian jumped in immediately. Paul and Joe had a Spec Miata at one point and missed the thrill, and Brian wanted to get more track time and real wheel-to-wheel experience. Our ace Scirocco guy, Nico got himself moved for work, so we had to find a couple of people to fill the remaining seats. Tom and Matt had been batting the idea around for a while, even had picked up a BABE car (the condiment car) from my former BABE teammates, but hadn't got their efforts focused. When we offered the opportunity to glom on, they jumped in feet-first. Both proved to be valuable additions, especially at the track.

Not too bad for starting with a post on a message board that said "I want to run the LeMons. Who's in?"

Fun fact: All of the team members shy of Brian own TDIs. We would race a TDI, but Brian's our engine expert, and he knows 2.sl0s. The rest of us are learning.

Getting started.... as Doing Community Service

We entered the 24 Hours of LeMons at Nelson Ledges last year with this creative entry. We had originally planned to use a different car, but then Paul found the Scirocket on craigslist, and things went downhill at an even greater rate than we could have ever dreamed of!

"We’re Doing Community Service, and we want to get assigned to the 24 Hours of LeMons, that silly race where people put $500 crapcans on the track and try to keep them alive for an entire 24 hour endurance race. We have a story – really, it’s true! It was even more true before the real Johnny got beat up by the lovely MI economy.

So, let's begin with where it all started, back in March. We all knew about the LeMons races, and we had a plan…..

We were going to be "Fast guys, Rich guys, and Idiots,"* but we couldn't find anyone who was fast or rich.

And then Johnny got yet another phone call from the City of Berkley for having too many yard cars, so we decided that we would do some "community service" and fix one of them up. Mostly so the one PITA neighbor who kept making the bogus complaints would stop bitching.

Of course, one thing (beer) led to another (beer) and someone had the great idea that turning it into a racecar would somehow make it acceptable to the city. At that point, it occurred to us that a $200 yard car with a squeeze-bulb bicycle horn would be a great LeMons platform, and since all the other cars we looked at when we were going to be fast and rich didn't pan out, how fabulous for us!

That's how we got to be Doing Community Service. You should put us on the grid so there is (more) proof that yard cars are good for something, and so Johnny can have a famous car in his yard.

We bring to the paddock: a full beer fridge (and a generator to keep it cold), a female team captain who can actually drive (she only spun the Corvair once, and she writes for CarDomain.com), some Limoncello (this Italian lemon booze that we cook up), and a bunch of stupid smart people. Like, PhD smart, and still dumb enough to run this race. And a Volkswagen. You can never have too many Volkswagens. Johnny is proof of this. We also plan for a very attention-getting (read: distracting) pit board. Our graphics guy assures us of this. He knows some strippers.

We're:

Katherine - team captainness and driver and chemical tribologist
Paul - expert driver who still fits in his firesuit and PhD operations chemist
Joe - other expert driver who still fits in his firesuit and has something to do with keeping a major hospital functional
Brian - engine builder and graphics guy and Macintosh Professional
Matt - driver and Diesel guy (what's he doing here?) and aligner of fancy cars
Tom - Matt's friend who won't crack up the car (this being an important thing when you're racing)

Mark - pit crew and one of those computer geeks that we all wish would grant us eternal admin rights
Jason - pit crew with a multimeter. Don't mess with the multimeter.

We're also pretty competent drivers who have all done at least one HDPE event, and we can swap drivetrains on a Volkswagen faster than those Chard Beef guys and their Regal. Really - four hours for an engine swap? Those guys claimed they knew what they were doing. We can do it in 90 minutes, two hours if we don't have a hoist. We only know because we've done it so many times already. Yeah. We bring a lot of spares, too. You never know with Volkswagens.

You know you want us. We already have the car. We have lots of VW paraphernalia. We're not giving up our costumes yet, but we'll make it worth your while.

*A famous book about racing cars. We may be stupid, but we’re not illiterate."

Welcome!

This marks the second year for Scirocket Racing, so we've started a blog to keep tabs on the whole mess.

I'll be telling the story of year one in between posts about this year's attempts to reach renown on the asphalt. Stay tuned for all the gory 2.sl0-laden, 02A-crashing goodness!