| –
We see a lot of engine swaps in 24 Hours of LeMons cars, some more ridiculous— ridiculously awesome, that is—than others. There's the Polaris snowmobile–engined Miata, the E30 BMW with Chrysler slant-six, any number of Detroit-V-8-into-sporty-import swaps, and then there's the ever-popular Mazda rotary swap. On paper, the cheap, lightweight, and compact Mazda 12A or 13B ought to transform any small car into a road-course-eating monster, but the reality of an endurance race sometimes tells a different tale. Here's the story of Team Scuderia Craptastic's Wankelized mini-Corvette.
We've seen a half-dozen or so Opel GTs in 24 Hours of LeMons racing over the years. Several had GM 2.8 or 3.8 V-6 engine swaps (which didn't work out so well), and the others had the original Opel 1900 mill (which worked a bit better). You can pick up a beater GT for practically nothing these days; solve the problem of the weak engine and you'll have a nimble rear-wheel-drive sports car that looks cool and goes pretty well. The engineers in Scuderia Craptastic figured the Mazda 13B rotary would really wake up their Opel, and so they lurched into an engine-swapping frenzy, showing up to last fall's Showroom-Schlock Shootout at Autobahn Country Club in Illinois. Here's our first sight of the car at the BS Inspection. 
The car reeked of last-second panicky thrashing and didn't quite pass the tech inspection the first time through, but at least the engine installation looked all right. With 146 fuel-injected horses in a car that weighed just 1800 pounds—and that's when it had a cast-iron four-banger and complete interior—Scuderia Craptastic's machine looked promising. The team had all day and all night Friday to get the car ready for the green flag on Saturday morning. No problem!
Unfortunately, it turned out that the team's logo was quite apt. In addition to all the safety/tech failures, the Mazda EFI system was completely kaput. Quick, break out the wrenches!
With junkyards about to close, the Scuderia Craptastic guys scavenged an impressive collection of random, ill-suited-to-13B-use carburetors and spent the night in a gasoline-soaked hell, fabricating adapters and throttle linkages for a series of brain-meltingly terrible fuel-delivery systems. The car fired up on Saturday with a borrowed Harley-Davidson carburetor, but that setup proved not-so-drivable.
Finally, a mysterious two-barrel carb of possible Ford Ranger provenance did the job, and the Scuderia Craptastic Opel hit the track. Seconds later, the call for the tow truck went out. Repeat. Endlessly.
The Opel guys weren't giving up, though. They would swarm on the car every time the wrecker dropped it off in their pit space and try to solve the latest problem. Finally, they got the GT to the point where it would run several laps before catastrophic overheating forced it to pit (under its own power or on the hook, depending on how far around the track the driver was when the engine started to crap out). In order to maximize the amount of on-track time per stint, the team would push the car the quarter-mile to the track entrance before firing the engine and starting the overheating countdown.
We'd like to say that the Scuderia Craptastic Opel was blindingly quick when it did make it on to the track, but that was not the case. However, the Opel managed to beat the best lap time of the glacially slow SchnitzelWagen Volkswagen Squareback . . . by 0.03 second. We at LeMons HQ were so impressed by the team's refusal to surrender that we had no choice but to give it the much-coveted Most Heroic Fix trophy. We're sure Scuderia Craptastic will have most of the bugs worked out at its next race and we'll be able to see the true potential of this fine racing machine.
from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com |
No comments:
Post a Comment