Cook County P71 -- With just $500 and a Fraternity (Page 1 of 2)

Here's my buddy winning the bid

Here's the adventure to go pick up the car off the lot
It's a google plus 'story' thing, which is pretty neat. However, most of the pictures have annotations, which show up if you click the little comment icon on the bottom right of the pictures.

Here's some camera phone quality shots of the seat

The first thing I want to warn you about is the fact that you are a bunch of Engineers.  It is common knowledge in LeMon's that you do not let your token Engineer work on the car unsupervised.  So if you have 9 engineers, you probably need at least one adult of a slightly redneck bend to supervise/drink all your beer.

The Panther platform is good choice.  Read all the threads about how much is really takes to get a car to the track (usually $2-4K) and hundreds of hours of work.

The first team I crewed for was, and still is, a bunch of friends from Engineering school who all still played with cars, got together and thought Lemons would be fun.  They still seemed to be friends even after about 6 races together with a car that should be great but is actually terrible.

Battery swap, don't sweat it for budget.

Fiberglass seat, you should take photos and send to Evil John (the head tech guy for Lemons) and get his approval.

Since you are all engineering students, my assumption is you probably do not have much money, but if someone on the team does you could get a legendary Lemons Crown Vic that almost requires and engineer to run, the twin-turbo taxi.  You can find that listed on the "cars for sale" page on the forum.

Welcome to the asylum!

Well if the Dr Brandon seat doesn't work you can always go to http://www.northstarmotorsports.com/?gc … MgodmmQAFg to atleast look at some seats and try them out to see what works for you.    THere is also https://www.pegasusautoracing.com/ in wisconsin which will have pretty much everything you will need for racing but they are a longer drive, however they do ship and as long as the part is in their wisconsin warehouse it will probably show up next day with the cheapest shipping.

I can get you the contact info to the cage builder therood mentioned.  He has been spending a lot of time working on the TV shows chicago fire and chicago pd, which means it will be hard to get a hold of him and it may be a while before he can do it according to filming schedule.  The plus side though is he currently is building a lot of cages for old p71s for that show so I'm sure he knows lots about that platform.  Not sure when the last time he built a cage for Lemons so be sure to give him the current rules just to be safe.  I would suggest having the seat and a harness when  you get it caged so he can fab everything up around that.  He can build the mount to the cage if you don't need to adjust it, or you can mount it with sliders or something  if you need to adjust the seat.  If the seat isn't mounted you may have some issues later with belt angles and cage placement.

He built my cage and I've only got compliments about it, and price wise most people don't believe how little I paid for it, but I mine was the first Lemons cage he did so it has gone up a little since then.

Hmmm, I am slightly less inclined to believe you wasted you money now as it contains all the elements of an acceptable seat without being able to actually put my hands on it.

Two should belt holes in about the right location...check
Crotch belt hole..check
The basic shape and design of a popular racing seat that starts with an "S"

I will let more experienced hands weigh in but this might not be as big a mistake as everyone (including me) immediately assumed.

How the $500 racecar costs $5000 you will find out once you have bought all the safety gear and budget exempt stuff plus spares.

If it was a former Lemons car they can get a residual and that is what you will have to spend, if not you can ask Judge Phil since he will know.  You are basically paying xxx for the car and xxxx for the safety equipment.   While you need to document everything you purchase and have it with you the final decision on what class and how many penalty laps you receive are from the Judges who do a very good job typically in classing and penalizing cars.

I am sure the seller will give you a receipt that says $500 for the car and $4500 for all safety gear and theme items.  You show that to the judges at BS inspection and they will decide if they believe it or not.  Since this was a previously raced Lemon, and a fairly well known at that, the worse that could happen is they give you some penalty laps.

Okay, so maybe the Taxi isn't the best example, but I was just suggesting that buying a previously raced car can save boat loads of work and money too.

Again, welcome to Lemons!

I'm going to echo the comments about being careful as engineers. That's how my team started. 5 of us, all friends from college, 4 were engineers. 3 were mechanical and 1 was civil. The last was a business major. All of us were car people. Engineers WILL over-think everything, and that gets you in trouble a lot. When something breaks at a race, (and it will) do not try and figure out why. Just accept that it broke and do something to fix it. You can over-analyse the why later after the race is done.

as far as cars like the turbo taxi. You can show up with a car over the budget, you will get to race. You will just get penalized. It's more fun to stay in the rules, but certain cars are just so amazing that it's fun to see them. I don't think the turbo taxi guys ever tried to hide the fact that they spent way too much, they just wanted to race an amazing car.

That seat looks to be a cheap clone of a Sparco seat. No FIA tags= don't trust it. Sell it to someone for their ricer and buy a real seat. You can find good used seats on Craigslist. Search for Sparco or Corbeau. Check for the FIA tag (go look at the sparco or corbeau page), and make sure you understand what a real FIA sticker looks like. There are clone seats with fake FIA stickers.

cheap safety items won't be tolerated.