24 hours of Lemons highschool club (Page 2 of 2)

I highly agree with the bold above.  Street pads were NEVER meant to stop a car from 100 MPH (assuming yours can go that fast) over an over for 7 hours.  They will fade quickly and be down right dangerous.  We too run ST43s, mainly due to their longevity.  There are cheaper pads that stop just as well (Hawk Blues, or Blacks) but the ST43s just seem to keep going.

Back on brakes ... pads are important but brake fluid is more important. Spend $20 for a bottle of Motul 600 or some other really high temp brake fluid. New drivers will use brakes more often and stay on them longer than they should. The result is about two laps in you will boil the brake fluid and find yourself with extreme fade or no brakes. For most cars, you can flush the entire brake system and replace the fluid with high temp fluid with one bottle.

Got it, I will definitely get race pads and good brake fluid, that is very good to know. After all of the little (big) things I had looked over (had not even considered in the first place) my budget is closer to the $4500 mark, on the bright side, I think I have almost all of the expenses listed now, emphasis on almost.

EDIT: I just got approval from the school (somehow) and have launched the GoFundMe. We are trying to race in 2018 Houston we have a problem race. Anyways here is the link. https://www.gofundme.com/SASLeMons

Best advice...buy a completed car that is well sorted and has never had a significant collision. Confirm that it has the following: 1. A legal Lemons compliant cage, decent brake upgrade, appropriately sorted suspension modifications, a legal seat in good condition, working temperature, oil, and tach gauges, newer belts with a couple of years left before expiration, two sets of wheels, a good radiator, and fuel lines in good condition. The car should also have an engine in running condition and a transmission/clutch that is not destroyed. If the seller happens to have a couple of sets of good used tires and some extra parts, that would be an excellent bonus.

It may sound like a lot to ask, but cars meeting these requirements HAVE been sold for $3K-$5k. There is absolutely, positively no way you can compile the above already built and sorted car for even close to that low money. Buy a built car with all of the above and spend your time painting it and sorting all of the things that are not 100% correct or ready. Install some brake pads, change the oil, plugs, apply a new paint scheme and theme...clean and neaten the interior...install some radio communications equipment, etc., etc.. If your really ambitious drop out the transmission and check the clutch, give the engine some compression testing, replace the belts. There will be plenty of low $$ work to do, even on an already built car.

Make sure you don't pay 3k for a car that someone declares "race ready"...and yet it still needs many of the items within the above list. This would defeat the purpose of buying a built car at low $$...as you seen will quickly be sinking another $3k in additional parts and completion. Be patient, they do appear regularly...

Hey, here's a Duster that's even cheaper. Needs more work and has one less gear, but it has A/C and power steering parts you can sell!

https://austin.craigslist.org/cto/d/197 … 24111.html

Title isn't required unless you wanna test drive on the street, but surely there's a lawyer parent somewhere on the team who can work out a bonded title for cheap.

Building a functioning Lemons car is a tremendous amount of work. There is no way that me and my entire high school could've pulled it off without an adult mentor/project manager.  I'd love to see them build there own ride.  But based on my experience I would buy and modify an existing Lemons car.  Starting from scratch is more work than most sane adults want to attempt.

Your statement doesn't pass the logic test.
If you had a chunk of cash now (at t=0), you'd build your own?
If you still need 3/4 of your budget in 6 or 7 months (meaning you only have 25% of your budget @ t=7 months), how are you going to pay for a working, raced Lemons car?

To me, it seems like you have the choices backwards.
Your budget was $4500 (which I still think is low). I think you would be hard pressed to buy a working Lemons car for $1150 even with a "hey I'm a HS kid" discount unless it had a blown engine/trans -- whereas you can probably find a working car for a few hundred bucks (or free) and then spend the next few months raising money for the cage, making it reliable/learning about the tweaks you can make, gutting it, and building it up.
If you pick your car right, you can probably make money selling off the non-necessary bits (ex: interior) to help pay for the cage and other stuff you need.

A more realistic budget to buy someone's working Lemons car is probably $2K or more (which should come with spares and most importantly a legal cage).

-g

Why not look for a team near you and see if you can help prep their car? I know it's not the same as doing your own but it could go a long way to helping you be better prepared to do it.

I agree that helping a team prep a car is probably the safest/best way to start but for worse ideas, here's one
https://forums.24hoursoflemons.com/view … p?id=35687

Getting it from socal to TX might be a little expensive (probably <$1K depending on the amount of spares he's including that can be packed into the car) but that's most of the way there to a complete car w/ spares for a little more than the cost of a new cage.

I think this is getting overlooked. Getting a school to sign off on something like this is no small undertaking, even as a club. Generally speaking, that speaks to your competence because school administrators--even open-minded ones--usually cower at the thought of SUPER DANGEROUS RACING ZOMG INSURANCE NITEMARE. I don't think most would be willing to hear of it at all, so you clearly have your act together.

I'm not gonna say anything about what to do and how to do it; Lemons offers ample teaching moments like that. If you've gotten anything from this topic, it should be that people approach Lemons in a lot of different ways. You've done a smart thing in giving yourself lots of time (Yeah, I know the schedule has something to do with it) to cross the t's and dot the lower-case j's.

OK, I lied. If I had one piece of unsolicited advice, it would be to show administrators what you're learning as you go: how to raise funds, how to manage people, how to plan work on the car, and maybe even what you learned about working on cars. That last bit is important, but I think you'll find it's (far) less taxing--and ultimately less important to adulting*--than the other stuff.

* Unless you're going to be a mechanic and even then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kB78hM_lkI