Topic: Question about vehicle weight rule
Hey! I'm a newcomer to Lemons who's thinking of organizing a team and entering a Lemons race in the not that far future and I have a question regarding the manufacture stated curb weight rule. I work at a truck salvage yard and a number of my co workers are very interested in starting a team based around a kind of 'manic trucker' vibe and some sort of pickup truck with either a ford SD gas V8 or a twin turbo diesel. I've got a good plan for pricing the whole deal out and getting all the needed parts while also maintaining a $500 budget, but that's not really what my question has to do with.
The vehicle we're using is an 89 ford ranger with a blown motor and junked trans a guy who works in the office is selling for $200 and while we have a choice of donor vehicles for the industrial big block/trans or diesel engine that we could purchase and make our money back parting out. There's only two problems with the ranger, none of the engines we'd like to use will phisically fit in it without us taking the whole body off and widening the frame substantially (nothing we don't have the tools for or capability of doing) and the wight of the engine we're leaning towards using (71 F800 with a 534 SD v8 being sold for $600 and we could easily make that money back on it parting it out) far exceeds what the poor ranger could handle on it's own. To address that issue we were thinking we'd take the axles and springs from the F800 and put them on the ranger while also significantly bulking up the rangers frame. Alternatively we were thinking of taking the F800s cab off, shortening the frame down to ranger length and putting the body of the ranger on it, pulling out the majority of the truck's springs to get it lowered down to a not totally unsafe height.
As you can probably extrapolate this raises the question of it being legal or not because either way we'd be fielding a vehicle that would exceed the 4200 pound manufactures curb weight rule. Using the F800s frame would be the easier option but then the truck would weight a considerable amount more then 4200 pounds. The eton auto the truck has alone probably weights a good ton and half, not to mention the solid 1000 or so pounds of engine lol.
We'd love to build something legendary and at the salvage we have all the tools and know how to build something like this, but before we even get to the stage of actually asking the organizers I thought we should probably seek some input on the forum here.
(Of course we'd love to just take a $500 beater grain truck out on the track but I don't think that would fly too well lol)