Topic: Coming of Age in my Second Childhood: A Lemons Rookie’s First Race...
The Ephipany
I guess it’s never clear when the miracle will happen. For me it happened during race prep. I was working to, um, improve the air intake on the Kim Jung Elantra after removing a bulky resonator.
I was thinking we needed some race-proven intake ducting. Our fearless leader, Karl (not to be confused with Our Dear Leader) pointed to some plastic drink jugs and bottles on the shelf. “Here you go,” he said. “Lots of usable intake material here.”
My brain melted a little.
Like other Lemons drivers out there, I come from a ‘real’ racing background. I ran SCCA Nationals and the Neon Challenge in the ’90’s…and made money doing it.
The Neon Challenge was good for turning good Club racers into paid drivers. One Champ Car weekend at Road America, the Neon Challenge winner, Erich Heuschele, made more money than the Trans Am winner, Dorsey Schroeder.
Dorsey’s purse for his race win was $12k, or something like that. Dorsey consumed a few post-race cocktails and was overheard scheming his hop from Trans Am to Neon Challenge. Obviously, we were bad ass in our ACR Neons.
So, forgive me if I was not quite able to wrap my mind around this whole Lemons deal. I made money driving a Neon. I was serious about racing.
Back to our intake… When I was done rolling my eyes at Karl, I grabbed a Trader Joe’s Low Calorie Lemonade jug (missing the irony/Lemony-ness of it all) and started grafting it to the air box with duct tape and zip-ties.
As I was finishing up my little intake project, Karl’s girlfriend, Bettina, stopped by. Just for the record, Bettina played a HUGE roll in our first-race “success.” More on that in another post.
Bettina saw the TJ’s Low-Calorie Lemonade ram-air intake for what it was: a perfect, lemony answer to the question nobody’s ever asked: just how do you fabricate a ram-air induction system for a $200 Elantra?
At that very moment, I got it—don’t take myself (and my illustrious Neon racing background) so freakin’ seriously. I slowly began to embrace the culture of Lemons...
The moment Lemons got, um, real...
To be continued…