Nobody asked or cares, but here's our story.

I was disappointed to learn last week that in Jay and Nick’s infinite wisdom, they elected to omit mentioning, or even showing the class winners in the High Plains Drifter, Full 24 wrap up video. While I understand that they don’t care about us, and that the story of a car/team that didn’t fail spectacularly isn’t really what people are interested in, it was a big deal to us. Please bear with me while I share the story of my people: Class B winner, [Floginagean] Racing – MK4 Golf 4 door, 5 speed, NA 2.0 4 cyl with the Ken Block tribute livery. This was our 4th race.

We started our Lemons journey over a decade ago when my team co-captain suggested it to me and we went out and bought an E30 to start the build. Unfortunately, life happened before we got that done we ended up selling the BMW and didn’t talk about it again for years. Fast forward a decade and we’re ready to give it another go. We attended a race to see what we were getting into, read the rules a dozen times, all the forums, and found a car that was all but abandoned in an alley near downtown. We gave the guy who owned it $100 and we got to work.

Our first race, The BFE GP 2022. We passed tech on the first go (Thanks Pagel for answering all our questions during the build process!) and proceeded to have a very uneventful race. The car actually was great and we were fairly quick, but we made a million rookie mistakes. Pit stops were too frequent and too slow. We came into our paddock spot too often. We put the car in the dirt a couple of times. And so on. Ended up 7th in class and excited for High Plains drifter in a few months.

Second race. High Plains Drifter 2022. The full 24. We addressed the few small issues we had with the car between races and added a 5th driver to the team for this one. It was a little rainy for the first 6 hours of the race and our little car is just a beast in the damp and we were near the front of the whole thing. Then things started to go wrong. First one of the struts came loose. Then we lost a wheel bearing, and in replacing that we ruined the half shaft. Then it was just kind of one thing after another and we ended up spending several hours in the paddock and bartering for parts that we failed to bring. We also killed the transmission during this race. Anyway, I think we were 8th or 9th in that one.

Third race. BFE GP 2023. Over the winter we addressed the issues we had previously which had us welding quite a few things that came loose in place because if you think Loctite is good, you should see how a weld holds. We also rebuilt the transmission and were feeling good. This race started like the others and we were thrilled that it was raining again. Car ran great the first day with the exception of the rebuilt transmission. It was hot garbage and 1st and 2nd gears were nearly unusable. Another unpleasant development was that I became extremely motion sick while driving the car. This had been a minor issue in previous races, but this time it was bad. Like a 90 minute stint had me throwing up in my mouth while the team scrambled to get the next driver ready and once I got out of the car, I was done for the weekend. At the end of day one, we were 1st in class and 2nd overall. Day 2 was not so good. A couple of hours in and half the exhaust fell off the car and we got black flagged. After getting that “fixed” we went back out into a torrential downpour. It was so bad that water was cascading into the car and causing the windshield to fog up. I’m pretty sure most cars had this problem, but we had no way to address it and driving the car with zero visibility seemed like a bad plan. We were forced to come in until the rain let up a bit. Anyway, we ended that race 6th or 7th in class.

Fourth race. High Plains Drifter, Full 24 2023. Our expectation for this race was to have 6 drivers and 1 crew (my now 16-year-old step son). 1 driver bowed out about a month before the race for family reasons. A second driver fell ill on Friday, the day before the race, and was too sick to even attend. Our crew member was deemed ineligible on Saturday because I failed to read the rules properly (he was 15 on race day, with his 16th birthday 3 days later), so now we’re down to 4 total. Our ages range from late 40s on the youthful end to early 70s on the geriatric end. I’m also was still unsure if I’d be able to drive much due to my motion sickness. I did have a bunch of things that I was doing to attempt to mitigate it and, in the end, I was able to run 3, 2+ hour stints without puking my guts out. If anybody wants to know what worked for me, just ask. I’m happy to share!

Now to the car. Our solution to our dumpster fire transmission was to go to the local Pull n Pay and grab one off another golf. This ended up causing 2 problems. 1st, the “new” tranny was out of a 1.8T and not a 2.0 like we’ve got. It still works, but the gear ratios are different (3rd and 4th gear are a bit taller) which would be fine, except for the 2nd problem which was that 2nd gear was just as bad as 2nd in the old tranny, which is to say unusable. This combination of problems turned our car, basically, into a 1 speed. 3rd. Truth be told, I would upshift to 4th on both straights for a brief moment, but that was the extent of the shifting. 4 shifts per lap, total. As you can imagine, accelerating out of corners 6, 8, and 11 was glacial at best. Our fastest lap time was more than 6 seconds slower than our fastest lap from previous races. While this sucked when driving, it had the benefit of using less gas. We could now run 50 laps (2 hours, 15 minutes-ish) per stint which means we were able to do this in 11 stints rather than 12 and save a pit stop. We also had specific concerns about tires, brakes and wheel bearings because we were running the same sets of each as we did in the previous race. I know. It’s unheard of, but with all the rain in June, the tires and brakes were like new, and we just decided to accept the risk and run the wheel bearings until the failed…which to our collective shock, did not happen. As it turns out, nothing else failed either and we were able to just keep the car on the track turning slow ass laps.

We were far from the fastest car in Class B and had this race been another 30-45 minutes, we probably would have lost to that Crossfire that was closing fast in the later stages of the race. I guess the moral of the story is: Prepare your car well. Take calculated risks. Stay on track turning laps. Race clean (no black flags) and you too can win your class in a slow car.

I know that there are no heroic fixes or catastrophic failures in my story, but it was still a surprise and super exciting for our team to actually win. I think it would be that way for any team. Yes, it’s fun just to be out there and hanging out with your friends and working on your car, etc., but I would put good money that if you asked every team if they would like to win, they’d say yes. So a win matters to those of us driving, who have dedicated more time and money than we care to admit to preparing their car, buying gear and tools and dragging all manner of crap to the race track for the weekend. It just plain sucks for the race organizers to belittle our effort by ignoring us when, out of blind luck, we come out on top. It probably won’t happen again and it might have been nice to share the wrap up video with people so that we can brag on ourselves a little. Oh well.

We haven’t decided if we’re done or not. Anybody want to buy a race-ready, class winning car? Ours might be for sale.