Topic: How many honestly stay under $500?
I'm curious how many of you are actually able to get a car together that runs for a reasonable percentage of the weekend for only $500.
I've been to a few Lemons races in various capacities in the past and have had an absolute blast every time. The cars I've been associated with have never done very well, but I'm definitely coming back for more in the future. The one thing I do know is that even though the cars I've worked on have been absolute POSs that never had a chance in hell to win, we definitely spent more than $500 to get them up and running. We weren't trying to sneak through anything that improved the performance, but just fixing all the broken stuff got expensive by Lemons standards.
Let's just say hypothetically that you find a decent car that actually runs for $300. That seems great, but after a few trips to autozone for a couple replacement hoses and belts, maybe some new spark plugs and all the other little things that you never think of before you start, it's very likely that you've spent another $100 just to get the engine to a point where it has a fighting chance of staying on the track for more than 20 laps. So now lets say in the process of testing the car out your fuel pump goes out or your alternator or any number of other components that can fail in a car with 250,000 mi on it that the previous owner only thought was worth $300. In my experience it's really easy to blow through $500 without doing anything to improve the performance of the car at all.
Don't get me wrong, diagnosing and finding a cheap solution to the hundreds of problems you encounter while trying to get a car ready is one of the reasons why Lemons is so fun. I'm just wondering if I'm the only one who's not smart enough to fix all these problems without "cheating."
Also, I'm interested to know people's thoughts on the ethics of sneaking things through. The BS inspection is obviously set up to be fun. Costumes abound and bribing is encouraged. That being said, do you think part of the Lemons competition is being good at cheating? Or are the guys who try to sneak things through being unethical?
I'll admit that I've thought many times about buying a $1000 car that if the cosmetics were a little worse would probably be worth ~$500. Then we could back a truck into the rear quarter panel and buff the paint with fine grit sand paper. Take some pictures of it with "$399" shoe polished on the windshield in a bad part of town and forge a bill of sale. I didn't do that, but would you consider that unethical, or is it just part of the game that is Lemons?
Personally I kind of lean towards it being part of the game. I like the fact that the safety inspection is very serious and very thorough, but the BS inspection is about just that, BSing your way through.
I'll be interested to hear your thoughts.