Lesson #2: Pick The Right Car.
The CR-XXX's saga, according to Coleman, who quickly slipped into a long-winded diatribe that meandered from freshman physics to advanced rally technique, began innocently enough with a damned fool. Reconstructing the spittle-soaked notes we scribbled during this rant, it seems that someone, nobody knows who, thought a first-generation CRX would make a good rally car. That notion, by itself, is only moderately foolish, but the preparation of the car showed the depth of our anonymous would-be rallyist's naivet. "The cage," he stammered, "was a jungle gym of heavy-wall tubing substantial enough to support a Trophy Truck, but the door bars were so poorly designed they could be crushed by a well-placed insult."
The beam axle rear suspension, inexplicably, carried four shocks - two stock CRX shocks, and two mysterious Bilsteins so long they passed through massive holes in the rear floor, and anchored to the monster truck roll cage. "Nobody who has even ridden a bicycle in the dirt," raged Coleman, "would put dirt-Hoovering holes in the back of a rally car!"
Fast forward a few years and Eyesore Racing is looking for a suitable car for the inaugural 24 Hours of LeMons. Dismissing wild theories about Detroit reliability or turbocharged speed, the engineer-heavy team focused on light weight, avoiding the substantial stress caused by heavy and/or powerful cars. After nearly buying an FC RX-7 (too bent) and a B13 Sentra SE-R (no compression), the team stumbled, quite by accident, on Aidan Spraic, who, years earlier, had purchased the would-be rally CRX from its hopelessly optimistic creator and spent the intervening time flogging it on the street until the transmission exploded.
Buying it for $400 cash, the team accountants creatively decided it was a $200 car with a bargain-priced $200 roll cage (safety gear is immune from the $500 spending limit placed on all LeMons entries). When the car could be convinced to run, raw fuel ran down the sides of the carburetor, horrifying chain-mail-in-the-dryer sounds came from the transmission, and the clutch refused to work. The next $300 would have to be spent carefully.
Lesson #3: Find someone smarter and more experienced to work on your car for free.
Grabbing the transmission's input shaft in hopes of determining why the gearbox sounded like nails in a coffee can, there was perhaps more wobbliness than seemed appropriate. None of the team, even the rocket scientist, knew what actually was appropriate for a Honda transmission, but they knew someone who did. Mark DiBella, owner of MD Automotive, has not only been servicing these things since they were new, he was Oscar Jackson's crew chief back when Jackson was racing them with factory Honda backing.
Minutes after the box was dropped at his Westminster, CA shop, Mark had torn it into 300 pieces and found a bad input shaft bearing and a cracked case. $17 for a new bearing and $8 for two new seals and a few seconds with a TIG welder and the transmission was good as new.
Well, it worked, at least...
Lesson #4: Redefine "rebuilt."
Rebuilding an engine to like-new condition is expensive, but taking it apart, looking for trouble, and fixing only what's absolutely necessary can be dirt cheap. Before their first race, the team (well, mostly it was DiBella...) tore down the engine, found the head was basically sound, but filthy, the bores were badly worn, the block deck was not exactly flat, and the bearings were basically fine.
By John N. Frink
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