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By: Sanjeev Verma

Racing is exciting.  No one reading this would argue with that; speed, power, noise, finesse, engineering, and talent all intersect in an intoxicating way out on the track.  Simulators like Forza Motorsport are a wonderful way to experience the rush of hurtling down a track inches away from your opponents’ cars, but how can any of us get a taste of racing in real life? 

SCCA Solo II events are a great way to spend a weekend, but you’ll never look through your windshield to see the competition’s eyes a few feet away.  You can buy a few laps on a track, but you’re not really racing.  For those of us without the money or talent to make it in the world of motorsports, Jay Lamm created an alternative: The 24 Hours of LeMons.

The California desert.  Two days.  Fourteen hours of racing.  100 teams.  A one-mile oval. $500 cars.

That’s right: in this endurance race, you’re not just testing your skill, but the reliability of a car that costs scarcely more than the average American car payment.  A LeMons race is not fast.  It’s not sexy.  It’s not glamorous.  But it is fun.  Believe it or not, there are few better things for a racing enthusiast than to get a few friends together, build a cheap race car, and go run it at the absolute limit until it falls apart…or you win.

This is a race car.  It’s not a Ferrari, a Porsche, or any other pedigreed scion of the motorsports industry. But it is our race car, and it’s a 1991 Ford Festiva with a Mazda motor that has spent the last few years running around in the dirt at Skagit Speedway.  We bought it, DOA, for $200 in late February with no idea what was wrong with it or how we would get it running in less than three months.  Assuming we did get it fired up, would it last for fourteen hours all-out?  Why would we even use this tiny American/Korean/Japanese mutt that nobody has even heard of?

The answer is reliability.  This isn’t a race of speed, but of longevity.  The winners aren’t the fastest cars or the most powerful cars or the best-handling cars.  At this price point, most cars won’t even survive the first day.  Impacts aside (and there are plenty of impacts --nobody seems to care about the paint job on a $500 car), it takes a lot to keep a junkyard car with a cheap motor swap running.  By using a small, simple car with reliable stock parts, we stand a better chance of having a car that will still run when the checkered flag drops.

To get the car from its initial condition to the point of reliability took us almost all the time we had, with most of the team working several days per week.  The first order of business was to get it fired up.  When we bought it, the sellers told us that the ignition module was shot, so we replaced it.  Of course, it couldn’t be that simple.  Eventually, we ended up sourcing every part of the ignition system after tracing the problem to the distributor.  Still, we couldn’t get the car to run for more than a few turns.  Thanks to the first of many brilliant insights by Dan, the tech lead, we realized that the distributor wasn’t screwed down tightly and was rotating in its housing.  Engines don’t run well when the timing is 40 degrees off!  After that, Dan dismantled and reassembled the carburetor, finally producing a running car.

But a running engine isn’t enough for a race!  We also need to turn and stop, and we need to do it well.  A stock Festiva handles pretty well due to its light weight, but several seasons of dirt-track racing had destroyed the suspension.  We replaced blown dampers, a bent control arm, and the loose steering rack.  We discarded the entire rear beam and dropped in a stiffer replacement with an integrated anti-roll bar, sourced from an Aspire.  We also used the Aspire’s larger front brakes and hubs.  In the spirit of the race (and the dictates of the price cap), we scavenged almost all of this from a junkyard.  After lopping a coil off the springs, the car was flatter through turns and rebounded properly from bumps.

Now we had a car that could hold its own at an autocross, running for one minute at a time -- but we needed it to stand up to fourteen hours of rough treatment.  The price cap kept us from sourcing new parts, so we had to make do with the old engine, carb, and other systems.  We patched a few holes where oil was seeping, replaced an oil-soaked timing belt, and refilled the engine with 20W50.  We flushed all the rust out of the cooling system, replaced it with water (no slippery glycol allowed, and you’d know why if you saw the condition of some of the radiators at the event), and wired the fan to run all the time.  The coolant temperature sender wasn’t working correctly, so we re-wired it to report the proper signal to the gauge cluster.  Idiot lights may seem superfluous in a race like this, but we need to keep an eye on the oil and coolant while we’re out on the track.  Finally, we flushed the brake system with DOT4 fluid, which again seems like overkill but will pay off if it prevents heat-based fatigue from setting in on the track.

Racing a $500 car is, to put it mildly, not the safest thing you can do.  The organizers of the race wisely removed the price cap from safety equipment, so teams can spend as much as they want on the parts of the car that keep them from getting burned, squished, or poked.  Every member of our team will be clad in two layers of SFI-rated fire-retardant clothing from head to toe, capped off with Snell SA2005 helmets.  We’re tightly strapped into a racing seat by a 5-point harness, all of which is bolted securely to the car’s frame and roll cage.  There’s a quick-release fire extinguisher within reach of the driver, padding all around him, and a window net to keep all body parts well within the cage.  We also relocated the fuel filler neck inside the cage where it can’t be damaged during an impact.  Just because this race is for fun doesn’t mean we can take safety lightly, and just because the cars are cheap doesn’t mean we will be any less protected than our brethren in the real racing world.

Another important consideration for an endurance race is logistics.  Every minute spent on the track is another lap for our team.  If we take too long in the pits or come in too often, we’re giving up valuable time.  For that reason, we have devised a system of responsibility and communication to keep the drivers informed and aware.  At all times, the driver will be in radio contact with a spotter in the observation tower and a mechanic in the pits.  They will provide him with information about the track and his car so he can make smart decisions about when to pit and how to avoid hazards on the track.  Dan ingeniously wired an in-car communication system inspired by professional racing.  Each driver will wear a microphone and headset inside his helmet, which plugs into a jack on the back of his seat.  This is wired to a radio inside the car with a push-to-talk button on the steering wheel, giving him the ability to easily speak with his support team.

Late at night on May 7th, we finished all preparations for the race and loaded the race car, tools, equipment, and spare parts into our appropriately cheap trailer.  Nathaniel, another driver, will be driving the trailer down to Altamont Motorsports Park in northern California, where the rest of the team will meet him.  The prep work is over—now all that remains is to run the race itself on May 10th and 11th.  We’ll let you know how it goes with our recap blog next week!

Sanjeev Verma is a member of The Fast and the Festiva. The team formed for the 2007 LeMons SF race when Nathaniel, Richie, and Sanjeev met on the forum Automotive Insanity.  They were later joined by Mike, Sanjeev’s coworker at Microsoft, while Jack and Dale were recruited on the forum.  The rest of the team signed up this year, requiring the addition of the yellow Festiva.

Team Fast and the Festiva are:

Sanjeev, Dan, Nathaniel, Mike, Jeff, Jeff, and Craig driving the yellow ’91 Festiva
Jack, Dale, Richie, and Randy driving the blue ’89 Festiva

Turn 10 Car of the Week:
Toyota Celica GT-Four ST185 WRC

By J. Mason

I’m a huge fan of rallying. Now I don’t mean the kind of rallying you do when your pathetically underdog High School football team somehow manages to go to State, and suddenly all the Sportos who used to stuff you in your locker are now all your favorite people. Go team. No, I’m talking RALLYING, as in World Rally Championship; as in over-clocked street cars parading around as ATVs; as in off-road racing at maximum tilt with nothing to guide you safely between a 100-foot drop-off and certain death but a funny person with an accent sitting on a short seat reading topographical cliff notes. If you want my opinion, and I know that you do, there is nothing in the world of motorsports more exciting than the adrenaline-charged, flame-spitting, ravine-jumping, speedfest known as the World Rally Championship.

Starting in 1973, the World Rally Championship became the pinnacle of rally racing events. It’s here where you’d find the icons of the sport, in both car and driver. Stig Blomqvist, champion Audi rally driver and considered by many to be the inventor of left-foot braking. Tommi Makinen, Carlos Sainz, Juha Kankkunen, all Group A champions in the 1990s, and Colin McRae, without a doubt the most famous and influential of all rally drivers, who tragically died in early 2007. All these are true legends in the sport.

And then there are the cars. In all honesty we could probably spend the rest of the 2008 Car of the Week articles focused on one WRC car per week and still have leftovers for 2009. Every one of them is special and unique in its own way, from the Ferrari V6-powered Lancia Stratos, the insanely powerful Group B 600 hp Audi Quattro S1, to the bitter rivalry between the Subaru Impreza and Mitsubishi Lancer WRC cars. The cars that enter the World Rally Championship have been some of the most technologically advanced cars ever to hit tarmac or gravel, and nearly every manufacturer has fielded a car at one time or another. Tuning group Michelotto even built a handful of factory supported Ferrari 308 GTBs to compete in Group B road rally events. Though Group B was banned after several driver and spectator fatalities -- but can you just imagine the adrenaline rush? Flying through a Targa Florio stage at better than 100mph with that Ferrari V8 screaming from behind you, with nothing between you and a cliff but a century old rock wall? It just gives me chills.

One of my all-time favorite model lines ever to hit the Championship was the Toyota Celica GT-Four. Even before I knew what the WRC was and why I should give a rip about rallying, I was introduced to the Castrol Celica GT-Four ST205 through the coin-op arcade game Sega Rally. At the time I didn’t know much about the car at all, and I certainly didn’t know those early experiences would lead me to Turn 10, but quick 50-cent trips through a desert stage definitely planted a seed. Suddenly I was buying rally videos from DUKE in the UK and skipping class to watch the Acropolis Rally on Speedvision. You know, when the channel was still called “Speedvision” and actually aired more than NASCAR? Ah, the good ole days.

On to the Celica!

The Toyota GT-Four WRC cars were prepared in Germany by Toyota Team Europe, the same group who would go on to build the Toyota GT-One for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and the team currently responsible for the development of the Toyota Formula One cars. The GT-Four history in World Rally Championship is epic and each generation of the GT-Four WRC models made improvements over the previous generation that pushed their success. The first WRC Celica was the ST165 and used the fourth generation production Celica chassis, housing a TTE-tuned turbo 3S-GTE four-cylinder engine pushing 295hp from only two liters. The ST165 entered the Championship in 1987 taking 13 first-place series finishes and giving team driver Carlos Sainz the World Championship of Drivers title in 1990 and 1992. Even more impressive was the fifth-generation Celica ST185 which won 17 rallies in three years, handing drivers championships to Carlos Sainz again in 1992, and winning both Driver and Manufacturer championships with Juha Kankkunen and Didier Auriol in 1993 and 1994. 

But numbers and specifications don’t really tell the story, and championship wins don’t sound as impressive on paper until you see the car in real life or watch the drivers at work. The whole idea of the WRC, or any rallying for that matter, is about the link between the driver, his co-driver and the machine. When you watch a rally driver and really look at his eyes when driving, you begin to understand the concentration required. I’ve seen video of Tommi Makinen driving and it appears he doesn’t even blink for an entire stage – it’s truly remarkable.

Throw in massive torque and power, a constantly ticking clock, a co-driver barking turns, trees tearing by the window in a blur, suicidal spectators running onto the course for that elusive photo op, and the ever-present notion that any misplaced wheel could cause dramatic and catastrophic collisions or rolling, and you have a recipe for real stress. That kind of pressure placed on a driver transfers just as much pressure onto the car, and when you consider the amount of beating these things take in a give afternoon, you start to appreciate how all of those championship numbers really begin to mean something. And you start to appreciate the cars that brought those championships home.

When it comes to the myriad of possible rally cars for Car of the Week, the choices are endless. For me, the choice is the Toyota Celica GT-Four ST185. What’s yours?

J.Mason has a glass eye from standing too close to a rally stage and catching a rock to the face. Don’t laugh, it ain’t funny.

Hi folks. In case you haven't heard (and there's a good chance you may not have), the Xbox Live service has been undergoing dashboard maintenance and updates today so you could see some network instability across the board.

Those of you playing Forza 2 will see this affecting your ability to access the Auction House. We've been getting lots of email from Forza players asking if their Gamertags have been banned from the online Auction House due to the pop-up message that states you have either been banned or the service is unavailable.

If you know for a fact that you have not violated our Auction House terms of service, then chances are you have not been banned and the reason you can't access the Auction House is due to Xbox Live instability.

Please check back and try to login throughout the day. This problem should resolve itself soon.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Joel is a car freak just like everyone at Turn 10.  The only difference is he doesn’t fool around when it comes to cars.  Why?  Well currently Joel has a dedicated car workshop, complete with all the tools necessary to do just about any job you can think of.  Oh yeah he also has a full sized lift, something that everyone can appreciate after spending enough time on the ground with an muffler in your face.  Luckily for me, Joel was nice enough to let me use his facilities over the weekend.  SWEET!

After parking my car on his gravel driveway, he gave us a full tour of the place.  Now keep in mind that his workshop has just recently been painted, meaning all his tools were scattered about trying desperately to avoid paint splatter.  Overall the shop is a great place to work on cars, and has just about every automotive trinket you can think of.  Let me put it to you like this…if MacGyver ever stopped by Joel’s place he would probably fly home in a Gyrocopter.

So with the car up on the lift it was time for the shakedown.  Considering the Corolla is 1 year younger than me, I was really impressed with the condition it was in.  I guess I am slightly biased coming from a town where salt is everywhere and rust is your best friend, but honestly this car is in really great shape.

First things first, the cat needed to go back on for the emissions test. When you have a hoist at your disposal, changing a pipe takes minutes.  So with that finished we rotated the rear wheels, as the tires were facing the wrong direction.  Really not sure why they were on like this and considering the amount of rain in Washington I was really surprised.  So with all of that done we started checking around for any other problem spots.  We discovered that the tie rod linkage boot was torn, and dirt was already starting to build up inside.  So along with the Throttle Position Sensor, this boot needs to be changed as soon as possible.

Turn 10 Car of the Week: Mazda Furai Concept

By J. Mason

Well now, it appears that not every one of our Car of the Week readers agreed with my discourse on the Lotus Elise/Exige inbreeding, and that’s perfectly alright. In fact, I’m happy to see a little angst, some piss and vinegar thrown down from the reading public – it shows you’re alive out there. Like most car geeks you’re allowed -- nay, required -- to be opinionated. Yes, variety is the spice of life and like I said in the article, I still think the Elise and Exige are fantastic cars; I believe we can all agree on that point, but it’s silly to have so many versions of one car model. Oh well, I guess James May and I will be on one side of the fence, and all the people who want a bajillion versions of each car model will be on the other. Can’t win them all, eh Captain Slow?

And now, on to the meat!

I like things that rotate. When visiting the Space Needle in Seattle, I think facing Ballard when I sit down to eat and then finishing my meal staring down Capitol Hill is insanely cool. I like tacky "As Seen On TV" rotating tie racks. I’m a huge fan of rotisserie chicken and those conveyor belts at swank sushi restaurants. And I’m a card-carrying member of the Church of Mazda Rotary Engines. Without a doubt, the FD RX-7 is one of my all-time favorite cars, and the 13B-REW is a remarkable engine.  When you consider that the four-rotor Mazda 787B won the 1991 24 Hours of Le Mans in its FIRST ATTEMPT, it makes it tough to argue against the capability of the rotary. And now Mazda has pushed the point even further with the Mazda Furai concept.

The Mazda Furai is one of a handful of Mazda concepts based on a design language called Nagare, or “flow” in Japanese -- a word that conveys all things moving in one direction. Designed to evoke that feeling of movement, and named for “the sound of the wind”, the lines of the car are absolutely stunning. Even while standing still, the concept is at once beautiful and terrifying; the car truly blends the line between art and function. It’s a sinister and evil looking machine; something imagined by H.R. Giger or pulled from the mind of Clive Barker. Yet the design of the car is so outside of the usual car show concept norm that you can’t help but stare in awe and ponder its internals: Using the Courage LMP chassis and housing an ethanol powered 450-horsepower RENESIS-based R20B three-rotor engine, the Furai is quite possibly the ultimate Mazda.

While the Furai will probably never see production, it’s clearly far from your garden variety, fake-exhaust, rolled out of a trailer and assembled on the showroom floor concept. Officially debuted at the 2008 Detroit auto show, the Furai is built around a carbon-fiber Courage C65 Le Mans Prototype chassis that MAZDASPEED and B-K Motorsports campaigned in the 2005-2006 American Le Mans Series. Yes they’ve chucked the mechanicals and sensors into the back to make room for a passenger seat, but for GOD SAKE it’s built from a race car!

But taking a car body and super gluing it to race car underwear wasn’t enough for Mazda. Nope. Next they stopped off at the plastic surgeon where the carbon tub and the original Mazda-designed body were massaged and tweaked and enhanced using Computational Fluid Dynamics data. The result: the team was able to optimize aerodynamic performance by reducing lift and drag, while increasing high-speed stability through judicious use of downforce. WIN! Add in an ethanol powered 450-horsepower RENESIS-based R20B three-rotor engine and you’re bringing quite the capable package to the party.

The goal for the entire Furai concept was to build a street-legal concept that would sit somewhere between a supercar and a pure race car. Clearly Mazda had its sights set on cars like the Ferrari F430, Honda NSX-R and the Nissan Skyline, all of which have street and race versions available to the highest bidder. Knowing where they set the bar, and given the pedigree of the race car and the extensive international race heritage of Mazda, you just know this thing is no joke. It’s a fully functioning, rip your head off, kick you in the junk, aggressive beast of a car. In this author’s not so humble opinion, the Mazda Furai concept is quite possibly the best Mazda ever created.

Don’t believe me? Watch the video. You may join the Church of Rotary too.

J.Mason has never met a whiskey he didn’t like. Tequila on the other hand, has proven to be no friend whatsoever.

A long time ago, in a marketing dept. not too far from here, somebody made like a billion plastic Forza 2 license plate frames. They don't look too bad. They sport Forza Motorsport 2 and Xbox 360 logos and the tagline: "Fuel Your Fantasy". Yes, that's right. Your fantasy. Give it some fuel with our game.

Fast forward to this afternoon, when the Turn 10 test team kicked off a new extra-credit project based on one of their lunchtime whimsies. Nate, one of our developers here, just bought himself a cherry Mazda RX-8 40th Anniversary Edition, which you'll probably read about very soon in this very blog. Anyway, as his first week in new car limbo (he had to take it in for some preventative formalities), Nate had to rent a car to truck between home and work. This gave our test manager Squid Owens an idea of sorts.

Squid's email to the Fun alias reads as follows:

Apparently we have an abundance of license plate frames trying to incite people to Fuel their Fantasies...or something to that effect.

During lunch today the test team decided that this should be thought of as an opportunity.  We would like everyone to change out plate frames whenever you have access to a car you don’t own.

In the case below the subject of the switch was the rental car Nate was forced to drive while the dealer applied 3M panels to protect the paint on his car.

Whether it’s a rental, a loaner, or a car borrowed from a friend, by all means, share the glory of a FM2 plate frame.

Bonus points to anyone who can get one on a Police Car.

Bonus Bonus points for getting one on an unmarked WSP car.

I promise the next time there is a speed trap out front that I will cross the street and ask the officer if I may apply a plate frame to his cruiser.  Please help me with this by letting me know if you see a cruiser out front.

Do not break the law in pursuit of bonus points.

Extra Bonus points for installing a plate while smoking a cigarette.

We still have 999,999,999 Forza Motorsport 2 Fuel Your Fantasy license plate frames left.

As you may or may not know Che and I have recently announced the grand prize winner from our official Graphic Design contest, and just when we thought we had the community stumped, we click on the submissions thread and realize that there are so many talented people on FM.net, that no challenge is too difficult.

For this contest we really wanted to let people use their creativity without any restrictions, so we left it pretty much wide open.  The only guideline was that we challenged players to create an advertisement for the recently released March Car Pack.  That’s all!  No specific size restrictions and no editing restrictions; anything goes.  We did not want to snuff out the creative fire burning deep in the souls of the artists within the community, and as you can see the results speak for themselves!

First Place Submission by: RoxxApexx
First Place goes to RoxxApexx with this extremely clean and elegant advertisement.  We were very impressed with the layout of the design as well as the overall look.  With lots of negative space and a very balanced and organized look, this design took the first place prize!  Congratulations to RoxxApexx, you are eligible for 3 free cars of choice and 10 Million credits!  Click here for the full size image.