(engines roaring)
- Prepare yourselves for something
you will never be able to unsee.
(bright electronic tones)
It just might be the ugliest thing ever to roll
into Donut's intergalactic headquarters,
but would you believe that it's actually fast?
This tired old bag of hammers is one of the oldest
and most successful race cars in the history
of the 24 Hours of LeMons, the endurance racing series
for $500 crap cans just like this.
We're gonna tell you how this heap is packed
with a ridiculous amount of real engineering.
Make sure your tetanus shots are up to date,
because we're going from where bumper used to be,
to where the other bumper used to be
on Eyesore Racing's hideous, filthy, nasty
but surprisingly fasty 24 Hours of LeMons Miata.
(upbeat guitar music)
Huge thanks to Keeps for sponsoring this episode
of Bumper 2 Bumper.
Just like wanting a big old wing over the top of your car,
I'm sure you guys also wanna keep hair on the top
of your heads and prevention is always the best medicine.
If you still have hair and you're worried about losing it,
Keeps treatments really work to help it stay there.
They're up to 90% effective at reducing
and stopping further hair loss, and the sooner you start
using Keeps, the more hair you'll save.
Many men have even had hair regrowth with Keeps treatments.
You can visit a doctor online and get hair loss medication
delivered right to your door. (doorbell rings)
Trust me when I say that's way easier
than building your own huge car wing.
If you're noticing that you're losing hair,
do something about it.
Our fans can get a special offer by going to
keeps.com/b2b
or by clicking the link in the description below.
(upbeat guitar music)
What is it that makes LeMons racing so popular?
Really low standards.
Seriously, if you have a pulse and a checkbook,
they will let you race.
No qualification is needed beyond a good attitude
and a bad car.
(gentle trumpet music)
The Eyesore Racing Team is actually older
than the 24 Hours of LeMons.
Dave Coleman was the Engineering Editor
for Sport Compact Car Magazine
and his home owner's association thought
that the 1971 Datsun 510 in his driveway
was an eyesore.
So, Dave naturally turned his 510 into a rally car,
named the team Eyesore Racing and everyone was happy.
When Eyesore Racing built this car, Dave assembled a team
of nerds, so over-educated that honestly, you'd think
they'd all have something better to do.
There are three Garret Turbo engineers on the team,
one SpaceX engineer, one Mazda engineer
and even a hot shoe precision driver who spends her days
writing stories about cars for this little outfit
called Donut Media.
That's right, this car belongs to one of our very own,
I thought what better way to help me tell you guys
about this car than to have her come on out and help me.
- Hi.
(funky bass guitar)
- You're probably wondering why the turbo is sticking out
of the hood right in the driver's line of sight?
So am I, Sarah?
- It's because it's cheaper that way.
With a $500 limit, every decision on the car
is about saving money.
(funky bass music)
- Turbo charging Miatas is pretty easy,
because the original 1.6 liter engine in the early models
was the same basic engine that was in the 323 GTX.
Only the GTX had a turbo.
All the Miata's internals are built strong enough
to be in the GTX though.
The turbo and exhaust manifold from the GTX will not fit
in the Miata engine bay though, so the most expensive part
of turboing a Miata is the after market exhaust manifold.
(gentle electronic music)
- [Sarah] That's why we use the stock Miata exhaust manifold
that we already had and just bolted it on, upside down.
(upbeat drum beats)
- This turbo is a stock turbo from a WRX,
but the original turbo they were running
came from a Mexican market Dodge Stratus.
- The Mexican turbo died about 15 races in when a screw
broke off inside the throttle plate, bounced around inside
the engine for 45 minutes, making horrible noises
and finally got spit out into the turbo
where it destroyed the turbine wheel.
Then our transmission got stuck in third gear
and we came in second place.
- My favorite part of this whole car has got
to be the custom cold air intake,
carrying air from the little hood scoop
to the inlet of this turbo.
Look closely at it, do you recognize it?
Something you may have seen before?
This intake's made out of toilet pipes.
(water flushing)
Just think, think about the life
of this little piece of plastic.
When it was born in some plumbing factory,
all it could look forward to was a few weeks of fresh air
on a ship, a few days of sitting with it's friends
on a shelf at Home Depot, and then it would get glued
to the bottom of someone's toilet forever.
(gentle piano music)
But not this little plastic elbow, no, no, no!
This guy got the ride of a lifetime, this is the luckiest
little poop chute in the whole wide world.
Now, you can't just stick a turbo on an engine
and start racing it, you have to retune it.
The right way to do that is with bigger fuel injectors
and a programmable engine management system,
but the right way costs money.
So, they did it the wrong way!
Before programmable engine management was an easy solution
there were a lot hackier ways to do your tuning,
like this rising rate fuel pressure regulator,
that increases fuel pressure in response to turbo boost.
Higher fuel pressure just jams fuel
through the stock injectors, delivering, hopefully, roughly,
approximately, maybe something in the ball park
of the right amount of fuel.
They got that for 20 bucks.
(gentle electronic music)
And what about retarding ignition timing when you're
on boost so that you keep it from knocking?
Well, before you could program an ECU with a laptop,
you could program a little black box with some DIP switches.
This little bit of 90s technology is called a BIPES ACU.
You flip these little switches up and down
in just the right combination and it'll retard timing
by one degree for each PSI of boost
or two degrees for every 10 degrees of cooling temp
or something like that.
Not a lot of people wanna trust their engine
to this anymore, so it was only 40 bucks
and I probably shouldn't be touching it.
- This mix of discarded junk is good for about
185 horsepower at the wheels, which isn't that much,
but it actually wanted to make more.
Less boost means better durability
and when you're endurance racing,
durability is more important than power.
- [Narrator] Let's morph in time.
- Our first car died when we gave another car a little
love tap and punctured the radiator
when it was in the front.
After that, putting the radiator inside the roll cage
seemed like a really good idea.
(funky guitar music)
When we got it was already a totaled shell,
with the front smashed in.
So, we cut off the crumpled bits, and welded on the nose
from a blue car that had it's side smashed in.
Then a few years later, we smashed the blue nose
and had to cut the nose off of a red car
to keep this car going again.
(funky guitar music)
The whole car is even twisted from the time
we touched tires with a rabbit.
(tires squealing)
We're too cheap to go to a frame shop and bend it back,
so, we just shoved a scrap of aluminum between the body
and the front subframe to keep the suspension level.
(funky guitar music)
So, for this next part I need this coolant bottle.
Since the radiator cap is buried in here,
next to the driver, we had to figure out how to top off
the coolant during the pit stop without burning anybody.
(beeps)
So, instead, we put the coolant in under pressure
with this intravenous coolant filling system.
During a pit stop, we just pump up this garden sprayer
until it has more pressure than the radiator,
there's a little gauge on here.
Then you plug it in, flip the lever
and let the water flow in, got a little overflow hose here
so you know when the radiator's topped up,
'cause all the air will have come to the top
and sometimes that works (laughs).
(crew laughing)
(funky guitar music)
- Getting air to flow through a radiator
that's inside the car is a little bit harder than it looks,
and it looks pretty hard.
So Eyesore Racing actually consulted an aerodynamics
engineer who works at a local helicopter company
to help design the airflow strategy.
- Sitting next to the radiator is honestly hot as balls,
so this old cooler full of ice water, rides in the trunk
and inside of it there is a bilge pump for a boat
and it pushes water out through this hose,
which goes into this home made cool shirt made of two shirts
and vinyl tubes and it cools down the driver.
(funky guitar music) (vibrating electronic tone)
- Now, honestly hang on, we gotta pump our brakes
for a second, you guys, there's something
I wanna talk about, something that's been hanging
over my head for a while.
It's this giant (beeps) wing!
(funky guitar music)
- We made this wing from an airfoil shape
that was designed for short take off bush planes,
since they take off at about the same speeds
that we race at.
We found the wing profile and all it's data on airfoils.com,
programmed the shape into a CNC router
and cut out a bunch of little wing sections from foam blocks
that we found that were used for padding
in shipping boxes from Japan.
Then we stacked all the airfoils over a piece of redwood,
wrapped the whole stack in fiberglass,
mounted it way up here, away from all the turbulence
that's caused by this hideous car.
At a 100 miles per hour, this wing makes over 250 pounds
of downforce.
- Now if you put 250 pounds of downforce on the back
of a car at a 100 miles per hour, the rear suspension's
gonna squat a bunch, so if you can run this much downforce,
you need a really stiff suspension setup
to deal with the big changes.
But the stiff suspension setups cost a lot of money,
so instead, they mounted the wing directly to the rear
uprights, putting all the downforce straight into the tires
and bypassing the suspension completely,
which is one of the smartest things I've ever seen.
(suspension squeaking)
See, the wing's dead still, kinda!
Both the Lotus Formula One Team
and the Chaparral Can-Am Team used high mounted airplane
style wings, just like this and it was so effective
that it was banned, leaving LeMons the only place
you can still use this cutting edge 60s technology.
- Sometimes this wing even goes an entire race
without breaking.
- Arg!
(engine starts)
Well, that's one way to start it!
(engine revs) (menacing laugh)
(laughs) Is this made strictly out of trash?
This thing is awesome!
Aha, so, apparently, this doesn't start traditionally,
what do you know.
They wired up the neutral safety switch
to the clutch switch, so you don't have to have the clutch
engaged anymore, the car just has to be in neutral
and if it is, you can start it from there.
And there's two starter buttons, just in case
one of 'em fails, which is very engineering.
(lively electronic tones)
So, I'm looking around, trying to find things
that I recognize from a stock Miata,
because I have a stock Miata these days
and I don't see very much.
I think the shift knob's from a stock one
and the gauge cluster is also from a stock Miata,
but other than that, I don't recognize anything in here,
especially the giant hot water tank,
shed that's in the passenger seat.
(gentle electronic music)
This thing is absolutely certified wild and I love it,
so if you wanna see more of this thing,
check 'em out at pretty much all of the California
LeMons events and they'll also be at Inde Motorsports Ranch
in Arizona in February.
So, thank you guys so much for watching,
we had a lot of fun making it.
If you wanna see more Miata content,
check out my new show coming out on Donut soon
called Moneypit, where you can build a Miata with me.
- [Woman] (laughs) Video game style.
- Oh, that.
Oh, like that?
Oh!
Oh (laughs)! (everyone laughing)