Here's Aki doing his creative flame paint job. What a talented JDM arteest!

Many people recognized the car from last two races from the bright orange and green paint. We would overhear mumbles of "oh damn, that's that fast #22 car...it's here again?" or "were you guys here last year..you were WTF? Racing right?" It was quite humorous and flattering at the same time.

New rules prohibited exoskeletons so we decided to pick up another chassis offered to us for FREE from Jaime Gomes @ Auto Innovations. Thanks Jaime!

We took the cage, brakes and suspension out of last years car and installed it to this chassis. Again, trying to follow the low budget philosophy, we found the cans of paint from the last two races and only had enough to paint half the car with each color...so half & half it was!

Look closely at the functional roof scoop...it's made out of one of our used engine oil drip pans. We named it our WRC Scoop.

We maintained a solid 2nd place for the most part of Saturday. Unfortunately a tragic crash ended the race in the early afternoon. We'd like to send our deepest condolences to Court Summerfield and his family and friends.

We started bright and early on Sunday and held onto 3rd place until the motor mount broke during Mark's stint which almost caused him to lose the entire shifter assembly thru the floor. Thanks to Graham working on the linkage and Aki & Jeremy working on the rear mount, we were able to get Mark back on the track in about 30 mins. The tow straps did a good job holding the motor in place..CUSTOM!

This bimmer understeered into a row of tires and got stuck. The racetrack staff left him there for a long while before providing any assitance.

Mark got a 30min black flag for starting under caution. We found later that a young boy was operating the lights faster than his flag. It was bad call but oh well...this is LEMONS not LEMANS! We're just lucky Jay didn't have us spin the penalty wheel and land on the Al Gore penalty. I think Mark would have punched the staff if they made him plant a tree while getting pelted with raw tofu!

After being out of the race for the sum of over an hour, we knew it was too late to place within the top 5 so we went to Plan B: Run the crap of the car and blow it up. This methodology led us to lose our radiator fan, almost overheat and blow a tire! Thanks Andrew! : )~

By the end of the day we moved from about 17th to a respectable 13th out of 89 cars.

Battle Damage:

• Same D16 from last December - stripped trans mount threads and engine overheated once...but still running like a CHARM!
• FR Bent Tie Rod & Lower Control Arm -toe in
• 1 Bursted Coolant Line
• 1 Cracked Rim (in two places) caused by Andrew e-brake difting before the chicane and dropping a tire
• 1 Blown Tire - see explaination above
• 2 Bent Tie Rods - Wheel Vibration
• 2 Fenders - so flexible it can now be formed by hand
• 4 Chunked Tires - From Running Over Misc Part and Out of Wack Alignment

So do you see the exhaust cannon that Natalie is resting her arm on? That was a fully functional exhaust custom fabricated by none other than Aki the FABRICATOR with the assitance of Mark the CRAZY IRISHMAN. And with the brains of Jei the INSTIGATOR....we decided to celebrate the end of the race with a bang, some confetti and when we got home....we celebrated with smoke! To see what we're talking about, click on the YouTube videos below.