The blog has been dormant for about a week due to a special project I’ve been working on.  This October my younger brother Drew was a driver in the Houston race of the 24 Hours of Lemons, an amateur endurance race for cars that have been bought and race-prepped (excluding “safety” items) for $500 or less.  After Drew participated in the race with some random guys nice enough to let him jump on their team and finished 26th out of 77 cars he, my dad, and I decided we would like to give it a go ourselves.

So we decided that if the race came back to Houston in 2009 we would try and put a team and car together.  On November 15th the 2009 schedule was released and Houston had a race scheduled for February 28, which is a very short period of time to find a decent $500 car, get it race-ready, and find a team of drivers (each team must have 4-6 drivers).  So when November 15th hit and we realized the race would be happening in just three months we went into car-finding mode.  We scoured Craigslist, eBay, Autotrader, and any other website we could think of for any usable car in Texas, Olahoma, and Arkansas.  We eventually decided we wanted to pursue a 1986 BMW 325e that was in the Dallas area.  Since dad is in Houston and Drew is in Arkansas I was the one who had to handle looking at and buying the car.

As you can see, the car is a piece of work (click on the picture to be taken to a Flickr photo set). The body is in pretty rough shape, the windshield has a pretty big spider crack in it, the power steering pump has been ripped off, the interior is an absolute mess, and the transmission linkage is broken and the car is stuck in second gear.  But it runs!  I drove it around the block after it got towed home.  Hopefully the transmission will be a pretty easy fix and then for the most part it will be drivable.

For the next month and a half we (and by “we” I mean my dad and brother) will work on getting the car race-ready, mostly over Thanksgiving and Christmas break while Drew is home from college.  Dad and Drew will be two of our four drivers; the other two will be guys they know who have some good driving experience.  I will be the crew chief and work on race and pit strategy.

So, now that we’ve got a car in-hand I can return to some more regular blogging and podcast activities (next podcast is tomorrow morning).  I may provide some more random updates about the car as things happen, but will definitely post after March 1st when the race is over.

Wish us luck.