Who’s up for a little old school DTOM? Apparently fate and / or a malevolent God that’s who. Between Wednesday and Sunday of last week I (with Craig) had to figure out how to get our painted car back into Craig’s garage, fly to California and back, then drive to Savannah in time to race with Brendan at the final BMW Club Race of the year. Here are the details of how that all worked out.
We dropped the car off at the end of November to be painted. The dude said it would be done (this was a Tues.) by the weekend. Craig and I rolled our eyes. This is like being the parent of 9 kids and having the youngest tell you “Honest I did my homework”. You know it’s a bold faced lie, but you’re too tired to give a shit. And really at this point it doesn’t matter, Daytona was the big race, we wanted to get the car done prior to that for the 8 hour NASA enduro shake down – that schedule came and went so the next realistic race would be Barber in April (Grand Am schedule here). So because of that and the fact that both of our garages are still chock full of crap we weren’t in a hurry and had gotten used to using these destinations as a sort of temporary storage to complement our already robust set of garages and storage units.
Another universal truth we’ve discovered – beside cost estimates that don’t even cover parts let alone labor, and delivery dates that are mere figments of someone’s imagination, -is that when something is done it is a) done immediately and b) needs to be picked up right that minute. As frequent DTOM readers will testify most of this project has involved shipping unwieldy shit from point A to point B. Getting a non running, sometimes not rolling car moved around isn’t the easiest thing in the world and often requires two people and some thinking. Knowing all of this I guess it should have come as no surprise when my phone rang early Wednesday (12/8) morning with painter Rob saying “Hey man I need you to come pick up your car it’s done, how quick can you be here?” It must not have dawned on this guy Tuesday at 5pm that he would be done on Wed. at 8am, but those few hours would have helped with the planning.
[As I finished typing that I just remembered that this guy, and honestly most ‘budget’ painters, don't / doesn't paint with a respirator, so it is completely 100% plausible that simple observation never occurred to him. Safety first has never really been part of the DTOM credo, but breathing industrial paint and solvent fumes isn't a good early retirement plan, unless by retirement you mean die of some weird cancer.]
Unfortunately like the perfect storm this was becoming, I was on my way to the airport to fly out for work. Craig and I formulated a plan whereby I would get my trailer and truck and leave it with him, he’d fetch the car from painter dude on Thursday, and I’d take one of his fleet of vehicles to the airport. I imagine his bitterness about my driving the 911 to work during the summer was behind the ‘rental’ car being his POS dodge pickup.
I hate to fly. It has nothing to do with the flying and everything to do with people, the airline industry, and all the stupid crap that comes with it. With that said, if I have to fly anywhere for work, going out to Irvine, CA. is usually not that bad. Irvine is pretty nuts. I maintain that they staff the entire town with actors and models. There are no ugly people in that place, it’s almost surreal. My other semi-frequent destination is New Jersey. You couldn’t find a more opposite experience since I think all the ugly people from CA get shipped to NJ. Newark airport is like a poster child for the decline of civilization, I’ve witnessed domestic violence while waiting for a flight, I’ve seen a man almost beaten to death by a crowd when he “mistakenly” cut in line, and I’ve smelled things that would make a hardened sanitation worker wretch, all while in lovely, sunny, NJ.
On the flip side John Wayne airport is pleasant, there are rarely lines, and even the security dude apologized to me when he needed to pat me down. Regardless you’re still getting on an airplane. If I could have one wish that wasn’t a winning lottery ticket, it would be for the entire airline industry to go bankrupt and be replaced by “Something”. I don’t care what it is – super fast Japanese trains, hang gliders, covered wagons, it doesn’t matter at this point ANYTHING is better.
For my flight out I had a middle seat, which I was lucky enough to change to a window, no matter the 6’5 gent in the middle seat made sure I wasn’t comfortable. Then to top it off he was a Delta employee, and quite possibly the most cheerful flyer I’ve seen. He proceeded for the next 5 hours to regale the dude on his right with how awesome flying was, how he loved to travel, blah blah blah. I carry earplugs with me at all times for just this reason and the screaming baby that I think the FAA mandates must be on all planes. I wanted to point out to Delta Employee of the Month to look around at all the smiling faces, the feeding frenzy for overhead luggage space, the aged lunch lady appearance of the stewardesses (Not flight attendants), his oh so comfortable barely adequate for a 5 year old child seat, to say nothing of the disrobing in front of strangers as fast as you can in some kind of anti-terrorist metal detection obstacle course, etc etc etc.
On the way home I had another middle seat, now before you blame me and say well there’s your problem jack ass, this meeting had been scheduled and cancelled four times so I was playing a game of chicken in hopes that it would be cancelled again, or that I could somehow weasel out of it. I lost that roll of the dice which meant booking the flight literally at the last minute and everything that follows was the result. No luck changing my seat again so I was stuck in the middle seat on the red eye back to GA. Again I have a professional wrestler on my right, and some more normal sized human on the left. The normal dude broke out his uber traveler sleep kit, with the neck pillow, eye shades, and zip around blanket sleep sack. He then proceeded to go into some type of night terror infested coma. It was like sitting next to my dog when he is dreaming, I’m not sure if this guy was running from the Viet Cong, or chasing bunny rabbits but my shins were bruised by the time we touched down at 4:35am in Atlanta. To say nothing of the back and neck cramps from rolling my shoulders over to ‘fit’ in the seat.
Not fitting in seats would be a theme for the weekend, as I made my way back towards Craig’s place to swap out his truck for my truck and trailer and pick up the big boy seat for Brendan’s car. Club Racing is in collusion with all the safety gear sellers to mandate expiration dates for EVERYTHING in the car, this ensures that every year you’ll need to drop $1000 on crap that was perfectly satisfactory. Because of this Brendan had bought a slightly used Sparco seat with a fresher sell by date, that I think was the basis for the airlines, combined with all the custom work to make the cockpit fit him, meant it certainly wasn’t going to fit me. Just sitting in it made people start doing the fat guy in the little coat joke that Chris Farley made famous. (Somehow Clay fit in this thing, he has some type of snake unhinging jaw ability to fit into cars that would appear to be physically impossible, it is almost gumby-ish.) So at 5am in the freezing dark I was feeling my way around in Craig’s garage looking for the seat theoretically dedicated to our car. There hasn’t been a car on his lift for months now, so with the early morning / lack of sleep, and the darkness explain how I almost knocked myself out walking directly into a rear tire attached to the painted car on the lift. Thankfully it was the tire and not the lift post or anything metal since I probably would have froze to death after being rendered unconscious before anyone found me.
I carried this huge box down his alley and loaded up my truck and drove home to grab a few hours of sleep before taking the trailer back and heading off to Savannah / Roebling Road for the debut of the S54 powered E12. 3 hours later my phone rings and Craig tells me that Rob the painter has more parts that are ready for immediate pickup. Apparently just the car was done, not the bumpers, doors, hood, trunk, etc. So I hurry up and unpack and repack, unload the trailer and drive back to Craig’s. Where I then unload the seat I had just put in the truck and we drive up to pick up more painted parts. I finally get to the Bradbury Suites Best Western in Pooler, GA at 11pm.
7am came quickly and as Brendan, Ted, and I are leaving for the track we exit our room and there is a dude that looks like one of the Hanson brothers from Slap Shot (but with a beard) wearing – 100% true – just long johns doing some type of stretching exercises in the hallway. His twin, thankfully fully clothed, joins him and they catch the elevator with us where we have the following exchange.
Q (Long John Hanson Brother): “Are you guys going to work?”
Ted: “No”
LJHB: “Oh, you guys look sad so I thought maybe you had to go to work.”
Ted: “No, we’re going to race”
LJHB: “What kind of race?”
Ted: “Car race there is a race track down the road”
LJHB: “Cool”
Reggie Dunlop: Oh you cheap son of a bitch. Are you crazy? Those guys are retards!
McGrath: I got a good deal on those boys. The scouts said they showed a lot of promise.
He and his twin proceeded to walk through the lobby and stand outside and smoke. He had on long johns, no shirt, no shoes, no hat, JUST long johns and glasses with tape holding them together. I think it goes without saying that in all of men’s fashion long john’s, spandex bike shorts, and those really high cut runner’s shorts are in a deadlocked tie for the most unflattering things a dude can wear.
As usual the racing was anti-climatic to everything else. Brendan’s car consists of 50% parts from every model of BMW every made, and 50% custom invented stuff that you can’t buy or replicate without a bunch of fabrication equipment and an expert fabricator (See Day of the Dyno post for details). So it came as no surprise that it was cold, raining, and that the car was having some growing pains.
I love the new “Green” bathrooms, “green” is code for Cheap. I think Roebling’s bathrooms were designed by MC Escher or someone with a sadistic sense of humor. To begin with the urinals are ‘almost’ too high for me to use, so to anyone shorter than 6ft you’re standing back and shooting from the 3pt line. The stalls on the other hand have a lot in common with your airplane bathroom, you almost have to back into them since once you close the door you can’t turn around. In an effort to be green / cheap – I mean consider the irony of ‘green’ restrooms at a racetrack? – everything is automated except the soap. So I get a handful of soap and start waving my hand around to get the water to turn on, just in time for the power to go off. Now its pitch black in this glorified outhouse, I have a handful of soap, no water, and they installed hand dryers not towels. My only option is to walk the ¼ mile away with my hand cupped like I have a hand full of bird crap to where we’re parked to get either a rag or a bottle of water to solve my problem.
So in summary besides getting cold and wet I learned how to rebuild a half shaft (sort of like an axle), on a dirty car mat, in less than an hour which includes all the ball bearings flying out of their cage. It’s sort of like a child’s puzzle but covered in axle grease. We did fit the big boy seat in the car and I eventually got to drive about 20 laps or so on 5 cylinders since one wasn’t firing. The final result DFL with a blistering 1.26 fast lap almost as quick as what I’ve done in the dry with the old Spec E30. On Sunday it rained even harder, I tried one lap for qualifying but no wipers or rain tires, and standing water made the executive decision to get home early that much easier to make.
