How Corona saved my life (& my cheap race car)

i want a turbo car where the exhaust pipe comes out the door and flames coming out of it so i enjoy going fast in cars who doesn't the best way to doing that right now i think is racing in the 24 hours of lemons now that's not lemo it's lemons and what that is essentially is star they started this way by you start with a 500 car and supposedly and you turn it into a race car and you go racing and they don't have any rules as far as how much you can spend on this is safety items cage seat fuel tank and things so eventually these cars turn into race cars over time because you're spending money on them but the idea is they start off as cheap jalopies anybody can get into it and if you've got a fast car there's a hundred and so odd cars in the track you can pass three cars every corner if you want if you're good at it and it's a lot of fun and you race for hours it's two usually two eight hour days not actual 24 hours so i got into this about a decade ago a few years after it started i moved back to california and a friend of mine's like oh you want to do 24 hours of lemons i was like yeah because i heard lemons when they did the articles one of the reasons that where the 2904 idea came from was to do it you know a cheap version of something and he's like yeah he has a bunch of buddies of mine from tesla got a third-gen toyota supra and we're gonna go erase that i'm like that's a heavy car but sure and they're like you've raced before you've built race cars before i'm like yeah let's let's do it oh by the way the tesla guys are out okay and so it's just you and me for now like so we're building the race car he goes no you're building the race car like so you're asking me on the team to build a race car he's like yeah so we get a truck we go down to tesla and stuff in the corner of this like secret warehouse with all this cool electronic stuff is this crappy broken down supra we drag it out of there they're good to see it go we get it back i built it into a car had the stock 7m engine in it and we're like oh that's right we're supposed to have a theme so like first theme like let's make a theme all right what's the theme and we try to look at topical things and at that point 2010 it was don't ask don't tell we came up with for some reason so we painted the car pink and we covered it in phalluses in different directions that made it look like camouflage so it was camouflage is what it was and it was hard to tell but that's what it looked like and we went in military uniforms and nothing against the military that was kind of a joke and liz taylor had just died so we did a big liz taylor thing on the back side of it and uh we proceeded to blow it up now we had done everything people told her like oh change the head studs on him because they didn't do them right from the factory and we spent all this money and time and it was a total piece of crap and you have to do street tires you can't do race tires and lemons so we're on street tires they stock everything and it was dreadful so instead of doing the smart thing and abandoning that car and burning it to the ground uh we decided to spend a lot of money and turn it more into a race car so over the next few years we spent some money that engine was dreadful so we blew up the 7m motor i'm like i'm not doing this again let's find something else my teammate finds a 1jz turbo engine now for those who don't know what that is that is this twin-turbo monster motor six-cylinder monster motor from japan they didn't really have it in a lot of cars here in the u.s but they had in a car called the chaser and the soarer and the 2jz became famous in the fourth generation supra that which became more famous uh in fast and furious and then everybody had to have it it was the drift engine made all the trippy fun sounds so we got we found one this drift kid was trying to put in his car and just ran out of money and we got it for 800 bucks and everyone jay-z guy right now is going they're not 800 bucks i'm like we got it for 800 bucks we stuffed it in the supra and we showed up we didn't know anything about turbo racing turbo cars i'd always race normally aspirated cars i'd never build turbo car so of course it has no intercooler on it it has the old radiator it overheats and it's a piece of junk and then of course we show up and they're like that's a 1jz those make a thousand horsepower you can't have that here that's horrible and we're like i think phil and the judges were like they're not gonna last five laps and i think we lasted ten before we popped it and we took it home and i'm like we can figure this out so oh actually you did some research open some books got it going and at the time i was working for canapa and they have a crack team of uh motorsports mechanics there and we were good friends of mine and they took pity on me so we dragged the 1jz supra into the canopy shop after hours and parked amongst the million dollar cars is this heap of of a supra and they proceed to corner weight it and show me how to do the suspension the way it was supposed to be done and all these little tricky things i've always loved seeing cheating in race cars that's one of my favorite things and it's a hobby to collect card sheets the great thing about lemons is there's no rules against cheating so i'm like what can we do to this that's not allowed in real racing like oh well if you're going to take the gloves off we can do all kinds of things like weight jacking where a weight in the back of the car actually moves from one side of the car to the other actively to keep it flat on the track and i'm like let's let's do that what else can we do and so we had a list of things and we started putting cheaty things on it legally cheating things but the guys at lemon especially judge phil never liked the car because of the 1jz every time we showed up they were like you're cheating this is a cheating engine it's got a million horsepower we're going to give you eight penalty laps or 10 penalty laps after we got it sorted out the car really started hustling and we were going sub two minute laps at sonoma in traffic on street tires and there are some quick teams out there like eyesore they can do a sub two minute lap there's a few of them and i don't know if we're the best drivers in the world but that car was quick and they hated it even more and at one point they gave us like 12 penalty laps and we still came in eighth place and judge phil comes over and this is we've been racing for years at this point with it he comes over and he goes this car can never win because i don't care if you do come in first place i don't know you're not getting a trophy nothing's gonna happen this engine is a cheaty it's not you know this is too obvious a one jay-z and a supra he goes it's not lemons he goes you can't win and we at that point the closer you get to winning the more money and time you're spending that final 10 takes 90 percent of the time and money like you were trying to get there and i'm like is it worth chasing a crappy trophy at lemons for all this i go what do we have to do to get your good graces and phil goes okay i'll make you a deal you can either put the straight six out of a ford pickup truck in your supra and you're running class c which is the lowest class the slowest class and i'll never give you a penalty lap again or you can race in class a but you have to put your chidi engine and everything in a pre-75 toyota and we're like no desire to go slow ever i'm like no don't want to afford no don't want to do it so we started looking around for pre-75 toyota now the problem with the pre-785 toyota is that they're made out of old sardine cans and what was left over after world war ii i'm assuming they're not terribly structurally sound vehicles and that's with the challenge we look around and we find a toyota karina which i don't even know existed at the time bought it for i think a thousand bucks now i know that's over the 500 limit if you strip things out of the car and sell it like we sold 500 in parts the car is 500 so we figured we could do that i put online i didn't even take it apart yet i put online toyota karina for parts for sale like i figured i could pre-sell all the stuff inside and i got five or six emails immediately like will you sell the car will you sell the car i'm like no um i need the car i do the car i can sell you the interior and this one guy was like i'll give you two grand i said no i'll give you three grand i said no i'll give you four grand i said maybe and then he's like can you deliver to my house and i'm like 4 400 i can deliver it to your house which was all of 60 miles away and i had a truck and trailer and then i had to find another car interestingly enough we had been talking to some of the people at lemons about phil and phil's first car that he ever owned was a 1969 toyota corona four-door with these little box cars and i found one in stockton which was only 30 miles from where i was dropping off the karina so i drove and dropped off the karina in the morning got my 4 400 drove down to stockton bought the uh corona for a thousand dollars pocketed the rest of it and drove home and we're like great we've got the car phil's gonna freak out we decide to drive it completely stock in as a mia culpa still has the spiders in it 70 series 13-inch wheels drum brakes two-speed automatic wheezy engine and i have to say and i have to admit and they were right it was one of the best races i've ever been in we caged it we put a racing seat in it stock dashboard it was the slowest thing i think i'd ever been in in my life on a racetrack and terrifying you drove the entire race with a river with just a rear mirror didn't even look in front of you you're just looking for who was coming up behind and eventually everybody got used to us staying on the inside out of everybody's way and we made lap after lap and we beat corvettes and we beat bmws and we beat mazdas we beat a whole bunch of cars i think we came in like out of 140 cars we came in like 68th place because we just stayed in the track and did labs the car ended up getting like 30 something miles to the gallon and the 11 gallon gas tank we would just go out and it was so calm and easy it wasn't sweating or worrying about anything we just put it around the track we end up winning their highest award which is the index of effluency which is the ioe and that is the highest prize has the highest money for driving the worst car and doing the most with it we had paid our price we had our patch we got our money and we're like time to build the monster so we take the corona apart and i have to say aside from the tuna fish cans that car came apart easier than any car i've ever done we cracked one bolt everything came off finger tight and this is a 40 year old car i've been sitting in somebody's side yard i was so impressed with the build quality on that car so we took it apart sold the interior and know everything from it and got it down to nothing and then we're like how do we fit this engine in here so we start disassembling the front end we mock in the engine and i'm like well we got to do both the front and rear subframes too because this can't sit on the old you know live axle in the back so we tear out the rear end we tear out the front end essentially it's just this four-door tub sitting on the floor in my garage we get a front suspension made but we're starting to put it together and if some people have seen the ferrari video a 35 feet of a redwood tree snap off 100 feet in the air come down smash my garage with us in it working on the corona i get thrown under a bench my friend peter gets thrown under the car the roll cage of the car actually supporting part of the roof of the of the garage and we get out relatively unscathed i had a bruised toenail but the car the poor corona was holding the garage up structurally and an engineer told us that until we took it apart the whole garage we had to leave the car in there otherwise it might collapse so the chrono was entombed for an entire year inside the garage and then construction finally began we had a party at my house unbeknownst to my friends we were going to take the car out so we lifted the car up with all the people we put it on the porch we got working and we rebuilt the garage same thing another surpri a party and surprise hey guys we're gonna put some sticks in the window and carry this car up this hillside and into my new garage we got it inside and got to work and peter ralph's who is an absolute genius the guys built like formula cars and nascar and everything without him we could never have done it and he was the one who helped build the front horns we hung the suspension on and the rear suspension so we got basically a mark iii supra stuffed under a corona we got the 1jz in it and the whole thing when we before we took we took it apart i think it weighed when the first race stock it weighed like 20 2080 pounds or something so now together it's only a few hundred pounds more it's 800 pounds lighter than the supra which is not something i think lemons was expecting the car now is all together well mostly and it's time to get it ready for its first race so we signed up for it and that's when you realize and people have built race cars will know this that it's never ready when you think it's ready so i invite the team members out and we work for eight days straight from four a.m pretty much till eleven so we're getting four hours of sleep and then towards the end we actually worked two days solid we worked all night came out the door the sun was up we're like ah screw it and we went back to work and it's friday for inspection day i'm like we're gonna get it done we had to get us an alignment or something it was just barely finished and we're like it's not finished so we're like we call up limits like we'll be there saturday morning we'll contech in the morning they're like okay tech in the morning and then saturday comes and we worked all night again and it still wasn't right and working correctly and so we're like okay we'll work through today we'll just race on sunday they said okay show up sunday morning we'll take it you guys can at least get on the track like great it'll be like heroic ending we're getting on track and sunday comes and it's not finished and we all weep openly on each other's shoulders and it was like all right i guess we missed it we lick our wounds and i'm like we're gonna do the next race which is no not in the area all the local california races were over for that period and we had to go to washington and that's a thousand miles from my house and the ridge which is an amazing track if you ever get to go there tremendous track and we pretty much do the same thing i wait till a couple weeks beforehand we're like it's finished it's not finished and they fly out we do the same thing we hammer on it we put it on the trailer we drive to the ridge i drove around my house it seemed fine it wasn't uh we had a few issues one being uh the ridge doesn't have fuel and the 1jz runs on 100 octane so we had to see if we could make 100 octane which you can't make 100 octane we got 91 octane doesn't run well on it we went to a local airport which happened to be open and we bought a 55 gallon drum of uh 100 octane leaded which doesn't work because the oxygen sensor didn't find that appealing i thought we could get by because we don't have a cat in it but no the car started running so we mixed the two fuels together and that made things worse and then we had to sell the mixed fuel which we end up get walking around the pits like would you like a mixture of leaded and unleaded fuel because it would work great in your car and the guy there had an old chrysler and we put it in him and it now leaded fuel smells beautiful i mean guys my age remember it of course it was killing you at the time but it smelled great so the smell of leaded fuel started wafting around in different cars and motorhomes we were trying to sell it to but we got it out on track and we ran into the other issues because again i like cheating weird stuff and i wasn't going to build a car another part from scratch if we didn't do chewy weird stuff one thing was i wanted to put the radiator in the back seat because rally car like the the audi peak pike's peak car you know all kinds of cool stuff because if you auger the front end you don't destroy the radiator you can keep racing that seems smart to me we put it in the back seat and we had ducting and fans and we got on the race track and it started overheating terribly which might have to do with the crappy fuel but no we've put some stringers over a duct we had made in the trunk so the air went into the back seat and out the truck all the strings instead of blowing in the wind beautifully out the back were being sucked into the car so the air was actually moving backwards towards the radiator while the fans were pushing air towards the so it was just a static mess of nothing so that didn't work and we also uh we didn't show up with rear fenders because we didn't have time so there we made which was the hit of the pits we ended up making right there fenders out of old license plates which looked fabulous and the last piece of cheating thing i wanted to do with the car i love one of my favorite cars of all time and i've had been fortunate enough to sit in it and be on and lay hands on it and that is the 88 audi quattro trans am car which is a holy grail car of mine and one of my favorite things about that is the exhaust pipe that came out the door and i'm like i want an exhaust pipe that comes out the door i want a turbo car where the exhaust pipe comes out the door and flames coming out of it so we routed the exhaust through the but right by the inside came out of the floor and out the door right next to the driver and we put like chimney kind of material to protect it so we didn't die of carbon monoxide and but it radiated a lot of heat which we hadn't really you know worked on that much i gotta say we worked on the car a lot uh but not enough and that's always the lemons way the racing way is you think you got it all done but you don't so we end up doing in two days and 16 hours of driving we end up racing uh 25 laps and my dad flew up to see the car and uh we brought my son and all of her friends came up and a thousand miles and 25 laps and we got the proceed we got another award the prestigious we got screwed award which i'm pretty proud of no i'm not proud of it all it's really kind of awful but we got it so we it's on display at the house you know to a lot of people this stuff sounds ridiculous and there's a good reason for it i mean to finish this car the amount of money we spent and the time we spent and time away from our families why why do it this car meant something to me because of the accident in the with the redwood tree and i've really felt deep my soul i had to finish it like have closure on the car like get it on its tires and wheels and everything that i had promised to myself and my mind to build it was to finish it and that was overwhelming driving desire maybe he was a little ptsd from almost being killed when i'm sure it was a little bit of that but working a hundred and something hours in one week and and through the night a couple of times that's what was driving me is like we had to make it finish we had to find completion for this car and cars are always emotional creatures as it is and i think race cars are doubly so because a regular car you just drive around and a race car is actually protecting your life and threatening your life simultaneously some of them more than others but you had to find a way of getting that card done so we had a few weeks to finish it and we had all gathered together and flown out you know bradley came out don came up and i now lived up in the mountains so i was kind of alone with the car most of the time and i was away from my team they fly in and i'm trying to finish it desperately and it wasn't going to get done and one of those like you always hope for kind of the christmas miracle like when i wake up the elves will have finished it and that race car were a few times i wish i had some elves and guess what i got some elves and what happened was i called a friend and his son lived up where we were and uh gavin was like 16 when he helped us out with the supra originally and his dad was on the team at the time and gavin was now in his 20s and an aspiring drift racer and all kinds of things and he was deep into cars he's like yeah i'll come over and help i'm like oh that is fantastic and anybody who's built or restored a car you know when you get the you get a little bit of help that when you're really in the weeds you know it's just the warm and fuzzies and you feel like you can breathe for a moment not only did he do that he contacted another guy who he didn't really know that well but he knew lived in auburn close to me named matt leyland who eventually now works for me because he's a brilliant mechanic so he grabs matt and matt grabs his friend travis and these three young 20 year old kids show up at my door and like what do you need i'm like oh i need everything and went through the list and they were the elves and we just started knocking stuff out i mean we that car would not be where it is at all without the three of them and uh matt and gavin are with us to this day as our crew they don't ask for money they don't ask for thanks they just do it because they love cars and that gives me hope great hope like here's the younger generation and they just they said i was like what do you want like of course we you know we bought them dinner or whatever they needed we paid for their gas or you know what they were doing was great and helpful and they're like no we don't need anything we just wanted to work on a race car and i was like well sorry i don't have a race car but we do have this corona you can work on and they tirelessly and selfishly help they get that card done avalon king has been a supporter of the vinwicki channel for the last four years and we can't thank them enough for that and i have it honestly on all my cars there's a ton of ceramic coatings on the market but not many of them are truly diy products where an idiot like me can actually put them on we've done a lot of collaborative projects we've got a lot of interesting things coming up with avalon king and we can't thank them enough for their support of the channel but if you'd like to try it out on your car i think you'll love the hydrophobic properties the resistance to scratching the ease of cleaning and honestly how good the cars look so be sure to check them out at the link in the description below and use the code benwicki for a discount

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 377,706

Rating: 4.9254336 out of 5

Keywords: John Ficarra, 24 hours of lemons, le mans, supra, corona, toyota, racing, endurance racing, rules, cheap car racing, vinwiki, car stories

Id: d6PmaR2Upn4

Length: 23min 33sec (1413 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021