(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
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(doorbell rings) Trust me when I say that's way easier than building your own huge car wing. If you're noticing that
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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)
