Finally, The Bomb Squad Does Something Not Entirely Stupid

They say you can’t fix stupid.  For two seasons now, the Brooklyn Bomb Squad have entered our shitbox Audi 200 into around half a dozen 24 Hours of LeMons races and left with nothing more than a handful of laps and a broken motor.  Why?  Why do we do this?  Sheer stupidity, of course.  But to be fair, remember that LeMons racing is a place where stupidity is considered the better part of valor.  If you rolled every team in the paddock into a ball and squeezed, the only reason you wouldn’t get 100% pure, distilled idiocy is because that would be too complete an achievement. 

This year, though, we’ve had enough.  Our car is Stupid.  (I just renamed it.)  And we’re going to fix it.

When I first joined the Bomb Squad, it was an exciting moment for everyone.  Not because they had enlisted me, a complete mechanical and racing newb whose sole qualification was the requisite lack of intelligence and a handful of cash.  No, everyone was excited because of the new motor.  You see, our Audi was born in 1990 as a 100 series sedan, which meant the non-turbo motor.  But now, the rusty pile of shit between the front fenders was a turbo motor from the 200 series car.  With a chipped ECU.  And that was the beginning of a long couple of years. 

We blew the head two or three times on that motor.  So many rebuilds.  So many hard to diagnose problems from the turbo to the fuel injectors to the spark plugs fouling to the electrical system.  The block was checked for warpage, but we still suspect it might be just a little tweaked.  Another head rebuild would put us on track for another hopeful start, but maybe another stupid ending.

So, instead of entering the LeMons race at New Jersey Motorsports Park this May simply to force ourselves to tape the car back together against an expensive and inflexible deadline, the Bomb Squad has done something smart, for once.   We bought another complete turbo 10 valve 5-cylinder motor.  Instead of racing, we’re going to tear this thing down and really, really rebuild it. 

The motor is in Connecticut in the garage of our most mechanically gifted member Ethan; Jay, Joe K, and I will be making trips up this spring to help him wrench on this thing.  Maybe, this year, we can fix Stupid.