Well I live in Lexington, and I will probably need some wrenching help...

The fear is real. I did 35 on one of these once and that was sketchy enough. The way I look at it, if it’s really that bad I can sell the modded 212 and buy a stock 212 motor instead. Then I can enjoy having limbs and skin and make some money in the process.

I think the R1 is physically larger than the rest of the bike.

UPDATE: I’m seeing it tomorrow night. I’ll be bringing cash just in case.

No, THIS is terrifying madness:

We did that too for a year or so. We were a lot slower than we liked, but there was no better feeling when we debuted our new car and everyone went “wow that is so much quicker than your old car.” We picked up 8 seconds on a similar course. That’s what hurt the most about competition: our car was so much faster than…

Put together a bunch of lessons learned from your current car and figure out how to solve each one of them. If you can get a car that makes it through competition, you can work on making it faster. We had a saying in our team to help keep us focused on that task: “Build a car that can car.” If you go too crazy too…

We had been driving the car for a month before competition. The vapor lock and charging system troubles never cropped up until we got to Nebraska. We had been driving in similarly hot conditions and we had done far more miles in a day with zero trouble. Our car was fairly simple as our team is small and underfunded so…

It will kill you if you get in too deep. Find a balance of school and team. I failed to do that and it bit me hard. That’s the best advice I have.

How about the SAE car that almost caused me to not graduate? I slaved away on that thing for 18 hours a day. It was fast in practice and we worked a lot of bugs out of it. We got to competition and it was a mess. Failed inspection pretty badly and lost a day making repairs (they involved a welder). Then the shifter…

A Morgan +8. Then I’d dump that Rover (or BMW depending on the year) engine and drop in an LS and a T56. POWAHHHHHHH!!!

When things are uncertain economically, politically, defensively, etc., the general populace defaults to conservative ideology (the idea being things worked in the past, let’s just do that again). It makes more sense on the surface to fall back onto past successes than it does to take risks. Unfortunately, those past…

Both cars lurch and halt like chained pit bulls, their wheels spitting out black smoke.

Brake dust is black. You heat the piss out of your brakes doing a burnout. Overheated brakes would burp out a bunch of brake dust (and possibly bits of sheared of tire that have been thrown EVERYWHERE).

Someone has to make those parts bin shifters. They don’t come out of thin air. Suppliers have to do that math all the time. If you’re saving a lot in material and process streamlining, you’ll save bucket loads on the sale cost. That new shifter is a plastic lever, a small gate, a momentary switch, and a couple LEDs.…

By FD rules, the car’s all have to use factory suspension pickup points. From shock tower to shock tower they have to be factory sheetmetal. The suspension setups are really wonky compared to old school drifting, but Time Attack cars have more outrageous suspension than FD cars these days. Hell, a lot of cars are…

Gotta tighten those belts son! Let the seat and belts do the work of holding you in place. Your lap times will improve if your head is concentrating on the lap and not what limbs will be banging against the inside of the car.

You underestimate the amount of penny pinching OEMs push onto their suppliers. If they can save half a cent they will. The profit margins in the auto industry are nuts, especially with the competition from Korea, India, China, and Mexico. If you can save a few cents here and there (or even a few fractions of a penny),…

It’s really a shame so many car people hate drifting. These guys are gnarly as hell! It’s definitely more of a live event: watching it on TV or online really doesn’t do it justice.

It depends on the team. Some of them use the nitrous solely for cooling (sprayed on the intercooler), some use it to spool the turbo (like anti-lag but cheaper and easier to control), while others use it for power production. It’s generally not used continuously. FD cars now run very wide and sticky tires and the…