Welcome to Lemons

So, the point of this is to goof around with tools. Which conveniently enough parallels the point of Lemons: goofing off with tools and cars and people. If you aren't familiar with it, the 24 Hours of Lemons is endurance racing on road tracks with cars that cost *less than $500*. Ok, not really less than $500, but also yes, in fact, less than $500. I'll get into that in some other post.

For now, let's introduce ourselves. Hi, I'm Matthew. I'm part of the Savage Orchid Racing team. This is Uma, our 2002 Ford Escort ZX2. Four cylinder, 5 speed.

That photo is from our last full 24 hour race in September, 2022. Over the last 3 years we've had seven races with this car, and learned a ton. I'm going to try and cover some of that 3 year process - builds, modifications, heartbreaks, victories, heartbreaks, broken brakes. Actually a lot of that will be about brakes.

We purchased this car in January, 2019, from another Lemons team. I will say this: if you're considering Lemons, buy an already sorted car, that has passed Tech inspection. Your likelihood of actually racing increases dramatically. The number of things in the rules that you can misread, misunderstand, or just plain miss is significant. Happily, our first tech was a breeze with this car.

Over the years, we've made some improvements

• 2019

  • New fire suppression

  • New harness

  • New Serpentine belt, valve cover gasket

  • Both front wheel hubs

• 2020

  • New wheels

  • so many rotor and caliper and pads

• 2021

  • converted rear brake drums to disc/rotors (I'll write quite a bit more about this later, game changer)

... Some of my intent is to come back and fill out some of the details, and history of our team and our original car. However, most of my intent with this blog is to archive our work and build of a *new car*.

By *new car* I mean, of course, a 42 year old car. Please say hi to our 1981 Datsun 280zx!

In my next post, I'll dig into that car, and share some of our initial work!