One of the great things about 24 Hours of LeMons racing is that a team can win a trophy at each of its three races even when the car finishes in the bottom 10 of the standings in two races and gets a DNS in another. LeMons officials recognize that victory takes on many forms, and a team’s struggles against bit-off-more-than-anyone-could-chew challenges tend to inspire us more than the team running the fastest car on the track. Here is the story of Rusty Dragon Racing, a New Hampshire-based team that practices a sort of post-apocalyptic, use-what-you-have-on-hand philosophy of drivetrain swapping.
Last year, the Rusty Dragon crew found a 1987 Volkswagen Golf in the no-doubt-haunted woods behind a team member’s house. The car had been sitting for years, but it seemed to have most of its parts and it was free—in other words, an ideal 24 Hours of LeMons car.
The team made its LeMons debut last fall, at the 2012 Halloween Hooptiefest at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. As is so often the case a first-time team, the Rusty Dragon Golf was found by our inspectors to be not quite ready to race. Even with a daunting list of things to fix before the green flag the next morning, the Rusty Dragons didn’t pause for a moment and got right to work. Unfortunately, a power-drill mishap during a firewall repair took out the windshield, which meant a panicky last-second run to the junkyard to get a replacement. With Hurricane Sandy approaching fast, the team thrashed all Friday night and had the car ready in time for the Saturday race session.
A few hours into the race, the Golf’s engine overheated and tore up all the rings and cylinder walls. Hey, said the Dragons, we’ve got a spare motor sitting in the weeds behind the garage at home! The only problem with the “new” engine was that it was seized solid, so the team filled the cylinders with ATF and spent Saturday night persuading the crank to turn.
That engine didn’t work so well, but the team managed to get a total of 77 laps and 110th place out of 117 entries. The LeMons Supreme Court liked the way the Rusty Dragons refused to give up in the face of multiple setbacks (any one of which would have sent a lot of teams home, tails between legs), so we gave them the much-coveted Judges’ Choice trophy.
After the race, the team started looking around for a replacement engine. Because they’d had such bad luck with Volkswagen hardware, they did a little junkyard shopping and opted for a carbureted A18 out of a 1985 Prelude. Of course, this meant that they’d have to use the Prelude transaxle, which meant lots of modifications , including re-splining the Honda axles to fit the VW hubs, fabricating the shift linkage from scratch, building custom motor mounts, replacing the Honda fuel-delivery system with a two-barrel Holley pulled from an ancient Ford 289 V-8, and the thousand other things you need when doing a front-wheel-drive swap like this. Honda engines have a miserable reliability history in LeMons racing, even worse than the record of Volkswagen engines, but so what?
The Honda-ized Rusty Dragon VW showed up at the 2013 Loudon Annoying race, and we were very impressed (and a bit puzzled) by their ingenuity. Maybe the A18-powered Golf would turn out to be the best idea in road-racing history!
So, the Rusty Dragonmobile hit the track on Saturday morning. Hopes were high.
24 laps later, kaboom! In typical Honda engine fashion, a connecting rod blasted through the side of the engine block, and the Rusty Dragon clanked to a halt in a cloud of smoke and a spreading pool of oil.
For most teams, this would be Game Over, what with Honda A engines being incredibly rare in New England wrecking yards. However, the Rusty Dragons had heard that it’s possible to remove bad rods, patch the engine block with J-B Weld, and keep racing. So, they pulled the oil pan, removed all the loose engine parts they could find, wedged a screwdriver between the offending piston and cylinder wall to keep it out of the way, and blocked the oil hole in the crank journal with the old hose-clamp-and-beer-can-metal method.
Sadly, this repair didn’t work so well, and the Golf spent part of a lap emulsifying engine oil and water before blowing up for good. On the bright side, we liked this team’s spirit so much that we gave them a second Judges’ Choice trophy.
For the 2013 Halloween Hooptiefest, the members of Rusty Dragon Racing decided that not only were Volkswagen and Honda engines bad ideas, front-wheel-drive itself was a bad idea. So, they bought this wrecked 1997 BMW 318ti as a parts donor. You can see where this is going, right?
Even though the Rusty Dragons don’t have a big machine shop or a crew stacked with nuclear-submarine-grade fabricators, they did have plenty of confidence in their ability to pull off the swap of a complete BMW rear-wheel-drive setup into a front-wheel-drive platform. A little cutting, a little pasting—hey, how hard could it be?
The members of this team don’t put any faith into that newfangled fuel-injection and electronic-ignition stuff, so they grabbed the same ’67 Mustang carburetor they’d used on the Prelude engine. As for the distributor . . . well, why not use the one from the same Mustang?
A V-8 engine has twice as many cylinders as an inline-four, but skipping every other plug wire connector on a points-style 289 distributor makes it suitable for use in a full-analog four-banger ignition system. A plate welded to the distributor shaft enabled it to be attached to the cam on the BMW M42 engine, and the whole assembly was attached to the engine via a “let’s get this finished today” nail-and-hoseclamp apparatus. This rig tended to make the distributor wiggle around like a snake-charmer’s cobra (jump to 3:15 in the official race wrap-up video to see it in action), but it worked.
We’re pretty sure that BMW engineers wouldn’t certify a 46-year-old Holley two-barrel as recommended equipment on the M42.
When the team showed up to the Halloween Hooptiefest last month, the car ran—sort of—but they encountered some problems with the safety inspection. Before the Rusty Dragons could race, they’d have to work on a long list of fixes.
All day and all night Friday, all day and all night Saturday, and much of Sunday, the team toiled away on their Volkswagen. They’d bring the car in to be inspected and we’d check off another item on the list. Finally, they were down to just one item: the kill switch. The car passed that test and got the official “GOOD ENOUGH” LeMons seal of approval . . . but then it wouldn’t restart. Why not?
It turns out that an intake valve had dropped into one of the cylinders, tearing up the piston and head. Zero laps for Rusty Dragon Racing at the 2013 Halloween Hooptiefest, but the team took home the I Got Screwed award for their efforts. What’s next? Running all weekend at a future race, we hope!