Team Turbo Schnitzel

Organizer's Choice!

2009-04-06T10:13:00.000-07:00

Organizer's Choice! Never would have imagined! What an incredible emotional roller coaster this past weekend has been. Thankfully, it ended on a high note - the highest! More details to follow...

BS Inspection

2009-04-03T13:32:00.000-07:00

BS Inspection went swimmingly. Here I am trying my best to pronounce 14-syllable German BS Technical words to convince The Honorable Lieberman how gescrewed we were last race, and how he should just let slide the fact that we installed an "Olwiederpositionsbastelsatz."

Oh, and Jalopnik has a great shot of the team on the top of their BS Inspections Page! Thanks, guys!

Suspension Wizardry

2009-03-29T18:55:00.000-07:00

Today was all about revitalizing the front suspension after visiting the oracle on the mount. Dick Anderson (founder of Carrera Shocks) seemed to love solving our whimpy bouncy jouncy problem for us. Dick has a gold mine of old racing shocks scattered about his warehouse. It was simply a matter of spotting the right sizes, making a few calculations, a couple of precision (plus or minus an inch or so) cuts, and fitting our front struts with helical Viagra.

Look closely and notice how we nearly quadrupled our stock springs' rate - a spring within a spring. The stock Merkur springs leave plenty of room for improvement - and plenty of radial clearance for a second spring. Pretty swank, if you ask me.

The shape of things to come...

2009-03-26T11:35:00.000-07:00

Pimp Brian's Ride

2008-08-07T19:13:00.000-07:00

Our little prank last year has made it all the way 'round the internets:
Jalopnik: The Ultimate Housemate Car Prank: Pimp Brian's Ride

UPDATE: And it has spawned another Lemons Team:
Our Lady of Perpetual Downforce

Getting some love from Jalopnik

2008-08-05T21:49:00.000-07:00

Since Jalopnik decided to point a link here, I thought I'd post a link to our pictures on Flickr.

Needless to say, the fury we had to put out to get our car ready meant that we couldn't update this site as we wanted. Fear not, as we're going to post up some backstory soon.

Bring Back Our Hood

2008-07-21T22:22:00.000-07:00

Jeff did an awesome job painting the hood graphics. Wish I could show you. Can't. Hood stolen. Whoever took it had better display it prominently in their garage, shop, or hand it high above the drum riser on their national heavy metal tour.

Prep and Paint

2008-07-20T22:33:00.000-07:00

Prepping to paint included searching for the owner of the BMW 5-series parked 7 spots away, not finding him, and masking not only the windows and bumpers of the Schnitzel-mobile, but also his entire car against overspray. I wonder, did he ever realized what happend, or how concientious we were? It was the right thing to do...

Burning the Midnight Rollcage

2008-07-17T01:46:00.000-07:00

Welding well into the night. Past midnight? Surely. Sign of schedules to come seeing as we've got a lot of work to do, and less than 2 weeks to get it all done.

Der Weldmeister

2008-07-15T21:57:00.000-07:00

Here we see John, the Master Welder (Weldmeister?) doing his thing on the roof hoop. What's his thing? Wielding a grinder with the fervor and precision of a Japanese Steak House chef and notching tube ends better than if they'd come from the factory pre-notched. Considering that I just recently learned what MIG stands for, I'm extremely glad he's on the team.

Caged and Harnessed

2008-07-13T23:14:00.000-07:00

Started laying out and welding the roll cage. We purchased a Competition Engineering kit from Summit. I was feeling pretty good about how it started going together. We were cutting, notching, fitting, welding. And then something started smelling fishy. Well, not fishy so much as a burning sensation. That, apparently is how you know it's working. What? Wait. That's burning fiberglas, and this is not a 'Vette...

Turns out that everywhere we wanted to stake the roll cage, there were rusted-thru-holes covered with strips of fiberglas. Oh yeah, this was a Michigan car for most of its life. Rusted-thru floor panels, massive fissures, had been "sewn back together" with fiberglas and smoothed over with bondo. A lot of sheet metal welded in place to bridge the gap and we've now got an airtight floor to butress a cage to. Judging from how much cussing came from Brian's mouth during the "bridge the gap" welding, sheetmetal to sheetmetal is apparently pretty fun to do...

Hot Seat

2008-06-29T20:20:00.000-07:00

Installed the race seat today. It's blow-molded polyethylene. Sounds safe. And comfortable. Aren't the "Daily Shopper" coupon book dispenser bins you find lined up in front of Kroger made out of the same stuff? Those sure look sturdy. Anyhow, it's from Summit Racing Equipment, so it must be race-worthy. It's the belt harness that keeps you solidly in place, after all.

Considering that 6 different drivers of all different shapes and sizes are going to swap in and out of this car many times throughout the race weekend, we decided to use the OEM seat mount brackets to afford the most adjustability. That required fabricating an adapter plate. Pretty fun. Jeff and I let the sparks fly, all the while keeping in mind what caused our shop/office to burn down only months before...

Viola! A stout, sturdy steel adapter plate for the milk-jug-turned-racing-safety-equipment:

Stripping

2008-06-21T22:46:00.000-07:00

Stripping can change a man. No, I'm not talking about the joyous kind of eye-opening euphoria we all felt when we attended our first bachelor party. Stripping a car is a different kind of intrigue, tension, and ultimate release. The intrigue part is removing and discarding parts you never thought to before, all at once, until she lies before you naked. ALL the trim panels, ALL of the seat cushions, the headliner, ALL of the carpeting. ALL the soundproofing. ALL of the stuff that makes a modern car civilized. The tension part is not having resolved whether you really want to commit to never putting this car back in service on the street - never carrying passengers again. The release comes after you realize how much crappier the car looks now, and how much more likely it'll be that you'll convince the judges of its (lack of) net worth. It's wildly, strangely liberating. Just like the first bachelor party I attended.

Ahhhh. That felt good?

Getting Into It

2008-06-08T19:32:00.000-07:00

Mark and I dug into things and started checking vacuum and coolant hoses, tearing out the heater core connections, etc. I re-routed the silliest oil-cooler hose routing I'd seen after busting knuckles pulling it out from behind the sliver of space between the engine and the firewall. Aren't German engineers supposed to be the sharpest bulbs on the porch?

What really impressed me about this guy Mark is that he really got into it:

But then again, it was on this, the first of our big "get into it" workdays that Mark informed me that he had never driven a stick before. Hmmmm.

Our first work day

2008-05-31T15:07:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce that Team Turbo Schnitzel has scored it's first victory! We were triumphant at getting accepted to compete in the race in South Carolina!

On the heels of our first win, we elected to actually put some coin into our heap in the form of a timing belt change. Thus began our first work and testing day. Here's our fearless Captain Craig checking the damage. He reported that it tastes remarkably like fail.

As you can see, the existing belt was a bit of a disaster. Fortunately our heroic crew was able to repair the faulty components at the cost of an $8 belt, 8 bratwursts and 6 beers. With the repairs complete several team members hopped in and roared down the street.

The almost got to the end before we discovered that the wheels were loose, the fuel tank was empty (the gauge is broken, apparently) and the fuel system seems to lose pressure. Oh, and the O2 sensor is busted, making our Merkur run like a Kuwati oil derrick after the Gulf War.

Here's our master wrench turner John (in the jams) applying his skills to the issue. We did manage to limp the car back to our base of operation. Hopefully in the next work day we can fix the fuel issues, timing, sensor problems and whatever else decides to break between now and then.

Here's our badass ride. At this distance it actually looks like a decent car...almost.

What is Team Turbo Schnitzel?

2008-05-02T06:50:00.000-07:00

They say obsession takes many forms. For some, Kirk will always be the captain. For others, Empire was the height of the trilogy. For Team Turbo Schnitzel obsession means taking an unloved piece of rolling Scheiß and elevating it onto a gold-plated, revolving pedestal of glory for the world to respect and salute.

Our journey started with a beater 80’s Honda, a smart-assed co-worker, and that co-worker’s vacation to Switzerland. An innocent “Hey, let’s move VanHiel’s car” quickly crescendoed into two weeks of purple paint, fake wings, non-functional scoops and spinner hubcaps.

Alas, beauty is fleeting. Today’s Brittany Spears always becomes tomorrow’s Brittany Spears. Fortunately for Team Turbo Schnitzel, victory lives on for eternity!

That’s why were turning our custom car fabrication skills towards not just entering, but WINNING the 2008 24 Hours of Lemons!

We’ve chosen the Merkur XR4ti as our trusty steed for this epic clash of man and machine. We believe that it has what it takes to go the distance –the awesome power of a turbocharged Pinto engine coupled with the kind of exceptional reliability the automotive world has come to expect from the Germans.

Our particular ride started life as tragically as our Honda. It was left to decay in an amateur’s garage as an unfinished pile of bubba-engineered hacks and spotty bodywork. Miraculously, a positive pregnancy test and a shortage of cash liberated our needy soul from that amateur’s garage and into our hands!

Now in a good home, we intend to transform our emasculated Merkur with the same intensity and focus as our beloved Honda. With our lavish budget we intend to not only give it a new timing belt, but also change the oil! There is no limit to what this car is capable of, and we intend to show the world what a healthy pile of exquisitely misguided obsession can do!

Ausgezeichnet!