The Trippy Tippy Hippy Van!

For the first ever 24 Hours of LeMons race at the National Corvette Museum Motorsports Park in Bowling Green, Kentucky, we wanted to pull out all the stops. Check out our teaser video for what is possibly our wildest build to date:

For the 24 Hours of LeMons race at New Jersey Motorsports Park in May, I decided that we would bring our old Suzuki X90 (formerly of pop-up camper race car fame) back as a hot dog stand. The Gang of Outlaws and I built a steel framework and put a tin roof and wood brick paneling on it, along with some printed vinyl banners. Although it was a massive aerodynamic hindrance and added about 500 lbs. to our race car, we flogged it hard on the track, and managed to finish 48th overall out of 124 teams! Not too shabby for a little body on frame SUV powered by a stock ’94 Miata four-cylinder engine. More importantly, we raised hundreds of dollars for Bella Reed Pitbull Rescue by giving away hot dogs all weekend and accepting donations. Our efforts resulted in another Index of Effluency win, the grand prize in the 24 Hours of Lemons series.

Check out the LeMons wrap up video (with lots of footage of our hot dog stand in action, starting at about 8:20) here:

The Upside Down Camaro is being featured on the Garage Genius episode of Outrageous Acts of Science Wednesday night (August 3rd) at 9pm on the Science Channel!

The car originally debuted at New Jersey Motorsports Park in a 24 Hours of LeMons race two years ago. It’s inverted an inverted 1999 Camaro convertible body, mounted on a steel framework, perched atop a $200/200k mile 60 HP 1990 Ford Festiva.

Now that we’ve proven we did what we set out to do (which took thousands of hours of hard work!), please make a donation to the Semper Fi Fund/America’s Fund, and make a difference for a wounded veteran through this link:
https://fundraising.semperfifund.org/fundraise/team…

Thanks to The Gang of Outlaws for all their hard work helping me realize this crazy dream, to my friend Don Huffman for the great music, and to Damion Jedlicka for his fantastic work on the video! Special thanks to my wife Jaime Bloch, the SAINT, who not only put up with me disappearing into the garage for the last six months and blowing our savings (and this month’s mortgage, uh-oh) on this outrageous build, but working with me on it day and night, even when she was really sick!

BEST.
WIFE.
EVER.