The Wall Street Journal Article & Video!!!

Click for the FANTASTIC video:

https://video-api.wsj.com/api-video/player/v3/iframe.html?guid=F3AD862E-2506-4FBE-9F78-64CF33F85B50&shareDomain=null

What a TREMENDOUS honor this was for our race team Speedycop & The Gang of Outlaws! Author/ WSJ writer/actor A. J. Baime gave us an amazing half page (A-12) in yesterday’s WSJ print edition, photographer April Greer shot some incredible photographs, Adam Falk filmed it (with Tom Di Fonza’s help) and edited it, Carmel Lobello produced it, and my whole team helped with the prep and the shoot. Truly AMAZING work!

WSJ article

Check out the online article (with lots of additional pictures) here:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/please-call-these-cars-lemons-1501600953

The Trippy Tippy Hippy Van Build Saga

The idea came to me—as so many other bad ideas do—by simply wondering how to make something totally conventional into something far more creative and entertaining to watch. Our previous builds were based on the same premise. What if a plane could be made into a racecar? We built the Spirit of LeMons, a ’56 Cessna 310, into a totally reliable street/track car that handles incredibly well, despite the mundane ’87 Toyota van base. I chose that particular model van because it uses a mid-engine/RWD setup and torsion bars in the front, which made for a low center of gravity, and left no strut towers protruding from the narrow fuselage. What if we did it again, but with a helicopter? Most helicopters have quite rounded bodies and use narrow skids, so even if a fuselage could somehow be sourced cheaply enough, neither would hide the chassis of even a small vehicle inside. The solution was clear to me—use pontoons to hide the vehicle chassis, and add an extra layer of challenge to the build by making it amphibious as well! The Upside-Down Camaro presented fewer serious engineering challenges, but still worked amazingly well as a visual gag. I wanted to recreate the jaw-dropping wow factor of that build, but how? A backwards truck had already been raced. I needed to think more unconventionally.

Why not a vehicle on its side? Continue reading

2017 NCM Mystery Build

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: