From Junkyard To Racetrack: Exploring The World Of $500 Race Cars And Automotive History

Welcome to another In Wheel Time Podcast, a 30 minute mini version of the In Wheel Time Car Show that airs live every Saturday morning 8 to 11am, central Podcast Channel.

It's the In Wheel Time Car Talk Show coming up.

Richard Tomlin, apex Auto Works building cars for the 24 hours of limits.

If it weren't for the dang hot, I'd go down there and get in the way Later.

A look at the automotive headlines this week.

Along with Conrad's car clinic that we didn't get to last hour, we're going to get to it this hour because we love that Howdy, along with David Ainsley who's filling in for Mr COVID, mike Mars, we have next to him King Conrad DeLong.

We always need more.

Jeff Zekens, I'm Don Armstrong.

Thanks so much for joining us today and also joining us right now on the Zoom.

Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, richard Tomlin, apex Auto Works.

How were you so lucky to be adorned with the builder for the 24 hours of lemons?

We just built a bunch of them and Mars was out here I guess two weeks ago and I think we had five or six lemons cars here in process at the moment in time and he felt it'd be good to talk about it because I don't think a lot of the listeners understand what lemons is and kind of like you were saying about the demolition derby.

It's Richard, if you can hear us.

Would you please take your phone and step outside so we can have a connection with you, because we can't, I think we're.

Yeah, you're chopping, I'll take that.

So yeah, you have to step outside.

There you go.

Thank you, it looks way better than it sounds.

What does you?

You can't go to the bar.

Yeah, well, maybe, maybe is that better.

Yeah, it's a lot better.

Yeah, exactly.

Interest.

Okay, yeah, so Mark go ahead.

No, I was just going to ask you explain to everybody what the 24 hours of lemons is and where is it held.

Well, lemons started 2006.

The brief history of it is a guy was racing advantage.

His name was Jay Lamb.

We were racing vintage cars.

They would travel five, six hours of a race for vintage cars MGs, fiat's, some British cars.

We know how those worked out right and the car broke down.

The joke became I could buy a Toyota Corolla for $500 in stock trim and go out there and beat all these vintage road race cars, and some of his friends took them up on that challenge.

Well, now fast forward to 2023.

Jay runs a nationwide series and some global series called 24 Hours of Lemons and basically impose the same rules Find a car for $500, put a roll cage in it, put a fire system in it.

Now keep cheap, cheesy tires on it above a 200 treadwear.

Find five-year best friends.

Pay him some money, come out to the track and motor sports because of it.

Fun.

You know what the problem is.

He's in Alvin, texas, and the chipmunks are eating the wires.

Well, no, it's not.

The chipmunks are eating the wires.

It's the cell service.

That's well, alleged cell service that he has back there in the woods.

He did say Mike was there.

We'll go closer.

So you are building cars for the 24 Hours of Lemons, and I know you guys are somewhat well known for your cage work, unlike Elon and Zuckerberg who say they're going to get a cage.

But you do a lot of roll cage building certified roll cage building and is that part of what you're doing for these people that are getting their Lemons cars ready?

Yeah, and most of my customers.

The way we talk about it is they have to be at work on Monday.

So our cages are built a little bit of what I call in excess to make sure that there's no chance of people getting hurt.

Best we can and we over build our cages have for a long time 120 to 140 cars on track.

Usually last couple of races we've had over 70 of the cars that were built here at Apex.

Oh my God, Wait, just to okay Stop.

Where do you get 120 cars on one race track at the same time?

Where MSR 2.38

miles of road course that's 48 feet wide.

You know I sit in traffic quite frequently and I don't want to be in a race where I sit in 128 other cars.

Yeah, because these cars don't have air conditioning in them, do they?

Some people do and some people don't know what we call the fill out, which is a cooler system that you can actually plumb into a T-shirt for lack of a better term and runs chilled water around your body to keep your core cooler.

Ooh.

I need that.

I would definitely run in air conditioning.

Yeah, well, okay.

So what kind of cars are there?

There's gotta be one of the most popular ones.

Which one is that?

Man, there's really not.

So they give an award at this one called Index of Affluency and it's really about trying to find the most weird, obscure, cool car that you can.

Yeah, there's all the Miata's, there's the Corollas, there's the Ford Taurus, shos, that stuff's out there.

But we just finished one Alancia Delta, or not Delta, alancia, beta, zonda, something like that, 800 of May, and it's like how did you find this thing?

800 of May, found it in a junkyard in Waco, been sitting there about 15 years.

So we just got that one caged and out.

Crazy looking car, very, very weird.

Fiat motor, ie, a Ferrari, four cylinder, front wheel drive.

What could possibly go wrong?

Everything.

All I can think of is the first.

Would you say that I wanna get the Citroen, the Citroen With that bizarre suspension, the air suspension?

I mean, if we're gonna do it, let's do it right.

You can drive it on three wheels, yeah.

Some of it becomes how good of a mechanic are you?

How quickly can you fix things and identify problems to get a car back on track?

Cause most of us are racing through garbage.

Those are doing it in a true spirit of the event.

Now there's the other side of the event that's not doing it in that and they're running the BMW E36M3, they're running some of the older Mercedes AMG stuff.

Cars are fast, fast, fast and over the years the event has gotten much faster, but the cars will run spec-me-out of times on garbage tires.

So it's a whole lot of fun.

And aren't there some penalties that can be paid by certain cars where the officials say up, you're too fast, we're going to weld a barn door to the roof of your car to slow you down.

Yeah, most of that's gone now.

So now what they do is they penalize you on laps, say your car looks too good, too fast.

We've seen a guy get a 200 lap penalty.

You usually only run 300, 350 laps, so 200 lap penalty, your race is over, but you still get to race and go have a good time.

So it's changed a little bit.

Some of that's gotten softer.

They do have three classes of cars.

You got your class A, which is your fast guys, your class B, who they want to be fast, and your class C, who says no, I showed up with garbage, I'm going to race garbage and have a good time.

And they're all on the track at the same time.

Correct, and day one is usually about nine hours of racing and then, basically, you wrench, depending on how much garbage you got.

You wrench overnight We've had engines and transmissions changed in the parking lot overnight and then back on track Sunday morning to finish a seven hour race, and then you add those two together and that's when they crown the champions.

Wow, so it's really not 24 hours.

It is not 24 hours.

They hold four of those races a year, four of the 24 hour races a year, this one that we have here, we've had one at MSR Houston Usually they do high planes and then one up in Thunder Hill up north in California.

So it depends on time of year, track availability, ability, on how all that stuff works.

So when you get, 16, 18 track time.

When is this race?

November 4th and 5th this year.

Well, thank God, at least in November and not next week.

Yeah, We've had them in August and we've had them in June and we all thought we were going to die.

Yeah, it's pretty brutal.

Yeah well, I mean, that's a weekend after the Halloween and all I can tell you is is that I have gone trick-or-treating with my girls and sweated through the entire walk, the neighborhood kind of trick-or-treat deal.

So November 4th and 5th is still in the summertime for most places.

Oh yeah, candy from a baby.

Kinda kinda like that.

All right, so what is needed besides the roll cage?

I assume that you take all the glass out of it.

Yeah, so you're allowed to keep all your side glass and back glass and front windshield, honestly, but you have to race with the windows down and we encourage people to keep those in, because if you take the windows out then you've got to either store the car in the garage or in Houston it becomes junk in like two years because it's just too much humidity down here.

So, windows come down, fire system.

You'll need a race seat.

You'll need belts.

We use the old show products made right here in Tyler, texas.

Really old track guys know them.

They're just now getting into the road race stuff with us.

It's really really good and really master switch hooked up on the car and that's about all you have to have to go race.

So we talked about a $500 car.

That is probably now gone to $1,500.

I'm thinking more than that.

You spent more than that on a car.

No, I would say a team of five to six people can get a car purchased, built and track ready all their gear, probably eight to 9,000.

Oh my God.

So so much for the $500 car.

Well, the car is still 500 because they don't account your brakes, because you're going to want better brakes, right, you're going to be able to stop.

Brakes are considered safety.

Tires are considered safety.

All your safety equipment is safety.

All that gets taken out.

So the only thing you're talking about the $500 is the car itself, and that's how the event works.

And that's where people get confused, because I think the whole thing is $500 investment.

It's not.

The car itself is $500.

And what do you do there besides build cars?

I'm sure you're some kind of efficient.

I don't officiate at this one.

I am there for counsel on cages because a lot of people build their own cages.

I will say last event was very humbling.

I actually received an award for helping 26 other cars get back on track that had actually been booted for either a cage failure, mechanical issue, couldn't get back on track or broke something during the race.

So the last probably four years I've been in the midst of literally just helping people stay on track.

Do you have one of those welder trucks?

Yeah Well, we make it look like one.

It's not really a welder truck, but we're 15 minutes from the track.

If it's major, we'll bring it back to the track with a 220.

If it's small stuff, we'll do it at the track with 110.

It just depends on what the situation is.

But you got to keep people on track where they're having fun to where they want to come back and do it again.

If they're sitting in the pits, having to wrench on a car, that's not everybody's favorite pastime.

Right, right, right, yeah, no doubt Sounds like, and have you driven in one?

I've driven in I guess 15, 20 of them.

Now I've got 11 trophies over that time, so a lot of fun.

I did win one of the IOEs and I got screwed.

I've got a bunch of fun trophies.

Do you have a particular junker car when you race?

I mean some particular making model car that you go out and find I'll talk a little bit about what I'm doing this year.

So I'm joining up with a local team that we've helped a long ways along.

They had an individual on the team that had the piece 71 Crown Vic, so police package Crown Vic.

He's owned it for about five years so we know the maintenance on it is amazing.

It's in such good shape.

That's what he wanted to do with it.

He got a new demon.

That's his daily so we get the car and we take it out there.

They've made three races with it now traveling around the country.

But now the transmission is slow so we got a Tremac five speed here that we're going to put into the police package car.

So basically it'll be a Mustang drivetrain with a piece 71 body that we can play and push around the track at MSR this year.

Who's your favorite this year?

Looking at the field, look at the stable of entries.

It's hard to say because the race goes for so long.

It's kind of like picking now winner at Le Mans right, but it's worse because you got teams have zero budget.

It's just who gets lucky.

A lot of luck involved in this race.

So the Lancia you're building is not one of your favorites.

Oh no, that's going to fail immediately.

The thing is start the race and finish on the last lap, they can win what's called the IOE, which is the most prestigious award you can win at the event.

And what does IOE stand for?

Because that's what they're chasing I mean they've got to take it.

Ioe everyone.

I index of affluence.

Is that IOE?

Everyone IOE?

What does that stand for?

Index of affluence.

So doing the most with the least, taking in a car that shouldn't be making race laps at all and making race laps.

But it's a Lancia.

I think I saw you posted a picture of that on your Facebook page and I'm like a Lancia.

Is that company even in the?

car Business anymore.

Yeah, in Italy Tony drives it, Tony, yeah yeah.

Tony delivers pizzas in it.

There are so many weird things about that little car.

It is nothing.

It's nothing I want to be a part of.

It's a very mechanically minded person to get that one running.

So they paid you cash up front to build it right.

For the cage.

Yeah, I mean it was a drop it off.

I think we had that thing like seven days.

It was in and out.

It had to be approved.

If you posted, they're trying to keep a lot of it hush hush, so I probably blew some up.

I will have to tell you that I ran across in this information sheet that you gave me here.

It's a Lemons cars, the heading and one of the things that you've got on here is you can find them through the government, the charity or insurance auctions, and the caption below it is that old cop car that can't be used by normal human beings because of the quote unquote incident in the back seat.

Right.

We have had cars show up that were littered with bullet holes that were, in theory, not caused by the owners, like prior owners have been.

Cars have been shot up.

It's amazing what you see.

Cars have rolled over.

The Miata we're working on now lost control.

In Houston, flooding hit all four corners, took it home, went to bed that night.

Same storm dropped a tree on top of it.

So they bought it for $500 and it was they literally bought it from their neighbor.

So we've had the best luck driving around neighbor.

And they named it lucky.

And they named it lucky right, yeah, well, there are other places to find these cars, and here's his suggestions eBay motors, the backyard as a restoration project and when you're done with the restoration that's been sitting in the backyard for 10 years and you're done with it, well, they're put that in there.

A lemons forum Okay, has classifieds with everything from stalled builds to turnkey race ready cars, craigslist, the government and cherry, which I meant mentioned, and we're not to look for lemons cars.

Yeah, always a study the full lemons rulebook and how to not fail tech guide.

And don't be shy about contacting Richard, really, because he knows all this stuff.

When it comes to that, well, it sounds like a ton of fun.

That's why we have him on the show.

Yeah, exactly, I'm surprised that you actually don't have an entry because, or at least the Don Armstrong Memorial entry.

Well, what we have to die for it to be a we need to do is have one for next year, and we'll time and we'll all, we'll get David out there with us and Mars.

Yeah, you know, one time I was running three cars, but too much too much?

Yeah, no doubt I'm, you know.

Here's what I'm thinking.

Three cars running?

Is it when I'm dead, when I die, when I leave the face of this, or?

Leave us to see five to take no, take my corpse and put it in one of those lemons cars and run me around the track.

That'd be kind of sick now.

Could you actually do that?

I did the roof, oh tie me to the roof and locking chairs.

I can't add yeah, like granny.

Yeah, no, and Beverly Hill Billy.

Well, there's that.

Well, you know, it's always, it's always enlightening to talk with you sounds like fun.

Yeah and good luck.

I mean, you've certainly got time to do all these roll, Can you got time Like no other?

I mean the thing's not till November.

Yeah, by the way.

Yeah, we've got a.

I think I've got four more lined up at this point.

When is a good time for me to bring the Corvette down there to find that errant Electrical drain that I have?

After November not after November.

I need it before that.

I need a do what a quick check through the fuse block.

See what we can find there.

Yeah, so I'll come down there.

I'll just drop it off one day, probably on a Saturday, is that okay?

Yeah, after the show.

Yeah, after the show Okay, oh, I did have interesting.

Thank you, don.

One of my customers here said hey, that radio show you're on, is that guy there?

Does he like work on one of the helicopters for in his channel?

I was like, no, I have no idea what you're speaking.

There there's that I try to play incognito.

Somebody said well, you know that girl.

Then she puts herself on television all the time and I'm going.

Nobody really wants to see me, so I'd rather not press that button.

Not that anybody wants to see her, but I'm just saying about you've gone viral with your challenger hell cat Well there's that, but you've been identified as a.

Million, somebody, some more than that, but somebody is see, he knows it's more than that.

Well, I've been told it's more than that.

But at any rate, richard, it's always fun to talk to you sir.

By the way, how did, how did pikes peak go?

Amazing, amazing time 20th out of 70 cars.

Car didn't have any issues.

Thankfully, driver was in a very comfortable zone.

In his words he didn't push really hard, but he wanted to make sure we made it to the top and we did that.

So Already got five applicants for next year Looking to rent the car.

So 2024 will be back up there playing again.

Well, congratulations.

I was gonna say it's probably more fun for you doing what you do up there on the mountain and Driving the car and doing all the other stuff, but tons of fun.

Richard, great to talk to you, my friend, it's more.

We'll see you Appreciate it.

Thank you, man.

Richard Tomlin, Apex Auto Works.

If you want work done on your car and want to make a, you want to make a, a lemon's 24 hour car.

He's going to have like 30 hours in his day.

He's always doing something.

He's tinkering in the garage.

He's going to duck.

And the and the, and the garage is behind the house, so it's easy.

It's not easy to find, though I'll tell you.

that Work is really good.

It's in the boonies.

Well it's.

Not only is it in the boonies, but it's almost as if you know you got to lay put corn behind you to get your way out of there, to find, you know, your way back, some of those pictures there.

All right Time now for Conrad's car clinic.

Sorry for the post moment, but we have the car clinic and it's ready to go.

Conrad, it's all yours.

Well, we're going to talk mufflers today.

All right, so if you think about way back in the day, mufflers were put on cars to try and quiet them down, create a little back pressure but also kind of quiet them down.

If you remember, you know back when we were building hot rods, what was one of the mufflers of choice Cherry bomb, it was a cherry bomb.

So really what a cherry bomb is is basically a straight pipe that had fiberglass inside of it to try and muffle the noise, because but not too much, not too much.

But originally, when people wanted to make a hot rod, they would just put straight pipes on the car.

Today people still put straight pipes.

Well, cherry bomb You're sitting right next to you Put a straight pipe on the car but it had glass inside of it to try and muffle the noise.

So how a muffler works is is it changes the direction of the air and instead of you know, as an engine creates a puff, each is cylinder firing event.

So what the muffler is trying to do is concentrate all of those puffs into one stream of air so it can minimize the noise that's created.

So that's how the muffler works internally.

You know the air is passed through different chambers to come, go in one side, pass through different chambers and go out the other side.

But cherry bomb was kind of the muffler of choice back in the day.

And then they made some evolutions of the cherry bomb muffler as well and actually put some chambers in it again, trying to change the direction of the airflow inside, inside of the muffler or cherry bomb itself.

And then their direct competitor was another company called Thrush.

Now Thrush mufflers were well known because they had the for lack of a better phrase the little Thrush road runner face on it.

Pretty popular sticker back in the day it was a Thrush muffler sticker on your vehicle and they had a pretty loud noise to them.

They weren't very quiet either but they had a relatively distinct noise to them and different manufacturers through the years did different things to help the exhaust flow of their vehicle.

That's the exhaust system of a typical Corvette.

I'm just going to say that's mine.

Yeah, typical Corvette exhaust system and one of the things that's a C5 exhaust system and one of the things Chevrolet did on the C6 is they added what's basically called the Cut Out, cuts out the muffler and becomes a straight pipe in the exhaust system that automatically functions based on RPM and how much throttle input you have.

But you know Chevrolet wasn't the first person to put factory cutouts on their vehicle.

You know who was?

No, 1969 Pontiac GTO had a factory cutout option.

Wow, where, literally, you would turn a lever and you would dump the exhaust system before the muffler.

Highly illegal, highly illegal.

I had no clue.

I did not know that.

Was that a John DeLorean?

yeah, it was a John DeLorean thing trying to create more horsepower out of the Ram air engines.

And you know, there's an old famous commercial of a 69 GTO driving through a drive-through, kind of looking for a street race basically, and he opens the cutouts, makes all the noise, closes the cutouts and drives past a cop at the end of the commercial.

Yeah, pretty cool.

Pretty cool commercial.

I mean, you know, I've never seen one, I've never heard of it before, that, but doesn't surprise me.

I wonder if there are any original GTOs out there that actually have.

There's one that shows up on the show circuit.

Every now and then it's kind of that pale metallic green that has that feature on it.

You know so.

And then there are custom exhaust systems that you can get made that can kind of tune the sound you hear.

You know, every now and then you hear a Mustang go by and it has basically a hollow sound to it.

That's because of the mufflers that they put on it.

Well, that and that flat plane engine, right Right so you know, each engine creates its own noise right, pulse, wave of sound.

So, yep, that's mufflers, that's a great.

That's a great story, great one.

Okay, thank you, sir.

A couple of stories making automotive news headlines.

The new Cadillac Celestique ultra electric, ultra luxury electric sedan will start as a blank canvas, priced at around $340,000 before buyers add their personal finishes, brand leaders said this week, hand belt handle Cadillac global CMO Melissa Grady Diaz disclosed the pricing, the starting price, in a LinkedIn post and said the brand has seen strong demand For the Celestique since it was unveiled last year.

Buyers will be notified starting this week that they can begin the process to design their cars $340,000 and Mary Vera still makes $29 million.

By the way, it's going to be hand built at the tech center campus at the new Cadillac house of Vanderbilt Susan Suzanne Vanderbilt, who worked on Cadillac vehicles before joining GM design in 1955.

The facility will house a concierge service for Celestique buyers from around the world to design their vehicles.

I'm in remember they had a concierge service for people who bought the Alante as well.

Ah, how did that work out?

Japanese ship leasing company showy Kisan Kaisa, owner of the car carrier Fremantle highway that caught fire off the Dutch coast last week, said Friday It'll investigate the cause of the incident in cooperation with relevant parties.

Blaze broke out July 26th, traveling from Germany to Egypt.

More than 3000 vehicles on board, killing one crew member, injuring seven others who jumped overboard To escape the flames.

You know how tall that is.

It's massive.

It's like you know a hundred feet down to the ocean.

At least good luck.

Local officials said the curia arrived at the northern Dutch port of Eameshaven for salvage on Thursday.

Yes, the fire is out.

The emergency responder was heard in a recording released by Dutch broadcaster.

Rtl is saying the fire started in the battery of an electric car.

Jeff needs to put it in his calendar.

And next in 2024, ships going down with, yeah, ships going down.

Mm-hmm Dutch company provides dredging, toeage and salvage services.

Company called Royal Boscalis, westminster, spell that I've got all their albums.

Yeah, all right.

Well, that's it for this hour of the in-wheel time car talk show.

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From Junkyard To Racetrack: Exploring The World Of $500 Race Cars And Automotive History

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Toyota Corolla

Mazda Miatas

Ford Taurus

Lancia Delta

Lancia Beta

BMW E36M3

Ford Mustang

Chevrolet Corvette

Dodge Challenger

Dodge Road Runner

Pontiac Gto

Delorean DMC-12

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