A new year inspires bold ideas and uncovers new challenges. It seeds the dreamer’s thoughts and creates opportunity. Sometimes the challenge of a new years’ opportunity is so compelling, so inspirational that no amount of pain reliever, water or sleep will make it go away. When the dream is to field your very own creation in The 24 Hours of LeMons nothing can stand in your way. Yes, my DIY friends, Brent and the crew at Autosport Labs are taking their ridiculous, born of way to much fun celebrating the arrival of 2010, idea and propelling it toward potential crapcan glory. This time it won’t be something simple like our Lab Rat turbo Miata: that can be done while sipping wine and eating sushi. This time it will be a ground-up challenge since we will be bloodying our knuckles, and wracking our wine infused brains on this glorious heap of motorized failure.
….wait, did any of you figure out what vehicle that mystery dash (from the video) came out of? No, Yes? Mystery no more, we’re going to turn a broke-down, leaking from nearly every seam and connection, currently full of water and smelling strongly of mildew, 1986 Merkur XR4ti into a competitive LeMons racer! Some of us are so excited!! Seriously, some of us are.
Here is the Craigslist ad that inspired one of us:
No we weren’t silly enough to actually pay $850 for it but we felt sorry for the guy and gave him $500. We think he might have stolen his own wheels.
So, let us know what you think of our plans! And we desperately need to know what *you* know about Merkur XR4ti’s or properly known as the Ford Sierra, for those of you on the correct side of the Atlantic!
Nice to see a Sierra getting some Stateside love, even if it istounge-in-cheek! Interesting how you guys got a blown 2.3l four-banger, when Europe got the lovely 2.8l Cologne V6 – later 2.9l in the XR4x4. I though the methodology of “no replacement for displacement” was a Yankee invention?