Love that sound! The VR has great character and I always liked the juxtaposition of its deep growl in the small, unassuming Golf it came in. Now it’s even better in the little Fiat.
Sounds like your X has been taking T…
It's such a unique sound, I love it. Once I tune the map a bit more I'll post a pass at higher RPM. There's still a lot of tuning to do before I really get after it.
Cool car! And lemons looks really fun. But how does the lemons budget work? I thought the whole investment had to be 500 or less?
The lemons budget rules are squishy. And $500 doesn't buy much in 2024, and safety which is the bulk of it (tires, brakes, cage, fire suppression, driver gear) is all exempt. The classing is done primarily on vibes. If you show up with something made in Britain or Italy, you're already doing it the hard way, and the judges love to see it. Everything in the series is meant to increase the diversity of the cars. As Steve said in a previous post...
Once upon a time, a series would go to various tracks during a season and some car/drivers would be good on some tracks and others on other tracks and there would be technical innovation and cars were actually different from each other.
The more tightly you control the rules to improve racing the duller it gets.
The $500 rules apply more strongly if you show up in miata or bmw, because they want to encourage all sorts of different stuff on the track. And it does create fun racing. Even with the stock engine, there were parts of the tracks where our car was faster than others by a big margin, and that was pretty entertaining because you'd be passing and getting passed multiple times in a single lap.
The engine/transmission in the car now was $350, which is less than junkyard core price. The guy wanted it out of his shop. But yea at his point we're way over budget. Oil cooler, radiator, ECU were all new, AN fittings aren't cheap, and this stuff adds up quick.
So all this is to say you get a lot of leeway in a unique car because you're on your own. And on top of that, nobody to my knowledge has put a vr6 in an X, so it's also a unique build which means we have to solve all the problems ourselves and the chances of it being competitive are pretty small.
I imagine we'll still be in class C and the expectation will be that something will fail early on, but that's part of the learning process