Mitsubishi Starion project for the 24 hours of lemons

So I've been putting off this build thread for a while, I just kept forgetting to put it up or whatever but Mark wanted us to put it up at some point, so here we are. Sorry for the wait.

So here's what we started with. A 1985 mitsubishi starion, the motor was on 3 cylinders and needed a new head gasket, still didn't stop it from doing donuts.



So we started tearing stuff out at some point





Our sweet custom dash


Meanwhile with the engine....
"tore our block down. plan on running the old block that came with the car and the new head got with the new motor purchase. we are getting the block decked so we can run a 3 layer metal headgasket, since the fel-pro ones always fail on these motors. this block had a low spot between 2 and 3, right where the head gasket blew. block needs to be super smooth for the new gasket to seal though."










And more progress on the body?

Our sweet s14 radiator, fits well, surprised we didn't get any BS laps from it.

Fully stripped


Off to mark's house for the cage.


Got some extreme herp and derp with the test fitting. The crookedness was just from quickly putting it in to take pics to make sure it would pass tech, straight of course. Surprisingly there were actually cages at the race that looked like this, or worse.




So that's basically all I have of the cage build. The car went to the a shop eagle had access to after that to get the motor in, but we failed hard, electrical issues up the ass, the final few days before leaving for the race were a terrible panic. Finally it was thursday the day we leave, we didn't have a running car, and the other utah team just talked us in to throwing it on a trailer, running or not, and getting out to california, so we did.
This is how the car was as we pulled it off the trailer, soon after the guys from stick figure racing raped our car and pillaged it into running.





So that night was friday of the weekend, we had our bs tech inspections in the morning as well as the real tech. If you know lemons, you know if you have no theme you get fucked by the bs laps hard, especially if your car is extra cheaty looking as ours is. An example would be the guys next to us in the paddock, they had a plain black mustang and were equally as cheaty probably, because they didn't even try on a theme they were slapped with 50 laps. We only got 5 because of this beauty of a paint job. Especially since they heard we did it in the pitch black darkness with tiny pen flashlights.
It's supposed to be a WWII mitsubishi zero.....but.....




Well that was good and everything, saturday we didn't get the green flag, had too much to do. Eventually we got the car out, adn first lap it was pouring smoke, definitely oil. Turns out we had some breather tube, and on right handers oil just flowed out and burned. We brought the car in and sent it back out around 5 times trying to fix it, eventually just giving up and pulling the pan in the afternoon. This is how most of saturday was spent

eventually though the car did hit the track, and pretty well too








So basically we started getting the car out at about 3pm saturday, drove until 6pm to the checker flag, when boost was turned on in the last session derek was able to latch on to a spec miata and stay with him very well, it was very exciting to see the car was actually fast.

After that he pulled the car in, parked it, said the turbo was squeeking on the final lap. We figured things were good? I can't remember I was tired at that point of the weekend, I just remmeber derek and eagle doing stuff to the car while I wandered around. Woke up sunday morning and started the car, and oil poured from the car. For some reason our oil pressure regulator stuck ope and our oil pressure was going crazy to the point of popping our oil filters in half. 4-5 oil filters later and around 25 quarts of oil and we were officially done for the weekend at about 10am sunday. We just need to tear that motor apart again at this point and redo it all over again. As for our next race, I know I am hitting Butonwillow in december for sure, but I have no idea on any other races, if I get a chance maybe something in August.

For now, here's other pictures from the race of other vehicles.










A true lemon

Wow, looks like fun!