I am in the middle of building a Infiniti g20 racecar for the Grassroots Motorsports $2017 challenge. We plan to take it to gridlife, track days and eventually cage it for WRL endurance racing. The goal is to build this car for free. How do we plan to do that? What follow this thread and you will see.
Let me catch you up to speed.
I bought a $300 complete and running Infiniti g20 and started a challenge team yesterday! Well when I say team i mean it's just me at the moment. (now accepting teammate applications haha)
Car needs some TLC after a front end collision, but these cars handle decently and have the potentially potent sr20de motor in it as well as factory VLSD. Add in some random left overs i have laying around and I may just surprise myself.
I'm not a mechanic nor am I an engineer. So this car won't blow anyone away with creativity or engineering excellence but Im sure it will be a good time.
The MotoIQ guys have built a nicely prepared G20 Racecar there are also a few guys that road race them as well. I hope to follow their lead and come up with something that I can be proud of!
We already got the livery picked out. We plan to paint it for cheap on our own for under $100 bucks and throw cheap white vinyl on it. Gotta love that look.
Later I snagged my tire for the car. I wasn't planning on getting them yet but they popped up on TireRack $90 dollars a piece discounted from 160 a piece. So i couldn't resist getting 4 Pirelli P ZERO TROFEO R . I wanted 225 but at 205/50ZR15 they will still get the job done and for the price I couldn't resist.
One of the things i was worried about with the car was that since it had been in a wreck and i had basically purchased it sight unseen was that the damage upfront may be worse than advertised. To my delight it is all very fixable and shouldn't take much to get her back on her feet. AND! the owner had forgotten that he had a hood and bumper that he had purchased over a year ago to fix it and never did. (yes its been sitting for over a year)... Bumper and hood aren't in great shape but they were free and will work for what I'm trying to do.
The interior is toast. Like really toast. Worse than i had expected and I was hoping to be able to recoup some $$$ from the interior. But there will be other items to get that $300 down to ZERO. On the plus side it did come with a ebay .50cal shift nob so that adds like 25hp easy, right...?
Digging in! Maybe my neighbors hate on me on days like this. I'm really lucky to have a wife that supports my automotive pursuits.
Getting close. Got tons more weight to cut out.
I thought that i was going to get stuck with the crappy 15x6 p11 g20 wheels based on budget. The offset and bolt patter for this cars create a very limited amount of Used OEM options that one may find at a U-pull It type of place or craigslist. However today on my daily ebay notification i found 3 brand new 15x7 wheels in the correct bolt patter and offset for $44 shipped! I was bummed that there were only three but i was able to find that exact same wheel in a different color for 100 shipped. $ brand new wheels for $230 and they even look somewhat similar to the BTCC Wheels some of the g20s sported in the early days.
Things were going as planned and then everything changed. I was on one of the any facebook sr20 pages and found a g20 with a DE block Ve head with a turbo JWT ECU and custom BC coilovers with tons of other great stuff. For.... Drum roll please. $600 Now shipping would later prove to be a debacle but it was still worth it.
Race seat. Snagged.
If you care about the shipping saga here it is:
Before I tell this incredible tail I must remind you of a few things. First, I was trying to do this a cheap as possible. Second I have never shipped a car in my life. Third, IF I HAD HAD MORE TIME TO WAIT AND $$ I WOULD HAVE GONE WITH USHIP....
Short Story: I had to handle it all brokers are pointless and annoying to deal with and the transporter drifted someone else's Maserati around the target parking lot. I paid $650 and my car arrived in one piece.
Long Story:
This cautionary tale is one of great hilarity and heaps of stress for me. When i first started my search for a shipping company I went to Uship the original price (on the low side) available was $580 dollars. I waited a few days for the seller to get the car ready to ship and then went over to USHIP to confirm my shipment process. With all the same data entered the price to ship was now $780 dollars when you work in the broker fees over $800 dollars and that just wasn't going to work. So my search for a new option began.
I stumbled onto another broker site (remember that you can't communicate with the trucking companies directly you must use a broker) and found a website called transportmyautomobile.com. It was easy to use and I very quickly began to receive quotes for shipping. I got connected to AAA transporters (a shipping broker) and agreed to their quoted price of $650 all inclusive. This was a great price and it appeared that the car would be picked up in the time frame that I had asked for. I gave them my CC info and waited to be connected to a shipping company. NOTHING. No one contacted me at any point I was constantly having to follow up and check on the process. The seller was getting annoyed after a few days because the time frame i was given from the broker to find a transporter was not the time frame that we actually experienced.
-Enter the Russian Mafia-
I get a call two days after my ideal shipping date letting me know that I had been matched to a transporter and that they would pick up the car in NY that evening and that the transporting company would be in touch. That was 11am Wednesday Morning. 3pm Rolls around and I still haven't heard anything from the truck driver. I call the shipping company 4 different times and each time i would get hung up on or transferred to a disconnected number. NOT GOOD. At this point Im thinking I got scammed or something. I call for a 5th time and this time insist on speaking to someone in charge and to not be transferred anymore. Im placed on hold and then a gentleman with a very think Russian accent picks up the phone. " this George" I explained to him how my expierence had been this far with the company and that i had been hung up on. He angrily told me that he would fire them and that he was wanting to get rid of them anyway. I told him that that wasn't necessary but he insisted. I got connected to the driver I call him, a another man with a thick eastern European accent. He tells me he is getting the car at 9:30pm. Thats not going to work! They told me that he would be there between 7 and 8pm. My Seller was leaving his house at 8:30 on the dot no questions asked.
Me: Please man, is there anyway you can be there when I was told you would? 7pm is ideal. Truck Driver: No Me: Ill buy you beer and pizza when you get to Gainesville if you do this for me. TD: No, you buy me shrimps. Me: Shrimp? TD: Florida has good shrimps. You buy me shrimps I don't like pizza.
True story^
We later settled on a pick up time of 11:30pm and I got out of buying the man "shrimps". The company new that the car was not operational. The truck driver insisted that my seller push the car to the top of the trailer! There was no way. Luckily the seller was smart enough to suggest that he could use his car to push my car onto the top of the trailer. The truck diver called me to let me know that he would arrive late Sunday night. PERFECT. Friday at 3pm I text the driver to confirm the Sunday Evening deliver. He responds "No, Tonight" Who knows how much notice he would have given me. For all I know he would have called me with one hour notice to let me know he was arriving. 11:30pm The truck pulls into the target parking lot where I told him to meet me. He jumps and began rambling about how crappy the car is ( its rusted out bad) and that he hoped I didn't pay anything for it. He then began unloading the cars off the trailer to get mine off. He hops in a brand new Maserati and revs it to the moon, he drives it off the trailer and begins to do his version of the Tokyo Drift Movie in the Target parking lot. I couldn't believe it. When I say he beat on this car.... He beat on it. He then unloaded my car at a high rate of speed and ripped off my exhaust. (luckily I didn't need it). I paid the man his money and he went on his way.
I was blown away by three things: 1. Total lack of professionalism and honesty from the brokers and shipping Co. 2. Inconsistency in what was promised and what happened in regards to timing 3. I can't get over the way the driver spoke to me and the way he treated someone's car.
Moral of the story. Go with U-ship....
But my parts car is here and I already have over $2300 worth of parts that I don't need from the car up for sale at the moment with tons more to sell of as well. That will for sure help with the build costs! And with the parts I have already sold from the other car the only money currently counting against the build is the $650 for shipping and the $220 for the wheels. There will be minor things needed to finish the build but its looking like we are going to In real world budget not GRM budget be at almost a ZERO dollar investment in this build. Which to me is super cool.
So how are are we gonna build a race for free? Well almost free? I have close to $2300 worth of stuff off of the parts car that very car still has almost everything i need to finish this build. I currently had $1550 in the total build cost including purchases of both cars and shipping.
So what do you think? What do you like what do you not like? Need some parts? I look forward to hearing from you all I hope that you enjoy following this thread.
