Sunday, October 21, 2007
"The suckiest car ever to win the Challenge"
Here are some belated pictures of the $2007 Challenge winner. Team Cheaparal took a 1986 Corvette that they scored for $1,400 (it had been rolled; they had before and after shots to prove it) and put twin turbos on it. That alone would have been pretty impressive. But it's what they did after that which was probably the deciding factor: They made it into a sucker car.
This is what was sitting where the passenger seat used to be: A surplus cooling fan off an M1 tank, powered by a snowmobile engine. This setup didn't seem to always work, but when it did, it generated over 1000 lbs of downforce, enabling it to rip through the autocross course like I couldn't believe, trailing a 12 foot high plume of dust and making a weird jet engine like sound.
It's a pity the drags were rained out, as I'd have been very interested to see what it ran. The builders didn't know, either - it had never been on a dragstrip.
Labels: $2007 Challenge
