By Timothy Odell
For a Lemons team like ours, it’s not hard to see the obvious benefits of having a garage space next to the penalty box.
Unfortunately, our presence here is no longer welcome by our esteemed race safety officials, AKA the Greatest Racing Judges Assembled in the History of Motorsports.
Why are we here, typing on this laptop while sitting on rickety folding chairs that are themselves a significant safety concern? And isn’t our current status the EXACT OPPOSITE of our intended team strategy, which we all agreed was: TOTAL DOMINATION!?!?
A number of possible answers present themselves, only the least of which have something to do with “passing under yellow”, “spinning in turn 7” and “adjusting the body panel alignment on another team’s Volvo at speed”. The REAL reasons are much harder to pinpoint, but we offer these strong suggestions as possible causes:
- Perhaps, we have been possessed by the the crashy demon spirits of Altamont 2007.
- Perhaps, sensing it’s impending death from injuries sustained last fall at Thunderhill, our Snowspeeder MR2 decided that it would henceforth consider driver inputs as merely “suggestions”, and instead decided that the car would make its way around the hallowed asphalt of It-Will-Always-Be-Sears-Point-To-Me on ITS OWN terms.
- Unintended acceleration due to poorly designed factory floor mats.
- Having run a number of races with relatively clean noses, we began to miss the companionship, camaraderie, and warm fellowship of Judges Phil, Judge Matt and our esteemed proofreader and penalty-dole-er-outer, Judge Tim. We shall share hugs, mango smoothies, and warm stories of times past at the conclusion of this writing effort.
- Judge Phil suggested that the quality of writing on Hooniverse was suffering as of late, and needed a healthy injection of hot-headed idiot driver mentality. In his mind, since we can’t drive, maybe we can write. Seems logical. For Lemons.
- Apparently, the “I don’t care if they run over a baby! Let ’em go!” pass, issued by Jay, ends after you get 4 black flags in one race.
- While testing the phenomenal data collection and live telemety capabilities of Autosport Labs’ Race Capture Pro, we decided that the penalty box area needed to be thoroughly evaluated for GPS detection capability. Seriously, though – check them out.
So here we are. We feel a little like the kids at Shermer High explaining who we think we are.
We are:
- A spacey, disorganized team owner with a checkbook. Who can’t drive.
- A dead-sexy stubborn wrench bender. Who can’t drive.
- A OCD checklist-creating data lover. Who can’t drive.
- A fabricating hothead. Who didn’t drive, because he’s not here.
So, Judge Tim:
Does that answer your question?
Sincerely Yours,
The Snowspeeder Pilots Association, Team #300
Kamil Kaluski 
Ross Ballot
And on these same pages of the Internet, I predicted Snowspeed Pilot DOMINATION. Way to embarrass me in front of Tim, guys.
http://hooniverse.info/2014/03/19/24-hours-of-lemo…
Next time, ping us ahead of time. We could have spared you the grief by saying a few phrases about our chances. You know, things like "rookie driver", "untested car after vicious wreck" and "general idiot mentality in high supply". The usual.
But we do appreciate the misplaced vote of confidence more than you know.
Also, does Autosport Labs' telemetry show page views for Penalty Box-sourced Hooniverse posts?
That's not really worth anything without full analytics. In these heady days of the Attention Web, merely checking your racing team's penalty post for click-throughs is not enough. According to Chartbeat's CEO Tony Haile, less than 45% of click throughs spend more than 15 seconds looking at a page. You need to be looking at attention focused metrics so you can be sure that your time in the penalty box at least generated some real engagement with your hoopty driving demographic.
And yes, if you're wondering: I (a) read the whole thing, and (b) have been working at a web marketing start-up for too long. (Keeps me in parts and gas for my Just Empty Every Pocket, so I'm sticking with it 😉
That's 'marketing' as in "Look out! Don't step in the marketing!", right? 😉
That said, the writing in these posts, irrespective of the rest of The Hooniverse, is much better than expected.
How many drafts do they go through?
Maybe more than the corners successfully negotiated.
You mean how many drifts they went through?
I lift my rear, inner wheel to your keening observation!
On a scale of 1, 2, many, lots, I'm going to guess at least many, possibly lots. Considering that the penalty box has included such torments as change the starter motor on a 1UZ-FE V8, and the point is to waste perfectly good track time, those seem to be the reasonable figures…
Both yesterday and today they spent like 2 hours writing. it was insane.
It shows. They did a good job.
Isn't the penalty supposed to be three hours off track, after X black flags? I suppose that penmanship really does count.
So the full story is that our car was overheating when we were flagged for contact, so we really didn't care about time off track. We figure, if we're going to attach our name to the product of this cool penalty, let's have some fun and enjoy it.
So we took the time to sit around, BS, try to type some funny stuff, and generally have a good time.
Took probably 45 minutes or an hour, and we did it while hanging out in the judges area, so there was plenty of fun distractions.
We're happy and humbled that its all been well received. It was a great time, despite the fact that we were watching the slow death of our hero car in front of us all weekend. 🙂
So, whadja asshats do this time? You've turned a car that dominates the race (on paper) into a doorstop, without managing to frag the engine. That's some kinda skill.
Props for everything after #7, which I hadn't seen earlier. Tough trial by fire. I hope you have far better luck in all your future races.
Couple of passing under yellow, on saturday, 1 spin by our rookie driver on Sunday and I bumped volvo #245.
I think real reason for our offenses is connected to the fact that the car is no longer competitive. We tend to flag a lot more when we are out of the top 30 because we are just having fun trying to turn fast laps rather making big efforts to clean and avoid the penalty box.
The car is bent (via the Thunderhill wreck) to the extent that it any left turn under power results the the right axle jamming into the gear box with rhythmic metal grinding thump. We didn't lean this till the green flag came out on Saturday. We can fix a lot stuff but we can't fix a bent unit body. We spent the weekend searching for the answer to the burning question: Can you break 2:10 while coasting through the carousel every lap?
Mid Sunday the car started losing coolant and over heating. We did a Petty Cash, and parked it until shortly before the checker. I took it out and bawled like a baby as I limped under the check for the last time in the Snowspeeder.
The Snowspeeder is dead.
D'awwww.
The ending was brilliant. Too bad your driving isn't in the same league as the writing.
[youtube mWUhcKUYbT0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWUhcKUYbT0 youtube]
Thanks. Now I have to go get that movie.
Fantastic penalty!
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