Let me preface this inaugural article by declaring my belief that blogs are a waste if time. Time that could have been easily spent working on your car. In the time it takes you to read this first article, you probably could have gone in the garage and at least gotten about halfway through an oil change. Your car will thank you. Repeat the procedure on your girlfriends or wife’s car, and THEY will thank you. Such a masculine activity might even score you some huge brownie points that could be spent when she opens up the UPS shipment with your new race helmet, or when you tell her yet again that you’re not available Friday night because you will be sleeping in the back of your car outside the gate of some racetrack. Never miss an opportunity to score points with the significant other. If you don’t have a significant other, you either never had one or lost yours because you didn’t offer to change their oil. Either way, you have plenty of time to waste now, so go ahead and read.

When you are standing over your future race car with the plasma cutter in one hand and a bucket of racing Glory in the other, it’s easy to develop the inconvenient superpower of seeing into the future; a future when all the hundreds of jobs that need to get done before this car sees the track are completed, and then having your mind trick you into thinking they are already completed, or worse, “slam dunks”. Our foresight is selective, too. We only see the cool stuff: the motor install, the killer struts, the new fenders. We forget about the stuff we hate, like building the stupid seat bracket, grinding toxic goo off the frame, and the hundreds of trips to the local hardware store. This crap takes time. Lot’s of it. And unless you already have your Energy Drink mega endorsement deal, you are the sucker that is going to be doing it. Look at this guy:

Does he look happy? He is dirty, hot, probably smells like butt. That smile is fake, he is not having fun. No this isn’t me, it’s my brother and grand-am co-driver, working on our next big project. This is the first thing we have to do to race: give up all our spare time, then give up a little more. Honestly, I am not sure how I am still married after almost 4 years. Either I have a very understanding wife, or she is playing a big joke on me. Maybe she is secretly keeping track of how much money I spend on racing, to be wielded against me decades from now when shopping for her anniversary ring. Employment is also a miracle. It’s been along time since I have stayed within my allotted vacation hours. I have become a master of dropping the nonchalant “so I won’t be in the office next Thursday and Friday” and getting away with it.

So now you have taken all these days off work, and spent all these nights and weekends at the shop, and you find yourself a couple days from your first event. Unlike all those TV build shows, there was no musical montage followed by some hot chick whipping a white sheet off your ride and revealing a magical transformation of carbon fiber and stickers. Maybe it starts, maybe the seat is in, but some of the parts are still in the box and in the “we’ll do it after the 1st event” pile. The foot-well is full of tools, fast food, and garbage, and you are struggling to get the brake fittings to stop leaking, all the while knowing that the front bumper cover and brake ducts still need to be built. After all, those were going to be “easy”.

My dad always says “In racing, it takes 90% of the time to do the last 10% of the work.” Maybe that’s why we start our builds 3 months in advance now, and plan an extra 6 weeks for testing and rebuilding. It always seems excessive, but I don’t think we have ever gotten to the track and been able to say “we have done everything we wanted to”. We never really think we got far enough into that last 10%. It think this is a good thing. It always makes you pay that much more attention on the next project, because it is only that last 10% of teams who do that get a shot at a podium, these are the guys that know that the last 10% is the most important.