Magic Rabbit escapes to Sacramento!

The Magic Rabbit escaped on Saturday, it ran up the road and jumped on the waiting trailer and off it went!

Parked the truck and trailer up by Rye's house, his Honda Element is in the background. Needed a nice level surface to make the loading uneventful. Here is Paul just starting up the ramps of the trailer.

The Magic Rabbit up on the trailer, fits nicely onto Paul's new trailer.

From the front, the black box at the front of the trailer will carry spare parts, tools and supplies. The fancy decals on the side of the box are from Paul, Nancy and Darrell's participation in the Mexican La Carrera Panamericana race for two years, races 20 and 22. The race is a re-creation of the famous Mexican road race held from 1950 to 1954, run on the open roads of Mexico for about 2,000 miles up to Texas.

The bullet holes in the box are from a run in with the Mexican Army! Well, kinda. The service truck and trailer did have an adventure with the Mexican Army with guns drawn when they went down a wrong road. However, no shots were fired and the bullet holes are just decals. But makes for a great story!

All loaded up and strapped in tight, ready to head to Sacto.

Hard to see, but Nancy and I next to the Magic Rabbit, but the photographer (Paul) wanted to make sure to get a shot of the service truck. You can just make out the decal on the side of the truck signifying it's part of the Panamericana race.

Time to head to Sacramento to get the roll cage updated and fabricated, get the safety harness installed, get the tires mounted and the suspension all aligned, get the car numbers made and put on, lots of things still to do and just 19 days before Thunderhill!!

Here is a video of Paul, Nancy and the Magic Rabbit heading out.

Seemed so very strange to get back to my house and find the garage empty. No Magic Rabbit that has filled my garage for the last few months. What am I going to do, my project is gone?Can't run down and work on it every night. But I have some fabricating to do until next weekend when I will drive to Sacramento, my turn to do the commuting.

OK, more fun stuff. We have tires! Delivered last week to Paul, the proud owner sitting on the stack of Dunlop Star Spec high performance tires!

The Star Spec tires are not a pure racing tire, can be used on the street. Rules of 24 Hours of Lemons limits how soft and sticky a tire you can use. The tires must have of a wear rating of at least 190. Most car tires on our daily drivers have wear ratings up above 400 so they will last 40 to 50 thousand miles. Our Dunlop Star Specs have a rating of 200, just above the rule limit! They look great and fast!

Next to the tires are the set of "snowflake" rims I bought from a guy posted on Craigslist living in Napa. He too is a Lemon's driver, done it a number of times. So our snowflake rims come from a racing home! The rims needed cleaning up, so Paul has done a marvelous job. See the next pic.

The snowflake rims before and after Paul's restoration work. Bead blasted, masked off the spokes and re-painted black. They look fabulous, just like they came off the factory assembly line. The Magic rabbit will have the best looking tires at Thunderhill, maybe it will take the "Best Looking Tires" award, if they had such a thing!

Can hardly wait to see the new tires and refurbished rims on the car!

OK, my fabrication project for Sunday, make a cold air intake to bring fresh, relatively cool air from the front of the car into the air filter and air intake box. So the pics below show the cool air intake that used the headlight carrier (the GTI had square headlights) as the cool air intake.

The headlight bucket is on the left side of the pic, the 4 inch to 3 inch home ventilation reducer was fit into the end of the headlight bucket. Turned out perfect, big air scoop to start with reduced down to 3 inch duct.

Shot from the front side of the headlight bucket with the fabricated opening for the ventilation reducer.

The cool air will then be routed using more 3 inch aluminum cloths dryer duct to the air filter and air intake. Same duct as we are using for the brake cooling ducts.

That is my next fabrication, to make an intake bucket for each of the brake cooling ducts. That will keep me busy this week.

A busy weekend, threw in my 45 year high school reunion Saturday night, just for kicks. And it was a kick. See many of these people only once every 5 years. Some look just the same as in high school, many I would never recognize until I see their name tags. And that is getting harder, well actually impossible unless I whip out my reading glasses. But when I do that, I lose all my young, youthful appearance and coolness....yeah right!

That's it for tonight. More next week.