We Are Team BOXY, BUT GOOD

The Event:

We are a New England based team of 6 that raced in The 24 Hours of LeMons.  No, I didn’t mis-spell Le Mans.  Think little, yellow, sour fruit, or in this case, old car.  The basic idea of LeMons is to buy and prep a car for $500, and race it for 15 hours across 2 days, all the while avoiding punishments like having a metal chicken welded to our hood, being forced to eat a nasty can of sardines to avoid lap penalties, or having our car crushed by an excavator.  Learn more here at the 24 Hours of LeMons home page, and get some good pictures of interesting cars and punishments at Jalopnik here.  And here’s a nice Car & Driver article.

Many cars simply don’t finish this endurance race.  We’re hoping our Volvo will offer the reliability to go the distance.

We raced our car at LeMons New England on July 11-12, 2009 at Stafford Motor Speedway in Stafford, Springs, Connecticut.  We plan to enter the Lego Volvo in LeMons New England again next year.

The Drivers (2009):

Most of us are employed by a robotics company in Massachusetts, working to make high-precision robots for the semiconductor industry. We are all brainiac techie-gadget geeks that also love cars, and actually drive well in the competitions we’ve all participated in. We are all comfortable with laughing at/with ourselves, and don’t take things too seriously.

Chuck is a controls engineer that buys many clothes at thinkgeek.com — shirts that say things like “i void warranties,” and “it must be user error”. An original 1977 Star Wars belt buckle, cast with the images of C3PO and R2-D2, graces his waist daily. Yes, he wears these things to work every day. Hey, he loves robots and technology. He gave up one summer in high school to go to a robotics camp (like band camp, but much geekier). But he’s also been a car nut forever. His current car’s license plate is “I-ROBOT.” The first car he tried to buy was a Toyota 2000GT…at age 10. He, for one, welcomes our future robot overlord(s)…

 

 

Martin is a double-Dr. engineer from the Czech Republic that has a keen penchant for all things Fiero. He actually has two of these fabulous, plastic-bodied pieces of machinery…one show car, and one track car, and he’s always on the hunt for another one…that perfect 1988 Fiero dream machine…if it exists.

 

Brice, the ex-engineer, now Program Manager of the bunch, used to drive old BMW’s, until recently when he bought a VW TDI. He’s now a hypermiling, diesel-fume sniffing freak who is proud to have hit 62mpg once, but still joneses for the M3 he can’t afford, so he’s prepping his TDI to be an oil-burning 50-mpg track-day-underdog instead.  Check out his personal website here: http://www.bricecenter.com/

 

Scott is also a controls engineer that used to race motorcycles, and now races bicycles. He’s another VW-driving car nut, who kicked ass at our last team karting event.

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The only thing that he is truly afraid of are Tuesdays, and that if he caught fire, he’d burn for days!  Keith owns a VW / Audi repair shop in Chelmsford, Mass, and though he’d like to race one of those, it’s likely that the reliability and power is less than that of the Volvo. Other notable points, he makes biodiesel and enjoys being a slum lord.

 

 

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Jeremy is our out-of-towner web guru who set this site up.  He is using his mad eBay skillz to score us some driving suits, & spare parts.

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-The Car (a.k.a. The LEGO Brick):

A 1988 Volvo 740 turbo with 237,848k miles.  The Volvo ad from the 1990 movie Crazy People pretty much sums it up (yes, our 740 looks almost exactly like that picture).

 

“BUY VOLVOS.
THEY’RE BOXY
BUT THEY’RE GOOD

We know they’re not sexy.
This is not a smart time to be sexy anyway,
with so many new diseases around.

BE SAFE INSTEAD OF SEXY.

VOLVO
Boxy, but good.”

 

Here’s our take on that ad:

Here is our actual beast, as purchased…just like the ad says, BOXY, BUT GOOD.

 

 

And as raced.

And here’s Chuck’s Lego model that is now our poster-child.