***FULL DISCLOSURE***
What you are about to see is real, and took place over the course of 16 months between June of 2017 and a few weeks ago. It all happened at such a frantic pace that I didn't have the time, energy, or mental patience to document it at the time, other than the hastily-scribbled out notes I took on a pad of paper in the garage, emails with teammates, and several hundred crappy camera phone pictures.
BACKGROUND:
By most accounts, the 24 Hours of leMons April 2017 race at Carolina Motorsports Park was a particularly rough weekend for our team. The 1975 Ford LTD Landau we'd been campaigning for a number of years has this proclivity towards raising our hopes right before dashing them to the ground. In this instance, I'd built a brand new engine (based on a low-mile 460 mill grabbed super cheap from a discarded RV) and we spent a lot of time going over the rest of the car in an attempt to make it reliable. It even got a new paint job and theme.
The race weekend turned sour on us, though as the oil pressure sank to zero during my time behind the wheel on the first day. We spent the rest of that race day (and a good part of that evening, until about 2AM) fixing a fallen-off oil pump pickup and replacing the transmission - which was on its last legs.
The following day didn't go much better; we shattered a transmission output shaft case and had to replace it and, as it turns out, the driveshaft. Battered and tired, the car limped across the finish line, and we trudged home. Spirits were low- and the post-race accounting was not particularly kind, either. We had spent, collectively, about $4000 for the privilege of driving perhaps an hour each, in a not-terribly good car. I dragged the car home, dumped it off the trailer, and mulled aloud with Mrs. VCH the possibility of me quitting racing. I was in a really low place- and I suspect the rest of the team was, too.
After about a month of being depressed about the whole stupid racing business, and consuming more than a couple fermented beverages of an adultish nature, I began developing a plan. Part of the credit for this has to go to Mrs. VCH. She's always been supportive of my racing, but she's also always hated the LTD. Let's face it, _look_ at it. The 1970's weren't exactly the pinnacle for automotive elegance and styling. And the LTD is probably about the nadir of what little style there was during the sucky seventies. And now we had a rusty, dented, and barely-running purple and gold example of this horrendousness plopped smack dab in our yard where God and all the neighbors can see it, and we both have to look at it every single day.
Clearly, something had to be done...