A friend of mine recently asked me how much it costs me to get on track in Champcar. I'm anal about saving receipts, logging purchases, and so on so I decided to make a quick excel sheet to help him out. Granted the car came with some spares and I didn't include any performance parts in this breakdown as the focus was -- how to get on track as cheap as possible to include personal safety gear. Obviously some items can be found cheaper than others and vice versa. I still think with initial performance parts, spares, and pit box equipment, we went endurance racing for less than $7k for our first outing. That includes fuel, food, and spirits.
Cactus
HalfDork
5/19/20 5:10 p.m.
Nice, I feel like you're well ahead of the curve there. Can you share those links? $48 radios sound nice.
Looks good. I guess that makes me anal too. I have an Excel sheet for every project (flips, DDs, restos and race cars) I do. I have one for a race car I don't have yet . . . but I'll be ready when I do find the right car. My race vehicle sheets include costs and potential income / offsets.
gosh, don't get mad at me when i tell you i spent $600...Buying an existing car is a huge savings.
Cactus said:
Nice, I feel like you're well ahead of the curve there. Can you share those links? $48 radios sound nice.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007H4VT7A/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Cheaper than that, I put $48 because you need 2. There are better alternatives out there; however, I had some of that stuff already and a while back Tommy wrote up something using some of these components so I just finished that project. Also, technically, you're supposed to have a FCC Amateur Radio License to transmit on the HAM bands available in this radio but then you run into issues because of where its manufactured. Bottom line: find a CB, FRS, GMRS, or MURS radio that was built stateside and doesn't require you to get a license to transmit. Two of us on the team have FCC licenses so its not a big deal....
And honestly, you figured out how to do it cheap when building a car from scratch.
I'm currently on this same path. We paid a little more for the car up front, but it came with quite a bit of stuff that we can use to offset the cost. It definitely helps splitting cost 4 ways too.
captainawesome said:
I'm currently on this same path. We paid a little more for the car up front, but it came with quite a bit of stuff that we can use to offset the cost. It definitely helps splitting cost 4 ways too.
Yea everything is split for the most part 3 ways on our team. We have two other guys that contribute here and there monetarily -- with one of them contributing a lot of mechanical expertise all the time. We also have a great group of family and friends that come out and support us at each event to fuel the car, cook, help setup and breakdown everything which is awesome. I've paid some of them back by giving them seat time in the car at HPDEs. The smile on my uncles face after getting to drive Sebring in a car he's helped out with was priceless.
I've contemplated building a second car for all the old farts to drive in but the logistics of getting and running two cars to the track seems to exponentially increase costs....even if its the exact same car and spares can go both ways.
