This story is about 5 years old now, but I actually wrote it all down for the first time a couple days ago in an e-mail to AngryCorvair about some wheel spacers he bought from my garage cleanout post (shameless plug, help me get rid of stuff) and he told me "That should be on the forum somewhere." So, with that encouragement, here we go. Let's have a thread about race cars that got away. The ones you wanted to build but the timing, the budget, or something else just wasn't right. I know a lot of you probably have better stories than I do. Mine is about this truck:
That S10's got some history, and I only know a small fraction of it. My buddy and his dad raced it on paved oval tracks up around the twin cities MN area when he was in high school. They had a lot of wins with it, and of course, were frequently accused of cheating for being smart about suspension setup and engine building and tuning. Eventually all the paved ovals either closed or turned into dirt tracks, and they moved on to racing ChumpCar, which is where we met. The truck didn't have a purpose anymore and was just in the way. It eventually got booted from indoor storage and ended up sitting in a field.
My LeMons/Chump team had dissolved by that point, so he offered it to me in trade for some Corvette parts. I didn't have the space or time for it, but one of my old LeMons teammates was excited about building it, so he borrowed an enclosed trailer and we picked up the truck and hauled it to his place up north in the iron range, where it sat while he remodeled the house, then built a new garage, then sold the place and moved the family out to Montana. The truck ended up sitting outdoors again, in his buddy's yard, and I got a call telling me I needed to come get it. I didn't have space or time for it then either, but I drove up there to rescue it, and found it full of leaves and sunk in mud on the old flat 13" slicks.
I hauled it 4 hours home and put it into a storage unit, thinking I'd build it for LeMons/Chump myself after I got some other projects out of the way. I bought a set of wheel spacers and put the C5 Corvette "wagon wheels" on it then, first because I thought they looked cool, and second because I just needed something that held air to roll the truck around on. Eventually the reality that I wasn't going to get to it as soon as I wanted to sunk in, and I hate paying for storage, so I put the truck up on craigslist for what I had into it in storage fees, and ended up selling it to a father and son out in farm country who were into mud drag racing. I was told it would be getting a big block, because that's what they put in everything they build.
Not what I would have chosen, but getting to decide the future of a vehicle you're selling to strangers isn't necessarily part of the deal. They showed up on time with a trailer and cash, so they got the truck. I appreciated that it was going to another father and son team, even if they were into a type of racing I don't really get. A couple years later, a mutual friend of the original owner asked me about the truck, and I told him the story and gave him the number of the kid I sold it to. He got in touch, and the kid told him that the truck never got built for mud racing, and they sold it to somebody else, but didn't have contact info, so the trail went cold. I wish I could find that truck to buy back now, because it had a nice cage, and it would have been a great platform for some cheap track fun, which I've been away from for too long.
In hindsight though, selling it when I did was a good move. I was dating the woman to whom I'm now happily married, and lots of other good things happened in my life because I wasn't focused on building a race truck and putting together another crapcan enduro team. But a non-rusty caged '93 S10 RCSB doesn't just come along every day, y'know?
