My Road Safety

Some otherwise-reliable engines just don’t hold up well under the rigors of low-budget endurance racing. The small-block Chevrolet V-8 is one, as proved by the engine-swap kings of the IROC Maiden Camaro team. The Toyota R is another; while the 20R or 22R can haul 25 AK-brandishing mujahideen up the Khyber Pass in a Toyota Hilux and not break a sweat, the R tends to respond to the sustained rpm of an all-weekend road race by sending a connecting rod out the side of the engine block and forcing the Celica in which it is housed to clank to a halt in a cloud of smoke. We’ve seen it over and over and over in the 24 Hours of LeMons, but we’ve never seen anything like the maniacal refusal to give up of Apocalyptic Racing and their ’78 Celica at this past weekend’s race at GingerMan Raceway in Michigan.

It started out in fairly typical LeMons fashion: The team, a bunch of cheerful New Zealanders, showed up with a suspiciously racy-looking Celica loaded with all manner of suspension upgrades.

Under the hood, the Celica’s 20R also had been upgraded—if that’s the word—with a gigantic Holley double-pumper and a fat exhaust header. We assumed that it also had a hot cam and high compression, and so we handed Apocalyptic Racing a few penalty laps for blowing past the $500 spending limit. However, we didn’t bury the team under penalty laps, because the car was 34 years old and the engine was an obvious time bomb that was going to start launching connecting rods not long after it saw 6000 rpm. Judging from the crazed, race-feverish look in the eyes of the Apocalyptic Racing drivers, it was going to happen early.

I described all the obliterated Toyota R engines I’d seen at LeMons races and suggested that the drivers keep the engine below 4000 rpm at all times, but they paid me no mind. At that point, I thought of putting together a little betting pool on the number of laps the Celica would turn before it threw a rod (my guess was 20 laps), but then forgot the idea. Saturday morning, the green flag waved—and about five laps later, the Apocalyptic Racing Toyota skidded to a stop behind a curtain of oil smoke.

Yes, another LeMons 20R had done what truck motors do when you treat them like Formula 1 engines: punch a nasty hole in the engine block.

Most of the time, a LeMons team that blows up their engine ten minutes into a weekend-long race hangs their heads, stares uncomprehendingly at the busted rod sitting on the valve cover, and feels more or less hopeless. I usually give them the “don’t give up, go find a junkyard engine and swap it in— you’ll be back on the track before you know it” speech, but that proved unnecessary with the members of Apocalyptic Racing. They were almost proud that they were the first team to kill an engine that weekend, and they had no plans to give up. Far from it!

Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—Apocalyptic Racing’s pit neighbor turned out to be none other than Marc, also known as “King Cobbler,” one of the most wild-eyed fabricators in LeMons history. Long story short, this is the man who dropped a Kinner five-cylinder aircraft radial engine into his Toyota MR2 LeMons car, so you know he’s serious. This race, Marc was running a regular 4AGE-powered MR2 that was proving to be fairly reliable, so he had time to help out Apocalyptic Racing.

While the team started calling junkyards and checking local Craigslist ads for a Toyota truck or rear-wheel-drive Celica engine donor, Marc took a look at the nuked 20R. “There’s really no reason you can’t just remove the bad piston and its rocker arms, then patch the hole in the block,” he told them. “It should run fine with three cylinders!” This seemed like a good idea to the Apocalyptic New Zealanders, so they pulled the engine and got down to the business of fishing out the broken parts.

Meanwhile, Marc crafted this precision engine-block patch out of an old license plate.

He welded the patch onto the block, then covered the whole mess with J-B Weld epoxy.

You don’t want oil gushing out the hole in the empty crank journal and killing oil pressure to the rest of the engine, so Mark went for a high-tech solution: beer-can aluminum and a hose clamp.

The engine went back in, at which point the team discovered that they’d somehow killed the starter motor. No sweat—just push-start it! Miraculously, the car fired up right away and headed out onto the track.

And, a few laps later, the Celica returned to the paddock behind the tow truck.

It turned out that the errant connecting rod had done more damage than just the simple hole in the engine block, and the three-banger had put all its energies into emulsifying oil and water to the point at which it was as gooey as cake batter. With fluids gushing out of every orifice—including some not engineered by Toyota—and the temperature climbing to nuclear-fusion levels, the 20R refused to play along with the feel-good/rising-from-the-ashes story we were all hoping for. Did Apocalyptic Racing throw in the towel at that point? Hell no!

Late Saturday afternoon brought a junkyard 22R engine out of a late-’80s Toyota pickup. The 22R is more of a cousin than a sibling to the 20R, with more displacement and a different cylinder head, but it will bolt into a late-’70s Celica.

By Sunday morning, the 22R was fully installed in the Celica. Was it a good engine? Nobody knew.

The linkage on the 20R’s Holley had been on the Rube Goldberg side, but the modifications needed to get said linkage to the 22R’s factory carburetor were even more tortured.

So tortured, in fact, that the hood required some modifications to clear the mechanism.

The team felt very optimistic as the Toyota headed onto the track to start Sunday’s race session, but the car promptly crapped out with fuel-system problems and returned on the hook.

Fine, said Apocalyptic Racing, we’ll just fix the carburetor. The carb and intake from the 20R wouldn’t fit the 22R’s head, so the team was determined to make the junkyard engine’s carburetor work.

With time running out, it became clear that the damaged and bad-gas-fouled Toyota carburetor was never going to work. At this point, the team was willing to wear their fingers down to bloody stumps wrenching on the car, if that’s what it took to get the car out there for the checkered flag. So, the logical next move: cut out a piece of the bad engine’s oil pan and use it to fabricate an adapter that would enable the 20R’s Holley carburetor to bolt onto the 22R’s intake manifold.

With the end of the race looming, the Holley was screwed onto the adapter. Go!

Another push-start and the engine fired up . . . but what’s with all the smoke and steam? It turned out that the new engine had a blown head gasket, probably caused by the faulty Toyota carburetor going lean during the previous on-track adventure. The cylinder bores were full of water, the checkered flag would be waving in a few minutes, and the Apocalyptic Racing guys were getting desperate. So, they drained the water out of the radiator, attached the Celica to the bumper of a pickup truck with a tow strap, turned on the ignition, put the Celica’s transmission in first gear, and proceeded to drag the ailing Toyota around the paddock in an attempt to pump the water out of the engine and get it to fire up. After three laps, success! The Celica’s engine caught and the driver sputtered onto the track about a minute before the checkered flag. It didn’t sound very good and it was very slow, but it ran well enough to cross the finish line with the checkered waving. Hooray!

Of course, the tormented 22R quit a few hundred feet later, which meant that Class C winner Speedycop had to push the car off the track in his Suzuki X90. For their incredible weekend-long thrash (which yielded a grand total of 22 laps, including quite a few behind the tow truck), the members of Apocalyptic Racing received the much-sought-after Most Heroic Fix trophy at their first-ever LeMons race.