What if the path to motorsports didn’t begin with a trust fund or a factory ride—but with a $500 car, a podcast, and a whole lot of humility?
That’s the ethos behind Garage Heroes in Training, the amateur endurance racing team and podcast duo of Bill and Vicki Fisher. In a recent crossover episode with Break/Fix, the couple shared their origin story, their misadventures, and their mission to make racing accessible to anyone with a dream and a driver’s license.
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It all started with an email invite to a BMW autocross event at Monticello. Bill, ever the strategist, made sure Vicki beat him on the course – though she insists it was legit. That taste of performance driving sparked something deeper, but Monticello’s price tag was a dealbreaker. Enter the Everyone Racers podcast and its tales of $500 Lemons cars. Suddenly, racing didn’t seem so far-fetched.
They bought a used race car from a friendly team, showed up at their first Lemons event, and were instantly hooked. “We found our tribe,” Bill said. Volleyball was out, knees were shot, but motorsports? That was the new frontier.
Spotlight
From the great halls of their house. There are assembled three, who hope to one day be, the world’s greatest driving heroes. Created from the cosmic legends of the universe, comes our team Captain, The Vision, Bill Fischer. Their soon to be Wonder Woman, Vicki Fischer. Our Captain Marvel and head flight trainee, Jennifer Skripchuk. And our Batman – the master of tools, gadgets, and all things mechanical. Our mild-mannered soon to be billionaire Alan Danvers. Their mission: to fight injustice, share what is right and wrong, to get you out of your house and come out racing with them and serve all mankind. They are the Garage Heroes in Training team.
Bill Fischer –Leader of this motley crew. Raced some when younger, not young any more. First car 1984 Firebird. Best/Favorite car: 2019 Mini Cooper JCW. Worst Car: tie 1974 Granada or 2009 Corolla S. Team nickname: TBD/The Vision Podcast
Vicki Fischer – Solid driver and obviously tolerant of our group craziness. As a self professed “car is a car is a car” girl, she has come a long, long way. She even agreed to be a co-host of our podcast. First car 1974 Pinto. Best/Favorite car: 2015 GTI. Worst Car: seriously? the Pinto. Team nickname: The Bulldozer Podcast
Synopsis
In this episode of Break/Fix, hosts Brad and Eric welcome Bill and Vicki Fisher, the hosts of ‘Garage Heroes in Training.’ The Fishers discuss their journey as an amateur endurance auto racing team, sharing insights and advice for aspiring racers. They recount their experiences with various racing series, emphasize the importance of organization and preparation, and offer tips on how to get started in motorsports. The episode also touches on their podcast’s origins, format, and notable guests. Additionally, they discuss future goals for both their racing team and podcast.
- Origin Story: Who/What/When/Where/How was Garage Heroes in Training formed? What’s it all about?
- We noted from some of the pics on the website, looks like you’re Blue Oval fans? There’s a foxbody, and more importantly, a proper-CAPRI (not that rebadged nonsense from the ‘80s) in the mix. Why Fords? And how are they working out for you?
- Successes/Failures in the enduro series you run? (LeMons most, Lucky Dog second most, AER just started, others upcoming– which?) Can we talk about the differences in the series, which to do like better/worse/why?
- Like our show format, it looks like you guys have different sub-arcs to the show, it’s not all just wrench-turning and mishaps.
- What are some future goals for the race team, and for the show?
Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motor Sports Podcast Break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motor sports related.
Let’s set the scene. You, our loyal listener, are interested in learning to be a better driver and maybe even have aspirations of racing. However, you know virtually nothing about performance driving and motorsports. Well, tonight’s guests are an amateur endurance auto racing team hoping to show everyone that they too can participate in performance driving and racing.
They’re a relatively new team and are sharing their experiences of dos and don’ts with you. That’s right Brad. And some of you might recognize our guests from their super Friends inspired intro where The Vision and Soon to Be Wonder Woman Host Garage Heroes in Training a podcast which has recently eclipsed 300 episodes and covers all forms of racing, and as they say, hopes to be entertaining as well as educational.
So without further ado, we are honored to welcome [00:01:00] Bill and his beautiful bride, Vicki Fisher, hosts of Garage Heroes and Training to Break Fix Crossover part one. I’m expected to hear my husband. Welcome to Garage, take 423. It’s gonna be a long night. Quickest way to get your episode count up. You just have 15 intros and call it an episode.
Well, sounds like we know what we’re doing. Good thing not to fake. Great. Good to be here. So I’m looking at your podcast. I found it and I’m like sitting there going, this podcast is pretty good. So then I go and I, I’m looking through it and all of a sudden I’m gonna take that as a comp. I’m gonna take that as a compliment, by the way.
Yeah, well it should be. And you know, I’m looking at the podcast and all of a sudden I’m like, how is this podcast? Like 1027? I’m like, why didn’t I find this thing before? And then I realized it’s not one comma. Oh two seven. It’s 1 0 2 7. I think it was season one maybe. So I realized that A, I can’t read and I’m an idiot, and b, I hadn’t missed a thousand plus [00:02:00] podcasts of yours.
And I’m like, on, how did I miss a thousand podcasts? Cause I do a search every few weeks looking for automotive and racing related podcasts. And I’m like, a, how have we not met these guys at the track? And B, how did I miss a thousand episodes of a podcast? So anyway, you wanna know the Secret, but this is like a VIN number.
First number is the season number, the second digit specifies, whether it’s a main episode, a drive through episode, a special episode, whatever. And then the last two digits are the actual episode number. So there you go. See, we were grossly, uh, guesstimating our skills. So we went with GHI for the normal episodes.
We went with DWD for Dominated with Dawson, and then we have the W episodes, the way of our topic episodes. And then we purposely put in a four digit episode code. Like we’re gonna be here for at least, you know, A thousand episodes. Absolutely. We never thought we would be, but now we’re like a third of the way, the episode.
So I’m gonna, I’m gonna put you on the finish spot. I’m gonna put you on the spot. Favorite episode so far of break fix episodes So far, the [00:03:00] one that stick out for me are always the news ones because you guys don’t just do the normal news. There’s always something in there that’s like new news. Exactly, that would be the one.
It’s just generically, you guys always find something and I’m like, I didn’t know that. And I listened to several podcasts cause I listen at double speed or triple speed. So I, I go through them pretty quick. I must sound like Alvin and the chip mics then. Cause I talk pretty, it’s, you’re not the worst.
There’s a couple podcasts that I actually can’t do it to us. I can’t listen to him when he, I can’t be in the car when he does it. It’s hard. I had to put headphones on. It just gets my brain. I’ve got stuff to do. Well, we’ll relay the message to Tanya because she is the executive co-producer as we call her, of the drive-through.
She takes a lot of pride in putting those episodes together, especially those Florida man stories. I mean, I don’t know. She gets them from, and by the way, If you watch the behind the scenes uhhuh, we never get to see the Florida man stories until the moment we record it. Cause she wants that reaction and it really was absolutely awesome.
Yeah. Yeah. [00:04:00] So if you hear me laughing hysterically, it’s not because it’s real. I’m making it up. It’s for real. Just like every break fix episode, we wanna learn about your origin story because as we say, everyone has a story. So let’s talk about the who, what, when, where, and how of, how Garage Heroes in Training was formed.
How it all, how did it all get started? It’s his fault. It’s always my fault. It’s his fault. He started it. I did. So the long story, which you know, we have plenty of tape in the machine, so we should be good. The long story is exactly, we got invited through email to one of the B M W events and it was up at Monticello and it was basically turned into a, uh, a lead follow parade in a small autocross.
And being the wise man that I am, I made sure that she beat me on every single autocross. Oh, don’t, no, no, I beat you. Legit. It was planned. It was planned. Legit, legit, legit. I beat you. Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. I spin it here. So riding Crut of the wave, I’m like, Hey, why don’t [00:05:00] we join this Monticello?
It looked like a great place. And she’s like, you’re smoking serious crack. That’s way too much money. So then coincidentally, I had started listening to the Everyone Racers podcast and they also have a television show, and it just so happened that they had their lemons adventure when they went to a race in Washington.
And it was a disaster. But the great part of the story is it was a great episode on TV and they said how it was a $500 car and I said, Hey Vicky, this is a $500 car. And she bought it so the door was open, I didn’t go with anything else and said, sure, this is great. And then we started trying to do this and we eventually bought a, a former race car from a a now friend team that races in lemons.
We go to our first race and on the way home I think we were both pretty much hooked. We used to play volleyball together and then we’d go to this and we’re driving home and separately cuz I was towing and she was driving with our daughter. You know, we were talking to each other and it’s like, wow. I think we found our, our tribe.
Cuz you know, my knees gave up on volleyball a while back [00:06:00] and when you get to a certain age, gravity gets higher wherever you stand. I don’t know what happens. It’s just weird away. Bowling was out, tennis was tough. We decided he falling apart. Yeah. You know, I’m a few spare parts away from a, a brand new chassis.
We just found out that it was really great. And then we knew nothing about the sport. We knew nothing about driving. We have videos to prove. We knew nothing about driving. We knew, we knew nothing about not anything. We didn’t have nothing about nothing. Right, nothing. So after our second race, we said this is so much fun and so entertaining and everybody’s so friendly, but it can be a little intimidating to get somebody to start cuz you don’t know the jargon, you don’t know the tools, you, you don’t know what you don’t know.
And the, the fear of the unknown makes it even more intimidating. Why don’t we start documenting what we’re doing and show people that literally anybody can do this? Cuz we went the first race, it was, uh, Vicki, myself, our son and his friend, 18 year old boys, which can only go wrong. And it did, but that’s fine.
You know, the second race, Vicky’s sister’s like, Hey, can I go, those do this [00:07:00] with you. And the team just gradually started to grow and then, you know, we did so well with one car at our first race. How hard can it be? Let’s bring two cars to the second race. So, you know, but a disaster. Yeah. And then we, you know, beat our heads against the wall and did like everybody else, but we started a podcast right after that.
It shows our progression from, you know, zero to hopefully heroes someday. As the logo says, we’re in training, we’ll always be in training and we’re just at a, a little better than just starting training level. We literally documented everything that went right, everything that went wrong, what to do and what not to do.
Yeah. I think that’s what it ended up turning into. It was like, this is what we did and it went horribly wrong. So don’t do this. Every time that we did this, it was like, okay, what did we do wrong? What did we do right. And then what can we do better for the next race? And then it just started to build off of that.
And then we started incorporating our stories. And then it just got really funny for a while. And that’s a common thread across the motor sports community, especially in the grassroots world, like we’re all a part of. I mean, you look at Jim Tramontana [00:08:00] with No Money, Motorsports is a very similar thing, right?
Change in parts in the parking lot of his apartment on his Miata. And that’s grown into another thing. And you see that across the board. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, I mean, we all, I guess, suffer silently in a way doing the same things. But when you’re starting out new, it’s extremely difficult to turn to somebody and go, now what do I do next?
How do I even get off the block? So I commend you guys for taking that step to say, look, follow us on this journey, and you know, we’ll show you where we’ve been and where we’re going. Mm-hmm. We were lucky in that we found everyone Racers podcast and we, we wrote a letter, well I wrote a letter to them and I think it had like 27 bullet points and each one had sub bullet points.
So they pick on me constantly about it, but they invited me on and said, Hey, could you represent somebody who’s trying to get into this sport? And I’m like, well, yes, yes I can. Cuz we were, we got along and for some reason they said, Hey, when you go to your race, cuz they live fairly close to us, meet us at the paddock and we’ll kind of shepherd you.
So the generosity of their team, which has been racing for 10 years and has won championships in races and virtually every award in [00:09:00] lemons for them to share that with us, to welcome us into a sport. And we were just some guy who wrote an email, we. Had no way of returning that, but we thought maybe the podcast could do that.
And since that time, we have gotten to a point, and we have done it a few times for some teams and, and taken them on their first ride with us. And we’ve done it a lot for a lot of the drivers that race with us. Almost all of ’em are friends. I don’t think we’ve ever had like a true arrive and drive that we didn’t know.
But we, we invite friends and we try and get people going. And we’ve gotten over, I think the last time I counted it was like 23 drivers into a race with our team. We call them our sister team. We kind of look at them like a 2.0. They kind of do a little bit of a higher level podcast than us, but our podcast is just basically getting you from your sofa to the racetrack.
As it says in the intro, it’s a, it’s a strictly a 1 0 1 and it’s actually harder to do that than when you’re at the racetrack. You start getting into it because, like Bill said, you don’t know the jargon. You don’t know what your buildup is. You don’t even know what your basic necessities are going to be because that’s not really taught.[00:10:00]
I think we actually did like a 10 part series on these are the basics to get you from your sofa to the track. What’s your basics on your car? What’s your basics of your paddock are, what your basics of your garage are. Basic things that you’re gonna need at the track. Basic safety gear, just so you can start your build of your team and get to your first race and have fun.
Mm-hmm. Cuz that’s the, that’s the most important part is, I don’t know that you’ll agree, but the most important part of our sport and the best part of our sport is you don’t have to win to have fun in certain cases with an endurance race, especially winning is being able to start. And finish. I don’t know, man, I gotta dry flat out for that $5 plastic trophy.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Well, you, you come to our team and I will buy you trophies just to get you this mellow out, man. So, you know, there’s, here’s a trophy. Slow down. We got a long way to go. So you mentioned before, I don’t know that it applies to humans in the sense of DC’s ship, right?
Replacing all your [00:11:00] parts to be compatible with sports, but you had a lot of things to choose from. I mean, you could have gone and played chess or, you know, yeah. I don’t know, make, make jigsaw puzzles or something. But why cars? Was there something that was always there lurking in the background about cars that you were interested in?
So I was, I was born at a very young age and in Alabama, I mean, what, what are we talking about here? I was, I was very, very small when I was born. The first job that I can remember, my mom was working at a toy company called Topper Toys, which used to compete with Matchbox and Hot Wheels. That obviously did a great job cuz they no longer exist.
So she would bring home little Topper toy. Hot Wheels. And you know, I had the Johnny Lightning case and that was basically based on Al Unser. So I was a car boy from very young, and I liked cars, but school, family work, things got in the way. So we kind of put things off. And then Vicki and I eventually got to a point where the children were old enough to participate with us, our oldest son and our youngest daughter’s getting there soon.
But they were at an age where they might [00:12:00] become part of it or appreciated, or at least tolerate it. And we had enough time and, uh, stupidity to do this. So we thought we’d give it a run. And, you know, how hard can it be? You know, famous last words. Yeah, yeah. You, you can make it as hard or as easy as you deem to be.
It’s kind of like we were talking to somebody today at work and he’s like, well, how expensive it is. I, well, I’m like, you can race, you know, a 1990s Miata or some other lower price car and your consumables aren’t very high. Or you can race a challenge. Ferrari dedicated full racetrack, so you can basically spend whatever you want to.
But on the low side, there’s, it’s not that bad. It’s like vacation. You can spend as much as you want or as little as you want. You still gotta have a good time. I usually answer that question cheaper than guns, planes, and boats and golf sometimes too. So take sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s so, it’s, it’s really whatever you wanna put in.
Racing is more than willing to take, but you have to control yourself, you know, a spec serious. There’s a limit to how much you can spend essentially, cuz there’s only so much you can do. But I know people who try to [00:13:00] win the spec series and they end up. Buying 10 or 12 motors and taking them apart and measuring everything and keeping the ones that they want and selling the others, that’s not really what we’re doing.
We’re we’re there to challenge ourselves and improve and get better. That’s the other thing we’ve done with the podcast since we started, was not only to get people started, but to help other people who are friends or soon to be friends. Cuz everybody in racing’s a friend, would eventually to get better.
So every episode I always try to have part of the episode where we give you some little, it could be significant or it could be this little nugget, or it could be this little tip, like using electrical tape on a harness to help everything get lined up when you’re putting it in so you can color code things cuz pit stops can suck when you start having to gripp around trying to figure out where’d the harness go.
You know, there’s things like that and little trips and ticks that we’ve picked up over the years doing things or learned from other friends and. Nothing is new, but we can share. And the other thing too is, is about our team. We’re really heavily focused on the journey more than we are on trying to race to get to that win, we bring people along, like Bill said, on that journey.
With that, [00:14:00] we’ve brought people into the sport that have stayed or have been interested in staying. And that’s another thing too, is that Bill especially has always been a way more the merrier. And just come along and enjoy this. We’ve never really been focused about the win, but we’ve been focused on our HPDs, our precision on getting better skid pads than Yeah.
Skid pads, you know, mini autocross. I mean, I, I mean, we would travel 10 hours to go to an h HPD e just so we can experience that track, and then we would, did you do it with or without music during the, the tow, I guess, triple speed podcasts. That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. Exactly. I, i out, we have a mind blowing like 12 hour tow to N C M, where basically we could get two radio stations and we opted to turn the radio off.
If anybody knows Brad, we didn’t talk a whole lot for that 12 hour stuff. When we would travel, we would travel with my sister’s rv. We would drive two cars and we would tow the third car [00:15:00] because we would go out as a family, as a team. We would do this and we’d do one away race, you know, from the very eastern tip of Pennsylvania.
We’d go all the way up into Michigan just so we can go experience gingerman. It would always be like smoking the bandit with this troupe because we would all. Be following the trailers and the people that were driving would shoot off and go get food and come back and, you know, everybody’s got radios in their cars and it was, it’s really kind of exciting.
Bill and Vicky, it would be unfair if we didn’t ask you some pit stop questions along the way. So since Bill talked about, you know, his advanced age, I would normally ask our guests, you know, what poster did you have on your wall as a kid? And in this case it’s probably a model, a Ford. So little, little after that, I know exactly what it is.
So I’m good. Oh, I’m ready. Is it, please tell me. Go ahead. What is the car faucet enough? Oh no. Yeah, whatever she was sitting on. I’m a cheerleader. I’m not that old. Thank you very much. I believe she was part of the Mustang two campaign. I’m just saying the malaise era. Fords, right? [00:16:00] There’s Malays there for sure.
It would be from the mid eighties to Ferrari. GTO O Oh was the 2 88. Exactly. I won’t say that it was a single. Picture of a car only on my wall at that time. But, you know, that’s fine for me. I, uh, I actually, uh, your Pinto? Yeah. No, no. Um, no. I’m actually the art girl. When I got in here, I was actually, we were actually doing the artwork on the cars, but I am the tomboy in my family, so it was just an artsy tomboy is what I was, and somehow I just kind of fell into racing with him.
But now I’m training to be the mechanic. So nothing wrong with that. No. You were the one who introduced us to, uh, top gear though. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Me and my sister are usually, were the ones that work on delivery until, you know, I took a turn into, we need a second mechanic, so I kind of fell into that role.
Richard? Jeremy. Jeremy or James? Who, who would you rather have a beer with? Jeremy. Jeremy or Chris? Oh, from New Top Gear. [00:17:00] Those would be the two for me. Jeremy would be hilarious. I think I would have the most fun talking to Jeremy, honestly. But anyway, I think the most interesting would be May, but I would also feel like, need to take all three please.
But you know, there’s a, there’s a test at the end of it or something. If you’re, you’re with James May, then it takes like 10 hours. Mm-hmm. Jeremy would be the one that gets you in trouble all the time. He’s that guy at the bar. Yeah. We noted from some of the picks on your website that you did not actually choose to race the Ferrari 2 88 gto, but instead you went with the blue ovals.
It looks like there’s a fox body. It’s close, you know, there’s a proper Capri, which is one of Eric’s favorite cars for some God awful reason. None of that rebadged nonsense from the eighties. Okay. Passes a fox body, but continues. So in a sport where everybody’s budget conscience is driving a Miata, Why are you all driving Fords and how are they working out for you?
Well, they’re not, those were early pictures. Those were early pictures, [00:18:00] yeah. See what you’re saying on racetrack? Dead. Dead, yeah. Or Ford owners repaired. Yeah. Very early on, the cars definitely had problems. Mustang still runs. Yeah, it does. It’s rough though. We’ve always had a struggle with the fact that it was a turbo.
The turbo, it was the one year GT turbo, not the s v o. So it was that one year in between. And parts are a bit of a bearer there, but what you’re saying is they run like factory new for Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And our, and our pork capri, just for the age of it, they had these really tiny transmissions. The links would just fall off.
The poor thing, couldn’t even handle the endurance. And people were just not giving them up because they were seven, you know? Was it, what is it? 77? 74? 70, 74. You can’t find the parts for it. And those that did have them were just like, you’re doing what with it? Uh, we don’t think so. So they’re not giving the parts up.
So we were going to do, uh, a full engine swap, transmission swap, rear end swap on the Capri. And we still have all those parts if anybody’s interested in, [00:19:00] in helping and or taking over the project. Cuz it’s above our pay grade at this point. We’re getting there, but it’s really slow to get to that point.
We have everything ready. We have the wiring harness good to go. We have all the parts sitting there mocked up. But, you know, not having ever built engine mounts and other details that we haven’t even gotten to yet. It’s a little past what our skill level is. Yeah. It’s, it’s something we’d like to do, but I just don’t know that we’re ever gonna get there cause we keep breaking the other stuff we use all the time.
So yeah, there’s that. But then we fell into a Chevy S 10. Ooh. Which, which I gotta tell you was the thing is like a Lego. It really is. It’s so easy to work on. We’ve been really successful with it, but we’re pretty much are outgrowing it at this point. So, um, what year? S 10, 2003. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, so it’s a 4.3 liter?
Mm-hmm. Or the four cylinder. Yep. Four, three. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So, and the car just runs like a clock. It’s just one of the difficulties we have is not buying the car, but selling the car. So I tended to buy cars and we had to downsize a little bit. So, [00:20:00] have you seen Eric’s driveway? It’s, I might, I might be close.
Yeah. I widened it. It’s helipad size for a reason. I’m just saying, my gosh. It’s, yeah. Instead of getting rid of cars, he just made his driveway bigger. A hundred percent true. Yeah. Instead of getting rid of cars, I got a second hanger at the airport. Yeah. So he legitimately did, but now we’re kind of cleaning house because the problem with hubby here is that there were a lot of recommendations for cars and he was buying all of them.
Yeah. So, so now, um, the Porsche came through and a Porsche is its own beast. I kind of looked at, it was intimidated by just the compactness of the engine area and how that was in there. And I’m like, I just. You have small hands. It’s fine. It’s Hans Small. Hans Tiny Hans. Small Hans. Yes. So we went through some Porsches, we went through some versions of the BMW Miatas.
We had the truck, we had the earlier versions of the cars of [00:21:00] the Ford Mustang and the Caprice settled on the race truck. And now we are into a 1993 Honda, which, ooh, civic. It’s a very cool little car. Now our team has to learn how to drive a front wheel. So yes, our specialty, no. Yeah, so, so I had to, I went out for my first race with it.
I did not get a chance to prep myself with it very well. But I had to keep telling myself when I was driving, when I was going into my apex, was that it is a pull, not a push. And once I had to keep memorizing that it’s a pull, not a push, is what the car is doing with the front end. So I was able to, to get on the gas earlier and not have to worry about spinning out in those certain areas.
There’s two rules to driving a fun wheel drive. Mm-hmm. Lift your foot to turn. And when in doubt, throttle out. That’s right. That’s right. I. Exactly. So that worked perfectly until it snowed about three quarters of an inch in one lap. Yes. When she was on the track and didn’t matter. I’ve actually autocross a couple Hondas from that [00:22:00] generation, and they are fantastic cars.
Unfortunately, in the autocross world, they are subject to the same downfall as Miatas, which means 2 75 square, and they look like little roller skate so they don’t mm-hmm. Handle exactly like the track cars do. That’s, that’s a hundred percent for sure. Mm-hmm. So is that all there is in the fleet right now?
Oh, he’s shaking his head no. No, I just sold my, uh, we’re divesting. Yeah, I just sold my Miata Turbo. It had a fly Miata in it. I was a little sad to see it go, but for that particular vehicle I was pigeonholed with it because it was two street for track and two track for street because sold it to a friend.
Sold it to a friend because of the age. I’m just at that point when I’d rather be in a more comfortable car to go, but I actually have a spec, one that looks exactly like it coming up behind that I’m building next. After I get all these other vehicles outta the way. Bill’s got a E 46 that he just had built.
We haven’t primed it yet. We haven’t had a chance to prime it yet, but that’s in the hangar, ready to go. We have an E [00:23:00] 46 M three for Daley? Yes. And Amiata 2019. And they’re HPDs. And we do those, those are kind of our, our light HPDs. And then we have a essentially a endurance version of a spec E 46 for endurance.
So it’s not technically a spec E 46, but we don’t care about hardware so as long as they let us go on a track, I don’t care. It’s not for like a lemons race. That’s more like a AR type of thing. Yeah. And And then we have the Honda Civic for our lemons car. We have a Honda Fit, which Vicky hates, but that’s okay.
She hasn’t run Sunday Cup yet. Life, which we will be doing. Yeah, shortly. Vicky’s gotta spec me out of coming around cuz she’s about to enter the higher level HPDs and maybe start doing time trials and time attacks doing her h HP three and four. Mostly with NASA Great Lakes. Having a cage car is always in our mind.
Preferred when you get to the higher levels. Mm-hmm. So you peaked my ears when you said fit. So that begs the question B spec racing. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Be spec and Sunday Cup. We’re taking it out. First for the, uh, lemons [00:24:00] rally up in, uh, the fail foliage, which is Boston to Boston, and I’m running it with my mom and my sister.
So that’s Won’t be first though. No. So you guys would probably be the only people to answer this piss stop question with a yes, which is, would you drive a Chevy Spark? It’s got wheels, right? Give anything a shot with wheels. Everybody’s like, why don’t you ride motorcycles? I’m like, because I would like them and I know what I do on a car, so I don’t wanna do a motorcycle.
Oh, that’s, that’s the same reasoning I have. That’s why I’m not allowed on two wheels. Exactly. So what are your successes and failures in the Enduro series you run? In spite of our lack of trying, we actually won a race one time in our class one C class for lemons racing. I don’t know what she’s gonna think her, I know what I think her biggest accomplishments are, but I think the most recent one for me was, uh, working my way to h HPD four and then getting my Ms F level to instruct her certification and, and starting to give back to everybody and, and going out and teaching as many people as I can.
It’s been fun. It’s challenging [00:25:00] cuz I always have one student dedicated for usually an H HPD one. Then we always have friends and teammates there. So I end up doing H HPD one h, HPD two H HPD three, and then driving some of those people in my h HP D four classes. And then at the end of the day, Vicky’s like, why are you so tired?
And I’m just like, so I didn’t get out of a car. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s kind of fun. I don’t know. What’s your accomplishment, miss Vicky? Are you proud of, do you have lots to be proud of? Well, or or biggest, oops moment. You know, biggest learning moment in there. Oh yeah. Ground moments. This is my favorite.
Always make sure that your tires are tightened with their lug nuts. Bill? Yes. Just episode six. Is it 69? 68. 68. Episode 68 on our podcast guys, go listen to it. It’s absolutely hilarious. Bill lost a tire on the race truck, but it ended up in such a fiasco cuz [00:26:00] it wasn’t on the racetrack, it was on the road.
Mm-hmm. And it wasn’t supposed to be on the road and he was trying to sneak it from point A to point B. Oh, I was told it would be fine. No. Yeah, it was less than fun. Yes. That that was short story. It ended up hitting a house after jumping, uh, armco house. Three bushes, a tree. It hit the house, but it didn’t just hit the house.
It hit the house right where the gas meter is and broke the gas meter. And the gas pipe. Oh, and then that was the beginning of the avalanche of incredible. Yes, because they had to. Dig up it up all the way to the street to repair it. Yes. Across the street. And, and for Bill, trying to get out there at like seven o’clock in the morning to kind of sneak this thing from like, into two towns over to a shop without having it registered to be on the road, it ended up having two fire trucks, an ambulance, it end up.
Yeah. And then we actually, the cop came late because he was really angry cuz he hit a deer with his new police car on the way in. So, [00:27:00] and this thing just went on, apparently the gas line was grandfathered in, so they actually had to dig it all the way up to the street to repair it because they went to go turn it off and they couldn’t turn it off because the thing broke off in their hand in the ground.
It was Wow. And actually at the very end of this whole scenario, as my husband keeps trying to call me and I, and I’m not available, To him to talk to me at the very end. He, the cop offered to give him a ride and bill’s like to where? Front seat or back seat. And he calls me at the end of it, he says the, the way that day went, as long as I’m not in a striped suit, I’m good the way he went.
So yeah, it was just an absolute fiasco. We have stories like that in our journey of this whole scenario with cars. I think that was our biggest UPS learning what it takes. What the difference between prepping a car for driving on the road and prepping a [00:28:00] car for a race and after a race twerking the lug nuts is the same, regardless.
Just wanna point that out for our audience. You, yes, yes. True. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That goes back to another problem we had was we had so many people who, none of us knew what we were doing, but we had so many people trying to help. We had to come up with ways, so many hands on the car that we didn’t, the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing that that’s, did you talk the lu nuts?
Of course. I took the lu nuts, but I didn’t know that somebody else had taken a wheel off and then not put. Them all the way on. So we got lots of knock to do. My big oops was the uh, car trailer falling off the hitch when I was driving down the highway. That was a joy. And it was nighttime coming outta New Hampshire all the way down to Eastern Pennsylvania.
I had lost all electricity in the back of the vehicle because it broke the plug. And as I’m sitting on the side of the road, everybody’s like, well, you don’t have the right ball for your truck, because our ball got stolen. And Bill went out and bought a ball for it, but it didn’t fit properly. We didn’t know that.
So it ended up, I hit a bump and the whole thing just, it lifted off the ball and it just starts skidding [00:29:00] behind me on its chains. I’m like, I can’t drive this any further. They’re like, well, we can get you so far. And then the people were still leaving lemons and you know, for the whole repair thing, it was like doing what they could do to help me.
And then my sister out of the blue, just. She’s in a whole different vehicle and she’s been gone. She just kind of pops her head around. She goes, Hey there. And I’m like, what are you doing here? And then of course, my brother-in-law is great at doing electrical work. So he’s sitting there, pulls the whole thing apart, repairs it right there on the side of the road in the dark, right?
And I’m just like, guys are, God said. But I’m sitting there panicking on the side of the road looking at this thing, and she’s like, hi there, what are you doing? And I’m like, God, thank you. It’s like the, you know, a beam of light as I looked at her face, like the sun had come out. Jeff gave you a ball, I think times.
Yeah, he did. But we couldn’t drive it because it was dark and it had no lights on the trailer. And I’m like, I can’t drive this thing without somebody possibly hitting me, or I’m gonna get pulled over constantly as I start going back from, you know, the next 300 [00:30:00] mile, 400 miles. I’m like, you know, what am I gonna do?
And I was like, oh, right. Speaking of trailer incident, knock on wood. Hopefully there’ll never be a third. I’ve had two incidents where, you know, you, you, on a Sunday morning you come back from the hotel and now you know. Mm-hmm. Now we do a lot more camping and you line your truck up with the tongue cuz you’re gonna eventually just hitch up and, you know, load your car or whatever.
Right. Then inevitably something happens, you pop a motor or whatever, and your friends are like, okay, we’ll help you push the car onto the trailer. Yeah. And at the second that the front wheels hit the ramp, somebody goes, wait, did you hook it to the truck and watch it? Oh. Yeah. And slammed down and luckily twice it has not hit my truck and destroyed the back of it.
So Ben Dawson, who does our dominate with Dawson’s with us, he’s a friend that we’ve never actually met in person. He did that, but the trailer stayed tilted and then started rolling. Oh no. Like through the paddock Towards the, towards [00:31:00] your wheels, yeah. Towards the building that was mm-hmm. You know, like, yeah.
Clubhouse. It was awesome. It, it had enough, it was done. Yeah. I think my wins to answer that question would have to be how much I learned in the garage over the last couple years of doing this. I’ve learned that I am a physical worker and not a desk worker. That’s where I find my most joy. I’ve picked up the mechanical stuff really fast and I’ve learned how to do delivery and painting vehicles now.
Just wrapping. Yeah, wrapping cars. Now I’m able to pick up on the mechanical stuff, like really fast. So now we’re working on fabricating and our next project right now is fiberglass. It’s like my happy place right now is in the garage. Like if I get a day off, I get to go down there. It’s like, you know, my mechanics come in in town too, so you know, even better cuz we can really bang the workout and we just.
We have a good time down there. I look forward to those days. You guys mentioned you race in a ton of different series, so can we talk about the differences in the series and which you like [00:32:00] better, worse, and why? I don’t know if we do a ton. We, we’ve done a couple, um, a few more than you. Yeah. So I’ve always had this idea, and I’m an engineer, so sorry, but I, I was gonna plot the fun factor versus the true racer factor.
Mm-hmm. And you can kind of plot the different series. In terms of what they stress and, and what they, what their characters are, right? So like when we started with the HPDs, we spent one year and we just sampled nine or 10 different h HPD groups to find out what we wanted, what was the right blend. And it’s the same thing with the, the racing series.
You can go to a series which is emphasizes the fun and not so much the racing. Or you can get some that are more intermediate on both, or you can get some that are, are very, very serious and very. ProAm racing type series. So you, you kind of gotta realize a couple things where you are in your progression as a driver and where you want to be.
And you may not start in the series you want to race in eventually. And you may get more serious with time or you may get less serious with time. And it just depends on where your [00:33:00] happy spot is cuz there’s different groups within the different series that go across. Cuz you know, sometimes you want to have a, you know, I want to see what we can do.
Weekend and sometimes you just wanna go and have a great weekend with some friends and you can find a series for that. So like lemons is kind of the default, not terribly serious Racing. Still good drivers and a lot of the impressions that people get are from old lemons races when they were kind of a joke.
Safety wasn’t anything but could be probably one of the highest levels, safety serious that they have just due to the cars that they allow. I kind of look at lemons like playing football with your friends on a Sunday. When you were younger, you go out there, you have a good time, and then afterwards you go have some beers and you just, you have fun.
There is, you know, serious play when your guys are playing, but there’s also people that are just, you know, I’m here to hang with my buds. And then you’ve got Champ Car, which is similar types of cars. They’re all car shaped as opposed to lemons. Can get a little fancy with the shapes, a little more serious, probably the same level.
And then the next series up, I, I think I probably put Lucky Dog there, [00:34:00] you know, if we only lived on the West Coast, they’d be like the perfect for us cuz they’re at the perfect balance and to fit our needs of serious racing, good driving and a lot of fun in a paddock. And Kathy runs a great series and, uh, unfortunately they’re mostly on the, the left coast, but whenever she comes East coast, we always do some and we’ve traveled out to race with her a couple times out west.
Next, you probably have something like a R. It’s a little more racy. Better cars tend to go a little faster. Some true race cars, there are some pro teams that are doing their practices there to get some more time and it’s cost effectively and racing’s quite good. Then you probably go with w r L would be above that.
And then imsa, I think I might have left somebody out there. There’s a, there’s a step in between imsa, W R L, that’s for sure. There’s, and that’s a, there’s sro. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep, you’re right. And then of course there’s Grid Life coming. We’re gonna go to our first two events. Mm-hmm. Maybe three events, if rumors are true.
We may go to three events this year, but Grid Life is, uh, been on a list and we, we think we, uh, like to have some fun there with the Sunday Cup and the H hpd. So we’re gonna go out there and, and bring our fit and go. Mm-hmm. Sunday [00:35:00] cupping, get Miss Vicky out there on the track a little bit for that. And then maybe some HPDs, and sometimes we might just go just to, you know, walk around with a microphone and a podcast and get a couple episodes with people we’ve talked to.
Yep. And maybe meet them in person and say hi. Here’s a shirt we owe you stuff for coming on, you know, thank you swag. Exactly. If you ever need a pitch hitter, you know, front wheel drive guy, just let me know. You know? Always all door is open, man. You just gotta let us know, cuz you know, we’re not terribly popular in terms of, you know, if you look at the world, there’s like 8 billion people in.
Most of them don’t listen. You know, with the four seats at erase it, they fill up pretty quick. Especially when, you know, Vicky never gives up one and she’s always looking for the the ladies team. So, you know, sometimes I get the boot, but that’s okay. That’s why I’ll just buy another car. Yeah. We’re actually, this next race we’re going into Njm P we’re putting in an all girls team and second time, yeah, second time.
The first time was quite interesting. I was a team mechanic and I had another girl who was. Savvy with mechanical work. I mean, not great. And the rules were for [00:36:00] our team was that we could ask for diagnosis assistance if we need assistance, but we had to put the hands on our cars, which we got it to about 85%.
Cause sometimes the guys just really wanted to touch a car. I’m like, no, no, no, you can’t touch a car. That’s the rule. But I gotta tell you, my girls, two of ’em, this was their very, this was her very first race and it was whoop whoop boo girl power till seven o’clock. I said, the work starts after dinner because then you gotta prep the car for the next day.
So I was like, this girl power stuff is not working right now. So this new race that we’re coming, they now better understand that we got paddock work to do. They stayed offsite. I, I think both of, you know, staying offsite, You know, after a day of racing, it’s, yeah, it’s painful. It’s ting come back the next day.
Yeah. And you know what, there were auto crossers, so they didn’t understand that for endurance racing that there’s a series of things that you must do in the evening to prep your car for the next day, especially if things weren’t going right. And of course at that point I had thrown all the shims in the, the driver’s side, so we had to go ahead and lay new shims in the car.
Steering shifts. Yeah. So we had some [00:37:00] issues we had to fix, but we got it done. Just like our show in a way. There’s two sides to it, right? There’s two sides to garage HEROs and training. There’s the racing side of this, which we’ve been talking quite extensively about, but I think I wanna circle back and talk about the podcast a little bit more.
Mm-hmm. So like our format, it seems like you guys have a bunch of different sub arcs to the show and maybe not everybody realizes that. And it’s not just about wrench turning and mishaps like we’ve been talking about so far. Why don’t you tell us about the show format itself and maybe some of your more notable guests and special reoccurring episodes and things like that.
And especially now after you guys are celebrating over 300 episodes. We did a, uh, a re-intro of ourselves for 300 episodes just cuz we realized that, you know, it’s been several years since we started and hopefully people don’t go back and listen to our first few episodes cuz you know, they’re. Oh, ours are tragically terrible too.
They’re so bad. They’re so bad. We can’t decide if our first podcast episodes are the worst thing, or our first on track driving videos are worse. We, they’re, they’re very close. Oh, the video. You know, I’ve [00:38:00] seen some shows and I, I’m gonna call them out like Sinister Hood. They took down a lot of their early episodes.
They kept some of the good ones in there, but I’m like, you know what? I’m not embarrassed. Everybody’s gotta start somewhere. And well, you know, I think if you do it in our instance, it gives people like, you know what, there is a starting point and we all were bad at one point. Yeah. There’s a realness to it.
You see the quality change of the quality of the guests change all of that. Right. So, and, and my, uh, comic book collector could not throw out any episodes, you know, cuz you know, I wouldn’t have a complete set. Exactly. Exactly. And what, what’s the trivia question? You’ve only missed one episode, so I’ve got you there.
I have not missed a single episode yet. Well, they, they recorded one while I was on a flight to Hawaii for work. So I just reschedule everything so then they can I know. Well, we didn’t realize we could get ahead so far and, and that that was, uh, episode two. I think so. So we started out prepl in the before times.
Yeah. So back in the day, you know, way back, we were essentially. Documenting our growth as a [00:39:00] team. Eventually we started having infrequent guests and we’re learning how to do podcasts and everything about it. We didn’t really have guests on that much in the beginning anyway. No, maybe, maybe once every couple months during the plague.
We weren’t racing as much as we wanted to. When we rapidly realized, it’s very tough to report on how we’re doing at the racetrack when we’re not going to the racetrack. So we started looking for not even leaving our houses. Yeah, pretty much we started looking for guests to help us and help our audience learn about a topic.
So to get a little better, cuz we had some downtime and we thought we’d, we’d assist with that. And we have questions, so if. We think of a question we somebody else has as well. We’re not that smart. So we’ll go find somebody who can know. So if we know nothing about shock, so we’ll go find somebody. Mm-hmm.
You know, uh, who knows something about that. Or we know nothing about anything. We just, what’s it like to run? We’re just educating ourselves. Right? And hopefully our audience will get better and learn. So then it turned into, it’s kind of a blend right now where we’ll do infrequent episodes about [00:40:00] our team, and we do mostly guests.
The guests, uh, episodes are kind of an intro to the guests with some history, so that. They uh, can be known by our audience cuz some of our audience is brand new and they may not know who Gerard the Stig on American Top Gear. They may not know who he is or some other race drivers or some people that are well known, but you know, we didn’t know.
So we’ll do an intro to kind of get our audience familiar with it. Then we’ll go into the topics, which are kind of be one or two, and then we’ll end an episode with like what we call the fast and furious story time questions, which are like a series of questions that just go on and on and on and ask.
Absolutely stupid little trivia things. Sort of like our pit stop. Exactly. I always wanted to have the episodes have something that would help somebody get better. So we eventually we met. Ben Dawson at one of our podcasts with, uh, Raymar, and we just kind of hit it off and, and he’s a really good driver and he’s also an instructor.
And we said, Hey, would you do a, a segment? We started brainstorming. We’ve ended, ended up coming with, with dominating with Dawson. Cuz the big joke about lemons is always we’re gonna dominate. [00:41:00] So, you know, we thought it was funny and then we were gonna do one of those every episode, but our episodes can go long.
I mean, we’ve gone over three hours. It’s not for the lighthearted. So when you start doing that, and then you start doing a dominated, but Austin, which was originally gonna be like a five or 10 minute thing, but then we start digressing, which is basically the same word if you look in the dictionary under digression.
There’s the word podcast.
So the episode started creeping up to where they were averaging like two and a half hours. So it was like, oh, wait a minute, why don’t we have a normal podcast on Monday? And then we’ll have Dominat with Dawson’s on Tuesday. And then if we have more, if we have a W episode, cuz we’re garage heroes in training named after superheroes.
So we start recruiting movies or pop culture things. So we’ll have, it’s, we love our superhero movie. We had to have the boots. Yeah. So you know, we’re gonna have one coming out on, uh, recent Dr. Strange Multiverse, man, this movie. We’ll have one of those and, uh, you know, we try to tell you in the title what’s coming.
So if you don’t care about Dr. Strange and it says, woo, Dr. Strange, you can skip. [00:42:00] We’ve done as many as eight episodes in a week because we did, uh, one where we followed the a lemons rally, or we were supposed to do one for the, uh, one lap with the Sunday cups. We were trying to get those guys, but we couldn’t track ’em down.
And, you know, schedules. So we’ll do series all the time. We did a GL LTC series with Grid Life. Tried to get as many grid life people on there and see what GL LTC was. Cause that’s kind of like one of those bucket list items for me is to eventually get to where I’m not dead last in grid life for G ltc, that would be nice.
I have the car, I just don’t have the skill. We’ll work on it. Mm-hmm. And then we do our fast and furious questions because we just think they’re fun to figure out a little bit more the person, about the person in general. And they find it fun too because they’re asked, they’re, they’re kind of reliving some of their history on the podcast, which is pretty cool.
You’ll know them soon enough. You too. Yes. Notable guess as I look through your catalog, people like Ross Bentley and Randy Popes and Mike Skeen and others, even on your trivia episode, the 300th episode, part of the questions were, you know, who’s been on the show the most and who was our first [00:43:00] guest, and things like that.
So, quite the list in the catalog of 300 episodes to go back and review and, and hear those interviews. So anybody you wanna give us a sneak peek, maybe a little spoiler or somebody else that’s coming along down the line? Anybody knows us. I mean, come on. I mean, you know, once when we started the podcast, I, I sat there and, and you know, I think Vicki and I talked about our team for weeks trying to figure out what the name is.
And when we started a podcast, I, I sat there and said, looking back after we’re done or have done this podcast for a few years, what would be cool people to have had on the podcast? And, and we’re probably close to halfway through our original list, you know, some of the people who have said yes, were shocked with, and some of the people who we thought, yeah, that would be a nice one to start with.
They, they don’t even respond to us. It really varies. And the, the thing that I find that’s incredibly surprising and satisfying is some of the bigger name people that we’ve had were the easiest and the most welcoming. Like mm-hmm. When you have in training in your [00:44:00] podcast name, the ultimate guest for you would be somebody like Ross Benley.
Right. And we called him up and said, we’d like to celebrate our hundredth episode with you because you know, you’re kind of what we’re trying to do. He’s like, sure. And then he had so much fun. He’s like, he comes on every 50 episodes now. Like every single time. So you know, somebody like Ross who’s, you know, world renowned racing coach, author, great speaker, he’s got more than enough things on his agenda that he doesn’t need to talk to our little podcast.
But every 50 episodes, like Clockwork Ross is on there and he’s pretends to have fun, happy to be, I think he’s happy to be there. You know, he fakes. Sounds like he’s happy. So I think Randy was a guilt trip cuz Randy Post we had on there the first time we were out in a lucky dog race in Portland and he had always wanted to run the car’s.
So Nice. We were renting. Nice. He’s, yeah. And seats dealer, but, um, seats dealer. That’s what he is. I’m a metrics guy. So we figured we’ll let Randy go out in the car and we’ll know what the car can do and then we’ll [00:45:00] see what we do relative to that and we’ll see how much we need to do. But it was a rented car.
It was, it was for four laps That was built in a week? Yes. For four laps and then it blew up. So Randy blew up our car. Not any fault of his, but you know, when Randy’s in a car, he is gonna get the most out of it. So he pushed the car to the limit and we found it just a little bit more. Just so you know, Randy will drive in your car if you ask him, but you better make sure that your car can handle it cuz he will burn your car if you are not careful.
You wanna find a weak spot. Randy’s your guy, he’ll help you with, set up everything. He felt really bad that the car broke cuz we had flown out to Portland for the race. He’s like, is there anything I can do? I said, you know what’d be awesome is if you came on the podcast cuz you know, you’re, one of the, the reason my son’s into racing is Randy, you know, head-to-head is one of my favorite racing shows of all time with him and Jason and uh, Johnny, two guests that have said yet, but haven’t come on yet.
They’re coming. So he came on and it was great. And then I realized in a 45 minutes into the episode that the, um, microphone had, um, disconnected and we had the laptop [00:46:00] sitting on the other side of the room and it was recording through the laptop speaker and there was nothing I could do about it. And I was, oh my God.
But Randy’s such a nice guy. He came on again to do it. You know, he’s been on three times. I think so. And you know, that’s actually a great segue in the fact that prepping for a podcast and doing all that post work isn’t too different than the prep and paddock work that it takes mm-hmm. When we’re at the racetrack.
What are some tips and tricks, things you guys have learned over the years that would be beneficial to somebody that’s. First starting out, getting into this hobby. There’s so many things that you have to do to run a race team and to run a race weekend. Could be an H P D weekend, could be a racing weekend, could be anything.
You’re going to forget something, and nothing drives me bad here than forgetting something and then needing it through. Lots of pain on my part. Mentally. Self-inflicted pain, we have checklists for everything. I have a checklist for an H HPD weekend. I have a checklist for packing for a race [00:47:00] weekend. I have packing lists for the toolboxes that we have.
We have packing lists for the trailer. We have packing lists for the paddock and all the food prep. We have lists for each night, what we do to the car to prep for the next day. We have whiteboard for scheduling the weekend. With mm-hmm. Things that we need now we call it the runner. Somebody has to go out and get us apart or go out and get us brake clean.
I think Alan lives on brake clean. He goes through brake clean, like it’s nobody’s business. We get our driving order. We know who’s gonna do radios. We know who’s gonna do the primary mechanic. We know who’s gonna do all the different steps that are a part of the team who’s gotta prep lunches and dinners and, and then organization.
Exactly. I mean, he said he was an engineer. Are you sure you’re not in the aviation industry? I mean, do you have a checklist for checklist? It might as well be a nasa, I mean, you, you don’t subscribe to the whole, just run it until it breaks and then you know what’s broken. You can, the most expensive race you have is the one where it breaks on the first lap dollars per mile.
You, you didn’t do very [00:48:00] well that weekend, so, you know, we aren’t, but how many smiles were in that mile though? Exactly. Well, it’s only one driver. Well, there’s only one. Only one driver don’t concern ourselves terribly with how the race works out, especially endurance racing. And we don’t care about winning the H P D fastest lap.
True. But we do care about the amount of time and energy and prep that we’ve done to be ready to get the maximum enjoyment out of it. And you know, the biggest thing we had when I went to our first race even, was I wanted to make sure that everybody got in the car. And then once we did that, the rest of it was easy.
I do do a lot of work with nasa, so you know, I’ve stolen things from them. And we share our lists with everybody. If you find something better or if you find something that’s missing, just let us know and we’d love to update our list. I think I’m on, it’s either version 56 or 57. He’s got master lists and But they work the, if you use them, the structure of the team is that Bill is our organizer and team leader.
He will go into the garage and do a couple things, but Bill’s tendency is [00:49:00] to, I always tell him, I says, you bring a sledgehammer when you need a screwdriver. You’re just that kind of guy. Faster, him doing the higher level for our team, which is the ordering, the parts, the structure, the organization. I mean, our tool cabinets literally have slots for our tools.
So we know when something’s missing at the track. You lose stuff at the track. You’re right, regardless, you’re still gonna never find your 10 millimeter socket of what We have so many 10 millimeter sockets. So in each, in each tool cabinet, we have four tens and twelves. 10. 10 millimeter sockets in each size drive, so we won’t have that problem.
And we have spares on the side. He was always the document person on our team, and I was always the paddock girl or the garage girl. He was supposed to be doing cars and whatnot, but somehow our roles got flipped. So now he’s got my job and I have the job that he was intended for, and I think we’re happier that way.
But he’s very good at what he does and he keeps our team moving forward. And because he’s [00:50:00] a, he’s basically being the engineer, he’s a systems person, he relies on systems. Our garage now has functioned to constantly make things easier or better or more efficient. That’s how he operates with us. And we don’t forget anything.
Ever the call, except when, right. Right. And then you gotta run to the hardware, you gotta run to the store, you gotta run out to the auto store. We’ll drive back to Scranton. Yeah. And come get it. And then go back to pit race. That sucked but happens. Yeah. But yeah, he’s, he’s really good at what he does. I do have to say.
But tips are I would have to say or lists, uh, I don’t know. Do we have them on our website? Are they available or can they be? We do. It might be like a, an earlier version, like 30 something. I don’t know when the last time I updated it is. Even when it comes to checking your car before you get it to tech, basic stuff you need to do on your car.
So, um, a story for the winner. Those really help. And even how to pack a paddock, like I said, just organization. Organization, if you can be organized at your race, you’ll have a much better race. And that includes [00:51:00] paddock, that includes, you know, making sure that your team is properly fed and hydrated because they will be happier people if they don’t have to go running around trying to find food or trying to figure out where their next meal is gonna come from or who they can bum it off or somebody’s gonna run out and go grab a pizza at a game is stronger than our driving game.
Always has to. Yeah, we have a very strong paddock game right now, so come eat with us the next time we’re at the same. Yeah. But yeah, definitely organization is strong. Has to be strong. I mean that’s half the battle. You can be one of the slower cars, especially if you start talking endurance racing with classes you can be.
Easily one of the slowest, if not the slowest, and still win the race. Just cuz your car just keeps going round and round. Speaking of the slowest cars. Yep. We’re right here ma’am. What should, what should I buy question. What should I buy as the starter track car? Let’s answer to this with the two different cars.
Let’s say one option is an h hp d e car. Oh, okay. And the other is, uh, a race car for a e r, not lemons because you can go [00:52:00] out and get a, uh, Chevy Malibu and you can run lemons all day long. All day long. Well, no, not in the Chevy Malibu. You won’t run all day long. But that’s, that’s a different story. That’s not your fault.
I would recommend the H P D E car first because I’ve seen people hop into a car that is an a e r car and it might have been more car than they could handle. Unless you have those basic skills, then yes. But our recommendation, I mean, through our trials is that, my opinion if you’re going to buy a car, is to buy one that’s already been built.
And used, and then you can modify, modify it, you know, and make sure it’s easy and affordable. Hondas are good, Miatas are good. They’re simple to work on something that’s not complicated and that already has a roll cage in it and has basically the structures that are already in it. Safety systems tweak.
Yes. Yeah. You can always tweak it and make it your own, but at least when you’re starting out in a race, you really don’t know what those big basics need to be, to not have to worry about the intimidation of starting from scratch. When [00:53:00] you haven’t done this before, it’ll be harder for you to even get to the track unless you have somebody that’s in the know.
So we had a rule when our son was able to get driving and we had a certain prescription for what that car should be. We disagreed on how we got there, but we wanted. 200 horsepower or less ish. We wanted a manual transmission to keep them off the phone. We wanted as much safety as we could afford to buy safety systems.
So we ended up getting him a Toyota 86, which is a great car for him so far, with the training that we did to, to help him learn how to drive, knock on wood, knock on metal, knock on anything. I come fine. No incidents, no accidents, no tickets. Life is good. We told him, you know, go have fun on a track, but on the street people don’t know how to drive.
Take care of yourself. Don’t, don’t die. Something similar, I think would be a proper H B D card to learn, because I don’t care if you drive a hundred thousand miles a year and you as part of your job or you drive just. Back and forth to the grocery store. You may think of yourself as a great driver, and you probably are from a road [00:54:00] perspective, but driving on a road has nothing to do with driving on a track.
Assume it’s like a totally different sport just because the, the utensil you drive is different. So think of a car that’s something along the lines of that you like, 200 ish horsepower. Judge for yourself. Change your brake pads, change your brake fluid, and go have fun. Just make sure it’s safe. A R car.
The car of choice right now seems to be a A BMW E 46. Mm-hmm. Could be some type of Porsche Cain, could be some type of Mazda Miata. It really depends on your budget there. Especially if you’re new. We always recommend buy a car that’s already been built. Mm-hmm. People sell them. It’s not that they’re bad, it’s that they chose to do something else or they chose to get out of the sport, or they graduated and went to a higher level.
Higher they have run their car D Different class. Yeah. Different class. You know, I want to go run a spec series. There’s nothing wrong with running a spec series car and you find out that, you know, you put all this money into a car that doesn’t fit anywhere and you, it’s great for endurance racing, but you wanna go do spec racing and time drops.
Mm-hmm. People just change and. Use what [00:55:00] they’ve done and then modify it. I think that’s the easiest way, especially if you don’t have the experience and expertise to build one from the ground up. And if you’re buying somebody else’s race car, what is the resource of choice for you to find those cars? I’m assuming it would be racing junk.
Let’s bring a trailer. Bring a trailer. Didn’t you know that? Oh, yes, yes, yes. Because I’m gonna spend $450,000 on my Acura Integra type R My favorite place to go is Vicky doesn’t know.com. And I thought it was Take all my money.com. Isn’t that the other one? The inner debt and, and then you pay for the cars that, uh, Vicky doesn’t know this bank account.
Yes, yes, yes. I’ve had cars show up on trailers and I did not know they were arriving. And she was less than pleased. I was less than pleased. Yes. I’m still paying for one of them right now. Not, no, not enough fiscal sense, by the way. Just, just in case that wasn’t, that wasn’t clear. Bathtub is getting, Awfully awfully lonely.
Um, as I sleep in there racing, junk’s a great [00:56:00] one. If you are fortunate enough to know people who are involved, just letting them know, Hey, I’m looking for, uh, you know, something to do in this series, or something to do in that series, or, or, I’m looking to just get into it. And it’s amazing what you can find by word of mouth.
We have friends who race with us and you know, I was saying, we’re probably gonna get rid of Vicky’s car. And they, they helped us by finding somebody else that we knew that was looking for a car for them and their daughter to learn on and for him to have fun in. Facebook marketplace isn’t a, isn’t a terrible place either, especially if it’s like spec E 36 spec, E 46 Spec Miata, things like that.
Spec cars are one of the few race cars that the pricing doesn’t seem to go down. You can get your money in and your money out and not take a bath. Building a car, you tend to way overspend what the end value is, so let somebody else do that. It’s not as much fun and maybe not as cool to some, but if you’re trying to be fiscally responsible, which using that word in racing is kind of funny.
If you try, you know how to make a [00:57:00] fortune in racing. Right, exactly. Start with a bigger one. Yeah, with you there. You know, that’s the best plan. Usually we’re dealing with people who are fairly new and fairly early in their career. That is somebody we wouldn’t recommend. Build your own. We’d recommend get one.
Maybe your second car or third car. Don’t do what we did. So I think I would dovetail off that there’s a couple things. Racing junk is a great place to start. However, asterisk caveat, make sure that whatever you buy off of there, whether it’s a spec car or not, comes with a log book because a car with a log book is worth its weight in gold.
You can get into different series. If you decide you don’t wanna do endurance racing and you want to go to NASA club racing or S E C A or something else, the car’s already certified right after that point. You just gotta follow the rest of the rules and go from there. Mm-hmm. I think I would diverge a little bit from the build versus buy.
I’ve always attested to build because I grew up in a household where we swapped a lot of cars. We did a lot of crazy projects. We’ve had cars and magazines, [00:58:00] stuff like that. So I find those projects to be a lot of fun, and I take a lot of pride in what I’ve built. So I know there’s a. There’s a lot of petrolheads out there that are into that, and I don’t want dissuade them.
I don’t wanna say yay. Oh, no, no. But understand it’s a, if you’re a petro head, then definitely if you have the skills to do it, you can do that. You might be spending more to do it than what the car is worth, like Bill said. But if you enjoy doing it and you have skills on doing that, then yes. But I mean, our audience are people that are just like literally on the sofa and they don’t know anything.
I got you. I got you. You know, I was, and that’s what I’m saying for those people, you know, don’t try to start from scratch if you don’t have what you need. Hey, comma, asterisk, caveat on that one is though, if you are going to build something, take the time, and I know it’s a cure to insomnia, but read something like the Global Competition Rules from S E C A and look at a class that your car fits in and build to the spec.
Save yourself the money [00:59:00] and the time that you’re gonna waste like I have over the years, proving that certain parts are great for the street and not for the track. And then eventually I should have just read the manual, right? R T F M. So it’s really important that these sanctioning guidelines exist so you can build towards them and still have your.
You know, reliant Robin Spec car that you wanna build. If that’s what gets you up in the morning, you can still spend the money. You can still have a lot of fun building, but make sure that you’re building towards a goal. And if your goal is to go racing and not just a flashy de car or something like that, Make sure you’re building towards a spec of some sort or some sort of class.
And I’d like to recommend one more thing. Go to a racetrack and go visit first, so you actually can see what people have done to their cars. What’s inside the cars? Ask questions. People are so friendly at the racetrack. You can walk into a paddock and ask a question probably more so not during the race when it’s actually happening, unless it’s a stalled [01:00:00] paddock.
But definitely after the race, they are the nicest people and they will answer any questions that you have. Take pictures so much like we talked about driving and driving on a track as different sports. When you say people who work on cars, the work on cars and the work on a race car and prepping car are very different.
Mm-hmm. So be very careful that you’re not trying to do more than your skills would allow. Like just because you do your handy maintenance and stuff, that doesn’t mean you can build a roll cage. You’ve gotta be careful with what you’re trying to do. And sometimes, especially with the safety related items, look to either.
A professional organization or a professional service center that will do that work for you or a very competent team that you trust because you’re literally trusting your lives and your family’s lives and your friends’ lives in that system. So those are things you gotta be careful of. And the first car, to me, even if you are very mechanical with lots of experience, I would still lean towards first car, buy a car.
And [01:01:00] that’s not diminishing the interest or the skill that you may have, but you learn a lot just by doing and trying it and seeing like, oh wow, that this car, the, uh, cage, the bar and the door comes way too far down and way too far in. And I hit my head whenever I get in and I can’t get my luxurious mammal friend who’s on my team to get in and out of the car easily.
And if there’s something goes wrong, he’s gonna be very slow, or the seat doesn’t go far enough forward for my beautiful bride. You’ll see things and you’ll learn things and as you learn things, then that second car I think would be easier, especially if you are mechanical, cause you’re gonna constantly tweak that first car.
Or you may start over with scratch. We bought the Honda, it was fully caged race prepared, raced in NASA’s sprint race. We converted it to an endurance race and then we found out that we didn’t like certain things about it. We took the entire cage out and built a new cage. It wasn’t what we wanted. We wanted to be what we view as proper.
So as we get close to wrapping up our segment here, bill and Vicky, I think we gotta hit you with a couple more pit stop questions. And I think it would be unfair not to ask you guys one of our classics, which is, [01:02:00] and don’t answer at the same time. The sexiest car of all time, alpha Rome. She won’t name a model.
She won’t. No. You know what? Jerks not her thing. No. Pretty red one. No, no, no. Not, no, I’m sorry. The Aston Martin. I always like the old Aston Martins. Like James. James Fond Aston Martins. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. DB five s. Okay. Yeah. I don’t know model names or anything like that, but I’ve always thought that they were just like, well, you can go with animal, mineral vegetable, or, you know, it’s, yeah.
She can draw it. She can draw it for you. Not a problem. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. But you know, she doesn’t know the word. We have a segment in Dominat with Dawson sometimes We have what we call the one oh one jargon segments. And Vicky is the entire reason why we have it. I don’t know my jargon and it’s some acronym I’m still learning.
Yeah. You know? Yeah. I, I’m not from a car background. Nope. So how about we expanded for Bill? Mm-hmm. Since, you know mm-hmm. Probably more models than I do. And, and take that as a compliment. Take that as a compliment. We’re gonna give you the three car garage question, or the [01:03:00] million dollar person question.
Mm-hmm. So in your three car garage, what would you park in it? Do I have a budget? Uh, no. That’s why it’s the million dollar person question. You spend whatever you want. I’m at three and a half just to start, cuz I’m gonna get my Ferrari gto o going cuz you know, I’d rather have one of those. Wow. So taco truck?
No, that’s Jennifer. We do this question a little differently and you’ll be subjected to ours. Don’t worry, it’s coming. I think what I would do is I would get some type of retro mod 77 trans am. So I still look smoking the bandit on the outside, but it actually drives well and has acceleration. That would be a unique situation for that car.
Ah, let’s see what else I, I’ve done, I’ve done that. I, I drove a 400 horsepower one. I still leave it on the list of Never drive your Euros. Oh, no. See we had a, we had a 75 Camaro in the family. I was too young to drive it, but that was fun. I don’t necessarily want the horsepower. I have a self-imposed limit for track cars.
Like I don’t really care about going fast. Like the car that came to [01:04:00] mind was, I wanna get a McLaren F1 in these three cars, but it’s so fast you can’t really get to the limit until you’re going really fast. As opposed to, I drive a anem out of 2019 and the limits are much lower and the fit’s gonna be even more lower.
Recently we had a M two 40 I B M W, great car accelerated, well turbo. No problem. Tons of power, but I couldn’t really have fun in it and not worry about going to jail. So there’s a limit in, you know, street car versus race car kind of thing. Anyway, I gotta pick another car, don’t I? Hmm. Yeah. Um, and we’ve had some really cre and, and as you guys know, fans of the show, we’ve had some really creative answers over the years mm-hmm.
As to what people are shoving into this garage mm-hmm. And how the garage is configured and is it on an island and, you know, all sorts of fun stuff. Let’s, let’s go with bay. Think Vicky would, Vicky would love to have the Capri done the way we had scheduled. We just don’t have the skills to do it. I think that would be fun for her.
Mm-hmm. Beautiful car, by the way, I love those things. European Mustang, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. I think like every [01:05:00] person who’s in the cars, it’s gonna change every day. And right now the one that that’s intriguing me is a, a race prepped, classic. Mini, original body or new body. Yeah, no, the old ones.
I think that would be a ton of fun. Those cars can embarrass some pretty good hardware out there on the racetrack, so that’d be kind of fun. And I give you your front wheel drive cuz you are gonna have to come out there and make sure it’s right for me. So I need your help. Hey, any, any day of the week, it would be unfair not to ask you guys your opinion on what we call the evolution.
So what do we think about EVs and EVs at the track and just electric vehicles in general? I think they’re coming along. I think they’re gonna be able to keep up, but I just don’t think that they will be able to sustain. I mean, I’ve seen people run them. I think there’s just been a couple, but I don’t know how they would manage an endurance race.
No hot swapping of batteries yet. I’ve coached in a couple Teslas, so I have opinions about them too. Mm-hmm. But Bill, what do you think? I like light cars. I typically like light and small cars. Do you have a lotus tattoo that we don’t know about or I would, I would really, I really want to drive a lotus. I haven’t done that yet.
I’m, [01:06:00] I’m waiting for a student to have a lotus, so if any students wanna come my way and request me, you know why you would do that? I have no idea, but I’ll definitely take that. If I can get my, uh, mutant head and helmet into your car, I’d love to get in there cuz. Double XL helmet man. Too much brain. I’m six four and over 300 pounds and I’ve driven a lotus.
So you, you’ll fit. Okay. Sounds great. And that’s Brad’s rule. If he fits, he sits. He drives. That’s, that works for me. So right now we’ve got a weight issue in my mind for EVs. Acceleration is not the problem. Trying to figure out how much trouble I wanna get myself into. The environmental impact of an EV is in some cases misrepresented and misunderstood.
If you look at a lot of the situation, and I know that while California is leading the charge for EVs, they can’t even keep their air conditioners on in the summertime. So what are they gonna do when everybody’s got a EV car and charging and powers off? But you know, that’s California. In racing, it’s probably tremendous for drag [01:07:00] racing, probably.
Okay. For sprint racing, endurance racing is gonna be a challenge. Your energy density per mass is quite a challenge unless you’re doing hot swaps. But then you’re also basically gonna have a. A large generator in order to, to recharge your batteries if you’re doing a nurse race, so are you really an EV or are you just a big diesel?
So there’s some challenges there. Liking small light cars, an EV is not in my horizon. I think it’s probably a tremendous commuter car, city car. But in the US if you’re not in the east coast or west coast densely populated area, it can be a challenge because everybody’s like, oh, the, the average commute is two or three miles or 10 miles or 20 minutes or it depends on who reports it.
Right? Average is far from normal. You get a lot of people who, their commute is literally the New York City. Their commute is to walk to the subway and take the subway. So is that commute like 30 feet maybe? I don’t know how they’re copulating average. So I know that I drive way too much right now for a current EV to be practical in, in our life.
Vicky could probably get away with it cuz she doesn’t travel as much for work. But I drive to [01:08:00] Huntsville, Alabama from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Yeah, I’m kind of silly, but don’t know that it fits our lifestyle at this point. And it’s not a matter of. Range. It’s a matter of recharge and the, the recharge to me is more important than the range.
Cuz I can handle a car that gets 200 miles in a gas tank and it takes me five minutes to fill it up. But if it’s even 300 miles and it takes me 45 minutes, that that trip to Huntsville is gonna get really painful. Let me ask you this. Just if you put all that stuff aside, is there an EV though that has caught your attention?
Then maybe you’re keeping an eye on that. If they get the formula right, you would consider crossing that threshold. Admittedly, I have looked at the original Tesla roasters, which their pricing has started to get a little crazy, but everything right now is crazy. I think I would be tempted with some of the hybrid sports CARSs, but there’s no EVs right now that interest me.
She likes I pass. She likes the white ones. Yeah, I pass. Listen, listen, I don’t have car knowledge like that. I just don’t now, you know, put me in MoMA. In New York City, I can start telling you all [01:09:00] about not the steering wheel, she’s talking about the Museum of Modern Art. So Yes. Can I, can I can, I can walk you through that.
But you know, when it comes to car history and I just don’t have that knowledge comes with I will. It does, it does. And my, and a couple of coffee table books will really help. I’m telling you. Yeah. Well I’m, I’m a, I’m like officially two years like heavily into this. I have a ways to go. I’m the biggest frustration.
Sue. Yeah. Biggest frustration I have is, you know, when she needs to get a new car and I ask her what she wants, she gives me lots of criteria and none of them are useful. It’s just like, it’s gotta be able to fit the dog. And then, you know, every now and then we go skiing so we have to be able to pack everything.
And I’m like, we go skiing like once every two years. So to re to Rey that problem, we approached one vehicle purchase the same way you were talking about prepping for the track, it was spreadsheets and calculations and how much cargo space and people room and all this kind of crazy stuff. And it got to the point where I satisfied all the requirements that my wife needed.
And then I finally said, just walk up and down the aisles at CarMax and point at [01:10:00] something and then we’ll go from there. You know what car has the most interior space that you could ever ask for? The one that you rent when you actually need that much space. Like pick your monster, s u v and you can fit as many people as you want in there.
You can fit more people than we know in there. And I don’t have to drive it every single day. It’s fantastic. So let’s transition. What are some future goals for the race team and the podcast? Like where, where are you all going with this? Are you gonna lose the end training at some point? No, we’re never gonna lose the end training.
We will. Don’t think anybody ever does training. I mean, I don’t think any driver should ever. Think that they’ve mm-hmm. I’ve yet to meet anybody, including everybody on our team, who got out after one lap or one stint and said, yep. Nailed it. Right. Didn’t miss a thing. Every apex dead on. That’s all there is.
You know, maybe Randy Post, but not us. And, uh, you know, Randy’s still training and learning and, and trying, so, you know, if he’s still going [01:11:00] at it. Mm-hmm. I know I need to. Where do we see the podcast going? Well, right now we see it going episode 3 34. Yeah, it’s the next one. Yeah. I’m kind of an in the moment guy.
We have general goals, but mm-hmm. Nothing really metric related. We, we wanna help people. The more people we help, the, the happier we are. I think for our podcast, I’d like to kind of steer up a little bit back to our team and see, because we haven’t had a really good chance to expand on the growth that we have.
We haven’t done that in a while. I’d like to revisit that, but great guests learning with the podcast and, you know, just keep it going. It’s a great way to make friends and, you know, out on the track and they come, it’s like, Hey, garage cheers and training. And they start talking and, and it’s like, whoa.
Like, People are starting to know us. You know, it, it’s, it’s kind of weird. It’s crazy. What about your driving though? I would like to get to level four into Great Lakes for sure. With the racing, I mean, I like to do some more lucky dogs. I like to kind of dance. I’m, listen, I’m not gonna be, that person’s gonna go grab a trophy out of, with some kind [01:12:00] of money or whatever gets sponsors.
It’s not gonna happen. It’s not the goal. I think to send information to garages and training gmail.com though, if you’re interested in being dumb enough to do it now, we’re just kidding. Yeah, that’s right. So I mean, honestly, my goal is, is to enjoy the racing, try a couple new series, kind of push myself a little bit when I start getting more comfortable in my skillset.
But generally just retire into being an instructor when the time comes. I mean, I mean, what a way to go and just to keep moving is just when you’re just older and just be able to share your skills. So you said something really interesting, retire into being an instructor. It makes it sound like being an instructor is where, you know, race car drivers go to die or something.
I don’t know if they’re retired. No, but boy, what I wanna get to is, it’s actually a great jumping off point for you guys, and as Bill knows, as he’s transitioned to becoming an instructor. Mm-hmm. That in training is even more important. I mean, I’ve been an instructor now for almost a decade and. I never stopped learning.
I learned so many things from my students, more so than I do behind the [01:13:00] wheel because I get on NJ and P or Pit race and the lap is muscle memory. You just do it. You’ve done it the same way forever. Mm-hmm. You know what your optimal lap time is, you’ve got all that stuff down, but it’s when you get in with the student, all hell breaks loose.
Cuz you don’t have control over those variables. You still continue to learn and you still continue to grow as a driver. Well, the thing is too is that when people kind of hit retirement age, they either, no, seriously, I am dead serious. Like I have like an old, you’re 27. No. Yeah, right. As we get older, I’m approaching the generation ahead of me that, you know, I’m watching my parents get older and they’re very like Cadillacs.
Yeah, right. But you know, a body emotion stays in motion and when you start getting older you start going more into isolation. So what a better way to stay moving to be social and to get out and be part of something is to retire into something like that. Very true. Very well said. So I have goals. I have goals for every stint of A H B D E.
So if you wanna know what my goals are, [01:14:00] I will refer to my goal list. We have compete in the NASA Thunder Hill 25. We have G LTC and not be Last would be fantastic. I’d like to be middle. That’d be kind of fun. I’ve got tracks I want to go to. I’ve got different places I want to be. The, the one thing I don’t have is I don’t have the, I want to drive a super fast car.
I don’t care. I’m more than happy. Spec 46 is my self-imposed limit. Everybody keeps saying that’ll change, but it’s not gonna change. So since you brought it up, one final pit stop question. What tracks are still on your bucket list? Anyone? I have we hit some really good tracks. We, we’ve actually hit some very good tracks.
I wanna hit them all right. Now Ozarks comes to mind cuz it’s new. We’re still trying to get to v i r. Yeah, v r number one. We haven’t done it yet. It shocks me when people say that because for us it’s like, we’ve been the v I R A million times or the Glen and you’re like, really? That’s on your bucket list?
I, I know. Offense by the way. I’m just saying. No, we found, we’ve found the Glen. It’s just, yeah. V i r is not raced in most of the series that we’ve raced in. Ah, that makes sense. And a pack of [01:15:00] our friends from racing that race in the south that we meet at periodically at a couple racetracks. That’s their home base.
And of course we have the dominating with Dawson, Ben Dawson. We have yet to meet in person and that’s one of his home tracks. Just to be at v i r would be fun just to catch up with pack of people and try a new racetrack. We, we went to the track and we realized, you know, I’m a natural driver. I’m an excellent driver, this is great.
We go to the track for the first time. We realized, wow, this is not different. This is way different. So then we started realizing, you know, if we do this H B D thing, there’s actually skills that we don’t have. So we started doing the H B D E thing and the first season we did, that was our second season of racing.
We tried all the different H HPDs and the one that we like the best happened to be NASA Great Lakes, which is so inconveniently far for us. The closest one’s, five hours. It just gets worse. And Ncms probably the furthest That’s 15 something hours from our house. Yeah. But I got to try mid Ohio. Oh, that’s true.
That’s true. And we’ve done gingerman with them. We’ve done Audubon, we’ve done Mid Ohio. We’ve done [01:16:00] pretty much all the tracks that they do. Pit race. Sure. The only places that we can go, I, I just did our first a e r race, which was fun. Vicky and Jennifer aren’t quite ready yet. They don’t feel they’re ready.
It’s not whether they’re ready or not, it’s, they don’t feel they’re ready. So there’s very few series that we can race at V I r. But we’re finding more and more h HPDs with the opportunity to go to the v i r. So that’s probably where we’re gonna end up going. It’s been on the list. We had the plague, so that was two years of non-real racing.
You know, hopefully we’re post plague for everybody’s sake. In the world’s sake. That would be fantastic. It’s on our goal for this year. Say it’s probably 50 50, whether we’ll actually pull it off. But, um, we may go there just and not drive, but I’d really like to drive there. That would be fun. Mm-hmm. Don’t go to v i r and not drive.
That’s my number one. I know. That’s the bad thing. Yeah, I didn’t say what drive the car. They’ll quickly move up. If not in your top five, somewhere very close to it is an absolutely amazing lap. Mm-hmm. So, and owned by one of the co-owners of Pit Race, from what I understand or something. There’s some relationship there.
Yeah, really. Race is lovely. I like that. That’s my favorite [01:17:00] current. That’s a great, that’s a great lap as well. So. Mm-hmm. I tend to look outside of the US I’ve been to a lot of tracks myself. I used to cart race all over the country and things like that. And so I always have things in my mind and Brad knows I wanna run at Brands Hatch, right?
Mm-hmm. And something low horsepower, stuff like that. Like there’s some really cool tracks outside of the US that I think are still on my list that I’ll, I’ll get there. You know what I mean? Yeah. They’re all on the list. It’s, you know, the bucket is very large for the number of tracks I want to go to, cuz I, I’d like to try them all and usually once you try it once, you usually wanna do it again.
So, you know, it’s kinda like sushi, right? You try it the first time and it’s just like a totally weird experience. You have to try it the second time cuz you know what you’re doing. You’re going into it. It’s just like a track. You know what you’re doing, you know that, you know, the scariest thing to me was when I didn’t prep the way that I’ve developed into prepping for going to Watkins Glen and I was coming up to a turn and I didn’t know if it was left or a right.
And Watkins Glen is not a good place for that to be happening. I’m very anal about my track prep for new tracks, but the second time is always you don’t the first time don’t, you don’t. You don’t say, yeah. Yeah. [01:18:00] Bill, bill at one point shocking. He caught a really good idea. He went out and he got large three by four foot track maps and he had ’em laminated to where we can actually write on them.
He actually puts ’em on our walls and we can edit our notes on it. Or he can, when he is instructing somebody, he can actually draw it around and make the marks on it. And then, Take our students out. So we’ll either hang them up inside the paddock or we’ll hang them up inside the trailers. But he’s picked up a couple tips and he’s always pushing us forward in training.
So in training. Mm-hmm. So that being said, bill and Vicky, any shoutouts promotions, thank yous. Anything else you’d like to share with our audience that we didn’t cover thus far? We have some discounts that don’t do anything for us, but if people want to use ’em, we’ve got discount for Apex Pro, which is really great entryway, especially into telemetry.
It’s a great system. We had, we had Andrew on, on our previous Andrew’s Awesome. Yeah, yeah. Recently we’re trying out a system from Candelaria on, uh, the Sentinel System, which is a. Incar live video streaming capability with three [01:19:00] cameras and, uh, integrates with your AIM system. So he’s got a discount for that.
The thing that we like to do is really to be a resource where if you’ve got a question, hopefully we’ve had a podcast that will deal with it from either our experience or from an expert’s expertise. Go into it and hopefully solve one of your problems quickly. Like, uh, a lot of times on the internet, you’ll see in Facebook, people are just coming into the sport.
They’ll be like, I hate my radio. It doesn’t work. We always say, go to this episode. We had Sampson on, and they, they just solved all our problems and it was cheap. I mean, it’s so cheap to fix our radios and. Reinventing the wheel and racing can get very expensive. So hopefully we can save you some time and some money be somewhat entertaining.
We try to be entertaining sometimes. I don’t know that we succeed, but, uh, that is the goal and hopefully you’ll get a little better. Mm-hmm. Although we’re in the same circle and, you know, petrolheads of a feather flock together. Right. We’re not really absolutely competing with one another for airtime or for personalities, which is fantastic.
Bigger boat [01:20:00] baby. Yeah, right. That’s right. Well, I look at it as, Is the Japanese philosophy, rising tides lift all ships. Right, exactly. So we’re all doing, we’re all in this together, you know, at the end of the day. Mm-hmm. I like, I like not only the rising tide, but I wanna give everybody a bigger boat. I’m usually the guy with the drill though, putting holes Yeah.
In the hall, right? Yeah. I thought that was my job. We’re, we’re a very, very inclusive team. We are honored to have had Bill and Vicky from Garage Heroes and Training on Break Fix, and we look up to you guys not only for your racing pursuits, but being superheroes in the automotive and Motorsport podcasting scene with over 300 plus episodes for folks to catch up on.
You should not be honored and you should aim much higher than where we’re at. Absolutely.
You can find out more about Garage Heroes and Training by visiting their website, www.garageheroesandtraining.com. Search for their show on all your favorite pod catchers and follow them on social media at. Garage Heroes and training on Instagram and Facebook and Garage [01:21:00] Heroes it on the Twitter and if you’d like to be on their show, you can reach out to Bill and the team at Garage Heroes and training gmail.com.
Thank you for inviting us on though. Absolutely. And you know, obviously it’ll be fun to be on your show where we get to be interviewed because that’s absolutely, for you guys, it’s very different to be on the other, yeah. On the receiving end of this, right. So yeah, a little bit. Yeah, so he is called the Interrogator, so you know, just warning you for when you do come on.
So Very nice. Well, Vicky and Bill, I cannot thank you guys enough for coming on Break Fix and sharing your origin story. And we really do appreciate everything you’re doing for the Motorsports community, for everybody out there that’s looking to get into this sport, into this hobby, getting them up off their couches and into the paddock and behind the seats of race cars or just any other Chevy Malibu that they found at the Hertz a lot.
So that being said, again, thank you for coming on, sharing your story, and we look forward to part two of this [01:22:00] episode when we visit you guys on Garage shares and training. Mm-hmm. Thank you for having us on and, uh, thank, hopefully we, hopefully we didn’t break your podcast and hopefully we fixed it just a little bit.
Thank you so much for having us.
That’s right. Listeners, if you enjoy this episode, be sure to check out our Patreon for a follow on pit stop mini. So, so check that out on www.patreon.com/gt motorsports and get access to all sorts of behind the scenes content from this episode and more. If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about gtm, be sure to check us out on www.gt motorsports.org.
You can also find us on Instagram at Grand Tour Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows. You can call or text us at (202) 630-1770 or send us an email at crew chief [01:23:00] gt motorsports.org. We’d love to hear from you. Hey everybody, crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that G T M remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge.
As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies and GTM swag. For as little as $2 and 50 cents a month, you can keep our developers, writers, editors, casters, and other volunteers fed on their strict diet of fig Newton’s, gummy bears, and Monster.
Consider signing up for Patreon today at www.patreon.com/gt motorsports. And remember, without fans, supporters, and members like you, None of this would be possible.[01:24:00]
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We are honored to have had Bill & Vicki from Garage Heroes in Training on Break/Fix, and we look up to you guys not only for your racing pursuits, but being superheroes in the automotive & motorsports podcasting scene, with over 300+ episodes for folks to catch up on. You can find out more about Garage Heroes In Training by visiting their website, garageheroesintraining.com – search for their show on all your favorite podcatchers, and follow them on social media @garageheroesintraining on IG and FB, and GarageHeroesIT on the Twitter. And if you’d like to be a guest on their show you can reach out to Bill and the team at garageheroesintraining@gmail.com
After their second race, they launched Garage Heroes in Training to document their journey from clueless to competent. The podcast became a living diary of what to do—and more often, what not to do. From misreading VIN-style episode numbers to sharing Florida Man stories on the fly, the show blends education with entertainment.
Their goal? To help others go from sofa to starting grid. They’ve onboarded over 23 new drivers, built a community, and created a 10-part series on racing basics – from paddock prep to safety gear.
The Fleet That Failed (and Flourished)
Early cars included a turbo Mustang and a proper Capri – both plagued by parts scarcity and mechanical woes. “They run like factory-new Fords,” Vicki joked. Eventually, they pivoted to a Chevy S10, which proved reliable and easy to wrench on. But as their skills grew, so did their ambitions. Today, the fleet includes:
- A 2003 Chevy S10 (retired soon)
- A 1993 Honda Civic (front-wheel drive learning curve)
- A Honda Fit (for B-Spec and Sunday Cup)
- A spec Miata (in progress)
- An endurance-prepped E46
- A daily-driven E46 M3
- A 2019 Miata for HPDEs
They’ve even divested a turbo Miata that was “too street for track, too track for street.”
Racing for the Journey, Not the Trophy
Garage Heroes in Training isn’t chasing podiums – they’re chasing progress. Bill earned his MSF Level 2 instructor certification and now teaches HPDEs across NASA Great Lakes. Vicki’s moving into HPDE 3 and 4, training as a mechanic, and mastering front-wheel drive dynamics.
Their biggest win? A class victory in Lemons. Their biggest “oops”? A rogue tire that broke a gas meter and summoned two fire trucks, an ambulance, and a street excavation crew. (Episode 68 has the full saga.)
Bill and Vicki embody the grassroots spirit: inclusive, curious, and always learning. Whether it’s towing three cars to Gingerman or debating which Top Gear host they’d grab a beer with, their story proves that motorsports isn’t just for the elite – it’s for anyone willing to try, fail, and laugh along the way.
As Bill says, “Winning is being able to start and finish.” And with Garage Heroes in Training, the journey is the real victory.
