How A $500 Craigslist Car Beat $400K Rally Racers

[Chris]

Professional motorsport is a cold, hard place. If you want to run with the big dogs, you can't just build a car in your mom's garage and show up, right? Wrong. One guy did just that. Here's his amazing story.

This is the multifaceted tale of Bill Caswell, a man who bought a $500 crapcan off Craigslist to run against the $400,000-plus rally cars in a World Rally Championship race earlier this month. It is a tale of a guy who had a welder, a bunch of credit cards, and a lot of free time but no real backing or funds. It is a story of a dude who taught himself how to build an FIA-legal roll cage, with no prior experience, because he wanted to spend the fabrication fee on race tires instead. It's the story of an enthusiast who drove a rustbucket to a third-place finish in an FIA-sanctioned race.

The story of Caswell's WRC entry is a story of weirdness: He entered the biggest motorsport event of his life with no crew; an untested, week-old E30 M3 engine swap and a junkyard transmission (don't ask); a car that was still covered in dirt from the previous season's rallies ("I'd wash it, but I gotta fix stuff instead"); and a rented panel van. His co-driver, a Rally America genius named Ben Slocum, had not spent more than five minutes in a car with him prior to the event. He did this not out of stupidity, but out of a lack of resources — he wanted to go rallying, and this was the only way he could make it happen.

Amazingly, they finished third in their class.

http://jalopnik.com/5497042/how-a-500-craigslist-car-beat-400k-rally-racers

[youtube=425,350]yaEcwQ6asWo[/youtube]

Tuesday, March 2:

Bill arrived in Rolla at 1:00 am. We were 37 hours behind schedule by that point so we drove in shifts nonstop to Laredo. After driving down Piotr Wiktorcyk and Pat Moro's cars last year for Rally of the Nations I had gotten used to driving unfamiliar tow rigs through the night across the country with little to no sleep, making this a familiar if annoying action.

We got to Laredo at 5:00 pm and drove straight across the border. The Mexican customs agents wanted to look in the trailer, so we showed them. That only piqued their interest, causing them to look deeper into more boxes of gear. My rudimentary Spanish skills weren't enough to get us through the border, luckily I always keep event documents on hand. I pulled out our movement plan which had the WRC Corona Rally Mexico logo on the cover. When the agent saw it his eyes lit up; "Ahh, Rah-lee? Go, go."

Our day stopped at the immigration office. To get into Mexico we needed the title and a letter for our service van allowing it past the inner Mexican border. I can't get into why we didn't have them for a few years, but the short version is we were sent back to the US despite our broker's best attempts to bribe the officials.

As we tried to cross back over we got caught on a cross over road between bridge one and bridge two leading between Laredo, TX and Nuevo Laredo, MX. The road is two lanes wide with concrete barriers a foot and a half high on either side. Nothing out of the ordinary, until a cartel decided to make war in front of us. We rounded what had to be the only corner on the mile long road when a car pulled across the path blocking us in. With the trailer we had no way of turning around. Suddenly dozens of people ran out of nearby buildings brandishing machine guns. We spent a frantic ten minutes backing up to the sounds of Spanish screaming and automatic weapons fire. Our broker simply explained it as "Mexico, she has problems."

We rushed across the bridge, darting between heavily armed Mexican military vehicles and took shelter in the Days Inn Laredo.

http://jalopnik.com/5500013/i-co+drove-the-500-craigslist-rally-car?skyline=true&s=i

After 22 stages, several severe mechanical issues, border delays and dozens of other reasons why it shouldn't have happened, we finished WRC Corona Rally Mexico Rally America. The final verdict came down that another car had been disqualified resulting in us moving up to third. The event that should never have occurred ended better than either of us could have hoped.

http://jalopnik.com/5497042/how-a-500-craigslist-car-beat-400k-rally-racers
http://jalopnik.com/5500013/i-co+drove-the-500-craigslist-rally-car