Movie Monday: All's Well that's Caswell?

Welcome to our first Movie Monday, in which we plumb the depths of the Internet for compelling and interesting videos from crapcan racing.

Those other people who race: Hairpin-flavored doughnuts

Welcome to a periodic feature in which The Rusty Hub takes a brief and irrelevant look at some minute aspect of professional racing.

The Inaugural Edition® finds us looking at this year's V8 Supercars* race from Tasmania. Ten laps into the weekend's second race, we see Supercars superstar Jamie Whincup either making a slight mistake or racking up some major kudos by hooning his Holden Commodore through the Symmons Plains hairpin with a 540-degree turn in what can only accurately be described as "Safeway carpark stuff."

WEEKLY QUESTION: At which international track would you most want to run your crapcan?

Getting to this site via race car may require drivers to spend some connecting rods. (Eric Rood photo)

The polls have closed on our initial Weekly Question and the masses have spoken. Unsurprisingly, the plurality (34 percent) of our readers arrived here by race car, though it was far from a runaway. The Internet brought 27 percent of our readers to the site, which just edged out dark horse candidate and "rocker" Kip Winger, who garnered 25 percent of the vote. Sadly, the complexity of magnets proved too much for most and only 12 percent of our readers arrived through such miracles. If this were a parliamentary election with proportional representation, race car guys would have their hands full with an alliance between Kip Winger and magnets.

Q & A: Schumacher Taxi Service, Part 2

[Editor's Note: This is the continuation of The Rusty Hub's interview with Rob Leone of Schumacher Taxi Service. Click here to read Part 1.]


So as far as I know, you’re the only team to have won Index of Effluency and another race [overall]. Were you part of the team that won [the ChumpCar World Series race] at Sebring?

I wasn’t. That was Jer’s team. They ended up down there...one of the guys has a house down in Florida. So they combined that race with a little vacation down there. It was real nice for them. They ran a perfect race. Like this one up in Jersey except they had a bunch of things go right for them. A couple of the teams...they had a second-place team coming up on them with a couple laps to go and they lost a wheel. So they were within sight of each other and the second-place team lost a wheel.

Q & A: Schumacher Taxi Service, Part 1

The Schumacher Taxi Service's Audi leads a pack of cars that includes the team's CoROLLa at Stafford Springs. (Photo courtesy of MurileeMartin.com)

If you've ever been to a 24 Hours of LeMons or ChumpCar World Series event east of the Great Plains, you likely have run across Schumacher Taxi Service. The Philadelphia-area team has campaigned as many as three cars at some events. They've also towed their heaps as far as Gingerman Raceway in southwest Michigan and Sebring International Raceway in central Florida to crusade for crapcan glory.

Of course, it's difficult to describe the Taxi Service as a single team; because of team members' spread-out home locations, there are actually two build teams and a roster of fill-in drivers. One team (Rob Leone, Dave Heinig, Mike Burg, and Kurt Krumm) recently inaugurated a "new" car, a BMW E30. A second team (Jer Enger, John Robertson, Dave Hughes, and Justin Hughes) flogs the venerable Toyota CoROLLa (so-named for surviving a rollover mostly unscathed). Drivers Lori Leone, Scott Boito, and Mark Labbantz fill out the rosters when needed. Of course, the teams occasionally swap spots in each others' cars and employ the help of several friends, so this list is necessarily incomplete.

Their long and storied crapcan career, like any other racing team, includes failures of varying magnitudes. But Schumacher Taxi Service's many successes include an Index of Effluency win in LeMons with a Chevrolet Citation X-11 and an overall win on laps in ChumpCar at the illustrious Sebring International Raceway with the CoROLLa.

The Rusty Hub caught up with the Schumacher Taxi Service's Rob Leone just two days after the team had run two cars at a LeMons race at New Jersey Motorsports Park. We discussed a small cross-section of the team's experiences, which include (but are not limited to) spectacular engine seizures, the psychology of a chassis-less race car, fires [lots of them], and Juggaloes.

There are no 12 steps for this: An introductory confession

Hi.

My name is Eric and I'm addicted to crapcan racing. I've been following it for about two years. It's caused me to lose sleep, to cheer for car makes I've never heard of, and to bash my head against the wheelwell of a 20-year-old car, shaking the powdered remains of Detroit iron into my eyes. If you're here, you know the affliction well, so I won't elaborate further.

I find myself unable to participate in racing for the 2012 season and am undergoing what I'm told are "withdrawals." Quitting a habit this entertaining and intoxicating, however, is only possible for the willing, which is something I'm not. But how can I maintain? It came to me in one sweaty fever dream: I could harness my tiny bit of car knowledge, my tiny bit of racing knowledge, and my fantastically expensive tiny bit of journalistic knowledge to get an iron oxide fix.