Project Sipster
Part 4: California or Bust
by Dave Coleman
Part 4 of Project Sipster marked the first time I ever actually saw the car, and what a sight it was. In the picture above, notice a few things about the front of the car. See how the ends of the front bumper are beveled, so the top of the bumper is slightly shorter than the bottom? That's how you know the bumper is on upside-down. Notice how the driver's side headlight looks lower than the passenger's side? That's no illusion. The car is seriously bent. Look at the radically different angles of the front lower control arms, just visible under the car's powder blue chin. Yikes!
Project Sipster made a bizzare and inexplicable stop at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca for a very simple reason. The weekend Jared finally hit California was the same weekend I was at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca enjoying one of the fruits of employment with one of the most fun-loving car companies on the planet: The annual Mazda employee track day. This fact, you'll notice, was conveniently glossed over in the original story.
Desperate to know how far we were from our 7-second objective, we sweet talked the corner workers into letting us onto the track during the lunch break to do 0-60 tests on the front straight, and then to drive up and down the corkscrew for video footage. That's right, UP the corkscrew!
Strangely, I can't find a single picture of that weekend, and even the video we shot seems to be MIA at the moment. I'll post it if I can find it, but meanwhile, here's the story:
Sipster Day 10
Not quite to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan
“You ain't crazy, are you?”
Can't really fault the guy for asking. Project Sipster is full to its bare metal roof with luggage, disorganized boxes of Rabbit parts and a full Cabriolet body kit; fender flares, side skirts, front bumper and all. To the untrained eye, it looks like a homeless camp. Our Editor isn't helping with the image problem. In the 30 minutes he's been stranded, hoping somebody, anybody will drive past this desolate stretch of Canadian nothingness, Jared has put on two pairs of pants, three sweatshirts and a sleeping bag. He hasn't slept for days and his hair… actually, his hair always looks like that.
After a short explanation, something along the lines of “I'm cold and I'm gonna die soon if you don't help me find some Diesel,” Jared's savior swings open the passenger's door of his F150 and then pauses.
“You ain't broke, are you?”
40 minutes later, Jared is very happy to have passed this little entry exam. If you're going to run out of Diesel, Frank is the kind of guy you want to come along. A local farmer with 40 head of Angus, not only is he willing to backtrack 5 miles to the nearest gas station, but his gas-powered truck actually has an on-board storage tank for Diesel fuel–for the tractors, don'cha know.
