Garage Heroes In Training

Please excuse a few spots where we lost internet recording. On this episode, Bill has the worst intro of any podcast in history, Vicki stages a coup d'état of the hosting duties, Alan shows up late, and we have recording issues galore so our episode for this week is posting late. Despite this, Jason Hopkins who is the founder of the Citrus Racers Lounge was an awesome guest and we hope you enjoy this week's episode.

Things we covered:

• Last week's Facebook conference in Menlo Park CA
• How many Smokey and the Bandit Movies exist
• Differences between thinking you are ready to race and being ready to race
• Other ways to contribute to a racing team, even if you never drive
• Bill makes several bad jokes about Massachusetts drivers and driving
• Jason shared a ton of great guests we need to have on soon
• Bill begs for all members of the lounge to subscribe to the podcast in vain
• Alan practices juggling bottles in the background several times, I hope I edited them all out
• Lesser know great driving/mountain roads in New Hampshire
• Happy Birthday to Mental (and his hair)
• Dream Lemons builds
• Alan: Mechanic and Referee

This week, we welcomed Chris Kamery to the podcast to continue our discussion on Autocross this month. Chris is an avid and accomplished driver mostly in the upstate New York and neighboring areas. We cover a wide range of topics related to start racing in autocross and what to do and what not to do. We also attempt to drag him into the dark side of endurance racing. We hope to see him out at the track soon.

Topics covered included:

1. Car requirements and preferences
2. Track design and review
3. Typical struggles of new and first time drivers at an autocross event
4. Several places to look for local autocross and other driving events

We may even have been helpful again this week. We cannot promise this to continue, lol.

On this episode, Vicki and Bill welcomed Sam Strano to our show to discuss another form of racing called autocross. This involved timed racing laps of a course that is usually artificially defined by a series of cones in a parking lot, air strip or other paved area. Sam is a multiple time national champion in autocross and we are now signed up for at least one race and one training session and knowing us there will be more to follow.

Please stop in or visit Sam's company at: http://www.stranoparts.com/

On our latest episode, we had Chris Abbott of the Three Pedal Mafia and the Everyone Racers podcast as our special guest. Chris is one of the nicest people we have met at lemons and has probably passed us more times than any other driver in the series, sometimes even in our own car.

On this episode, we talked about a wide variety of topics including:

• Our wish you were sponsoring us, Alpine Stars
• Alan does his Dalek impersonation
• New car race prep strategy
• Giraffes and racing

Also as a special surprise to those of you who listen to the Everyone Racers podcast, we made special accommodations and you can actually hear Chris speaking on this episode, lol.

We are very happy to have our first guest from our friends at the Everyone Racers podcast and also a member of the Three Pedal Mafia, Christian "Mental" Ward. While our usual episode is around 45 minutes to a bit over an hour, this one went a bit longer. We actually had some audio issues so it ended up under 3 hours of a great conversation. If you listen to us on the way to work, we may have your whole week covered. So either you have our apologies or you are welcome.