There have been some BIG changes in the Fast Farmer Autosport race shop over the past couple of months. An opportunity appeared, and I became the extremely proud owner of a car I never dreamed I would be racing.... But let's not get ahead of ourselves, let's turn the clock back several years to where the story actually begins, shall we?
The year is 2019, and I am tearing it up in HPDE3.... at least until the event at GingerMan Raceway. I pushed my car a little to hard and left the track in turn 9, which at this track is generally not a big deal. This time, however, the ground had been rutted where I went off during a previous event. The splitter on the front of my car dug into one of these ruts, and was violently ripped off the car, taking half my front bumper with it. This led to me being out of action the next couple of events. While I couldn't actually drive, due to my wife being Volunteer Coordinator for the region, we still had to attend the events. To keep myself occupied, I volunteered to help on grid during those events where I didn't have a car to drive. This allowed me to get up close and personal to the actual racecars before they went out on track. This is where I fell in love with a very unique class of car, the Thunder Roadster. These things had it all a future racer could want, a low slung, flowing, fiberglass body and powered by Hayabusa motorcycle engines that made the coolest sound when on track. Being up close to these beasts right before they went on track planted the seeds of what became an obsession. The car leading the charge happened to be a bright, lime green (Chrysler Gecko Green, as I later learned) rocket sled piloted by one of my favorite HPDE 2 instructors, James Wheeler.
Not only was the car leading my obsession with the class, but it was usually leading the pack out on the track as well, which just drew me to it even more. James usually placed near the top in regional events, and he also took "Thunder Grinch", as the car was christened by another of my favorite instructors, Marlon Sumlin, to victory lane at the NASA Championships in 2019 and 2021. I never, even in my wildest dreams, imagined that I would get a chance to pilot such a badass racecar. I was content to watch James have all the fun, and enjoy watching it race when I could.
Fast forward to July of 2023. NASA makes its annual trip to Pittsburgh International Race Complex, and I am extremely excited. The reason: I was finally going to get to race for the first time that season. A "new to me" engine had just been installed in my car about 10 days earlier after much difficulty. Unfortunately, that excitement disappeared very quickly when, on the second lap of our first practice session, the engine completely seized up. This was probably the lowest I have ever been during a race weekend, I seriously considered loading up and driving home, then driving back sometime Saturday so I could give my wife a ride back home at the end of the weekend. She convinced me that would be a REALLY stupid idea, so I stayed. Fortunately, I have some great friends in NASA, and one of them decided he would let me take his car out for a HPDE session, just to try and cheer me up some. Ironically, he raced a Thunder Roadster, so I found myself behind the wheel of my most coveted type of racecar. I didn't exactly set the world on fire lap time wise with the car, but man, did I ever have fun! I ended the session by setting a new personal best lap time at that track, by 2 SECONDS!
Doing that in 8 laps really impressed upon me the performance capabilities of those machines, and made me seriously consider buying one. Unfortunately, the Thunder Roadster was probably the most popular class nationwide in NASA, driving the price of a car through the roof, and well beyond what we were willing to spend at that time. While I did entertain buying a couple of quality used cars over the next couple of months, by the end of the season, I had made my peace with not buying one, and that feeling continued until.......
Early spring, 2025
I see a Facebook post that takes my breathe away: Thunder Grinch was up for sale. In my mind, this car has always been THE Thunder Roadster, every time that word enters my head, the car I see is that bright green rocket. But, still.... these things aren't cheap, especially one with the pedigree of The Grinch. I showed the post to my wife, more as a joke than anything. To my incredulous surprise, she actually thought it wasn't a bad idea. Her reasoning being that if I were ever going to get into the class, this was the car to get. We knew how well it had been treated, and that it was always a threat to win. So, a few days later, with nobody showing serious interest in the car yet, we worked out a deal and put a down payment on the car to have James hold it until we could get the proper finances in order. I don't think I believed it was really happening until I unloaded the car, and saw it sitting there in my shop. It was such a mind trip, that I just couldn't accept it as reality, until I unloaded it at the track, but we'll save that for another post.....
Thunder Grinch WILL return!
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