Somebody took me up on my offer. My old #187 Performance Touring “E” Neon is off to another home, where, it is fervently to hope, it will become a first-rate LeMons racer.
I don’t want the history of this car to disappear. No, it’s not a Parnelli Jones Mustang or Sunoco Camaro, but it was a factory(ish) race car for much of its life and it deserves to be remembered. So, if you have some time, and you want to read about a car which spent sixteen years in rough-and-tumble competition, read on…
The full story can be found at neons.org. I’ll just excerpt a few of the photos from that story, in rough chronological order:
That’s our little Neon, from start to finish. It made podiums in three different classes across three different sanctioning bodies. It ran up over 13,000 racing miles. And it’s not done yet.
I’d like to say that I was sad to see the little Neon disappear on the road towards $500 crap-car racing, but if a car has a soul — and I want to believe that this one does — than it has a racing soul. Racing is life. The rest is just waiting. For our Neon, the waiting will soon be over once more.
It’s amazing how the basic shape of that car still looks so modern after all these years.
My neighbor bought one of these last fall to race with. I sent him the original link to the offer but I didn’t hear from him, oh well…
Good luck little car :)
Oh, and FWIW, the other day at the credit union I work at, a seventeen year old boy walked in, and I kid you not, he looked JUST LIKE YOU! I had to do a double take.
You ever father any children in Michigan???
I have never slept with a woman who claimed Michigan as her primary state of residence. However. Eighteen years ago. That would be… 1993. Nope. I was perfectly well-behaved that whole year. I suspect Nicholas Cage.
That car looked sharp in street trim. Definitely seems to have seen a few different paint schemes over the years. Didn’t think there was a large market for race-prepped Neons sans fenders, front or rear clip or engine.
You can’t beat a free caged chassis, even if it’s a bare shell.
I don’t think you can get a full, NASA-legal, fabricated rollcage done for under $1500 anywhere in the country. Bolt-in cages are much cheaper but they don’t offer the same level of protection and they don’t stiffen the chassis.
There were no shortcuts taken in our cage. The tubing alone cost $800, and our welder worked on it for a week. If you really expect to hit someone or something, this is the kind of cage you want.
And with a bolt-in, there’s always the risk of this happening:
http://culturegarage.com/article/bolt-in_roll_cage_fail/
Jack, did you ever get your “I ordered a header on the internet” saga sorted out?
I did, after a fashion. I had Amex dispute the charge. The seller didn’t respond and I was credited the cash back. Now I have a useless header, but that’s better than being out the money.
When I type “Jack Baruth” in a Bing search box, the first suggested completion is “Jack Baruth Road Rage”. I hope you’ll take that as a compliment from your friends at Bing/Microsoft.
I was kind of hoping for
jack baruth america’s greatest blues guitarist
but since nobody’s ever used those phrases together I guess I’ll have to be content with “road rage”
Well yeah, John McLaughlin is still alive.
Not that he’s American, or a blueser, but still. He’s so good I quit playing guitar and stuck
to drums, bass, and keys.
/end threadjack
Also, which lime-green came first, the Neon or the Audi?
Just wait until Jalopnik gets a hold of this and copies and pastes an “article” about it without fact checking it first.
Nice Dodge Jack.
For external stories they just want to direct readers’ attention to, they typically use “blips”…a tweet-like paragraph with a link to the article and a brief comment; no more, no less.
The horror! A repainted exterior and no one even took the time to do an actual re-paint of all the parts you normally wouldn’t see! How Earl Sheib-ish of you! Amateurs! By the way, I’m very surprised you can “tin-can” a modern car, for when all the plastic is removed, there’s scarcely anything left, especially a Neon, but I guess that’s just not true, as the dash must have some metal underneath, somewhere. I suspect we’ll see this car again on the “pages” of TTAC. EDIT: I see Jack has an entry on Wikipedia. Now I’m impressed!
As the step-owner (was the now ex-wife’s from new in Nov ’94) of a 267,000 mile ’95 model Neon 4dr SOHC 5sp Neon I approve of this endeavor.
From the start go-fast real-racing and ricer-street-fighting ownership base has allowed me to fix mine ’95 in the cheapest and easiest ways. Viva the Neon. Maybe it will run at the Silver State Classic in the future…
As the past owner of two ACR Neons it is great to see them still racing, in any kind of form. The ACR Neon deserves some coverage on TTAC. Had to be one of the best values in all of car-dom.
No Chrysler bash-fest? Now that’s more like it.. Cool car, hope it wins no matter where it ends up.
This is awesome. I’m happy to see the car live on.
As for the crappy paint job, I was probably twenty years old then and doing the best I could with limited funds.
Neons FTW.
I love your little photo album with the Neon ‘when it was a baby’. I think you’re right Jack – certain cars do pick up a soul along the road (track) and the memories of that car always remains wedged in your brain.
That looks like Nitro Yellow Green Pearlcoat, one of the greatest factory colours ever invented, especially shocking that it came from a domestic mfr. of that era. When Neons first emerged I had hoped for a whole lineup of wonderful crazy “neon” colours to go with the name but Dodge mgmt must have chickened out and went back to Basic Bland. The other Neon colours such as “aqua” and “magenta” paled by comparison so to speak. For a while Ford Ecorts had a couple of wild hues, metallic purple and metallic pink. Now on modern roads we’re surrounded by a thousand shades of metallic grey i.e. silver. I still find it hard to believe but I have to resign myself to the fact that unusual factory paint colours must in fact be really that much harder to sell to your average citizen who wants to blend in??
Is it #187 as in “187 to the dome?”