However, he still has time for his other lifelong love, car racing.  He has raced many different circuits over the years, but has now settled in on a few more “fun” ways to approach the sport. Chump Car racing and 24 Hours of LeMons are two different race classes cut from the same cloth.  They are really pretty neat because they lower a lof of the barriers of entry normally found in racing.  They both put $500 limits on the cost of the car (not including safety equipment), explaining their interesting names!

LeMons (a nice play on the old 24 hour LeMans races) has been around quite a while and has a large loyal following.  The races are more of an “event” than what you’ll find at a Chump Car race, which can be a positive or negative depending on who you ask.  The events are an extravaganza and any black flags result in the offending driver and team doing truly outlandish things as a penalty.  This can be a lot of fun, but many prefer to spend their hard earned time on the track instead of in the paddock doing silly tasks to appease the judges.

Enter Chump Car, a newer series that focuses on the racing.  This is all I have done, but I have heard enough comparisons to LeMons to know that it is definitely my preference.  The name Chump Car is a bit misleading because despite the cost of the cars and their often unruly appearance, this is real racing.  Competitive and fun…there are a lot of really serious, seasoned racers who participate in these events.  Given the nature of the cars, mechanic skills are a huge part of success.  These are endurance races (some lasting 24 hours straight), and old sub $500 cars typically have problems maintaining themselves for extended periods at high speeds.  My father-in-law Bill, is just the man for this.

Our team car is a 1971 Porsche 914, disguised to look a bit like the bastard baby of the Martini racing Porche Hippie 917 and a Porche 908..

Basically, if you took the stock 914 above on the left (although ours didn’t quite look like this when it first showed up), stripped it down to lower the weight, added some fins (a la the 908 in the center pic) and gave it a “hippie” paint job like the #3 917L on the right, you would end up with a fine specimen of Chump Car/LeMons racing…The Hippie 908:

The Chump Car

This is the car after it was originally given it’s Hippie paint job. Having survived a few races, it is now quite battered and bruised. However, it continues to run like a champ due to Bill’s amazing monkey wrenching skills!  It’s also undergone some mechanical and physical changes since this picture was taken.

I have been lucky enough to get to be a part of the team driving this beast in 2 Chump Car races.  The most recent was only a few weekends ago, where we placed 3rd on day 2 (mechanical problems plagued us on day 1), and I will chronicle that in a different post.  Until then, enjoy the video preview of that race as team member Michael Hsu passes the cars that ended up in 2nd (Honda CRX) and 1st (Mustang) place respectively later that day.  Pretty impressive for a stock 1.7L air-cooled straight four cylinder 914.  Have a chumpy day!

A quick Google search of “Joomla versus WordPress” reveals just under 17 million search results, so this topic is obviously of interest to many people.  As such, I’ll add my two cents to the debate and hopefully provide some additional information for someone looking into this topic.  Perhaps my non-techie view on the subject will help someone out there!

I’ve used Joomla as my CMS of choice for several years.  The learning curve on Joomla is somewhat steep (compared to WP), but the wealth of third-party extensions is unrivaled.  Joomla can be a bit clunky at times, and is often overkill for many projects, but there’s not too much it can’t be made to do.  For those who are overwhelmed by this learning curve or don’t need the vast features…enter WordPress.

WordPress is quite simply, very elegant.  I can’t think of a better adjective to describe it.  It’s light weight, simple to use (relatively), offers a fair amount of third-party options, and is easy to use.  However, it is pretty easy to run up against WP’s limitations pretty quickly if you’re trying to do anything complex.  There are many WP fanboys (and girls) out there, who would argue this, I’m sure, but in reality, Joomla far surpasses the capabilities of WordPress.  That being said, WordPress is insanely popular and the amount of plugins continues to grow at a staggering rate.

WordPress has impressive SEO (Search Engine Optimization) capabilities built into it (versus Joomla’s reliance on third party plugins) and this seems to be a highly regarded feature of the platform.  While the ability of WP sites to get indexed does seem superior to that of Joomla (at least out of the box), there is still quite a bit of legwork required to get things optimized.  There are some third-party options to help with this, albeit quite expensive.  All said, I’ll give the nod to WordPress in the SEO department.

That being said, it’s not fair to criticize an apple for being an apple or an orange for being an orange.  They are just different, and both have their respective places in the world.  I’m excited to learn more about WordPress, and I feel for the intended purpose of this site, it will serve me just fine.