Some of you have had the priviledge of reading my profile, and you secretly know you're shaking your head at someone wanting to enter a Saturn in the Bullrun. Come on, you know you're laughing on the inside. It's okay, I'm used to it.

Let me rewind a bit (I'll get to the actual car in another blog post). I'm a middle-aged computer geek. I do a lot of reading to fix problems for a living. I've taught myself more than most people learn in an entire stint through college (and yes, I did go to college, but not for computer work). Chances are, there's somebody, somewhere, that has encountered a similar problem, and has done steps to figure it out.

My early ideas of cars were straight out of pages from Hot Rod Magazine. I still have a huge pile of them I use as reference material. Some of the info in those pages is like gold nuggets, waiting to be discovered. Ideas, how-to's and everything else. I soaked it up like a sponge. One of my favorite trends in cars over the years is something called "Pro-Touring" which is where they take an older car and update it with modern suspension and drivetrain options. You get the best of both worlds: classic drop-dead looks with modern whoopass. To this day, I still know more about classic Mopars than any other classic car, even though I've never owned or even driven one. I just like 'em that much!

So how does that all play into the Bullrun? Simple. I love numbers, I love driving, and I love cars. My mind processes information and spits out data. Gear ratios, mileage numbers, engine specs, part numbers, route numbers, etc. To others, it looks like alphabet soup... to me, it's a finely calculated plan.

For instance, on the last leg of Bullrun Season 1, assuming the distance was 24 + 246 miles, average speed for the winning time was 59.9 MPH, the time split was 8 minutes 52 seconds, which means the Allsops won by about 9 miles. On a roughly 4000 mile race, that works out to around a 0.25% margin.

The public's perception of this race is that "fast cars will win hands down" but you have to factor in navigation with no aid, gas stops (which killed Mr. Angry), plus things like stoplights and stop signs that eat up precious time. Anything that you can eliminate waiting for will help you... even if it's one quarter of 1%, it might be enough to win.

For instance, my car is capable of around 30MPG at speed on the interstate. It has an 11 gallon tank. This gives me a range of about 330 miles. Can I improve this? Sure, but there are two options: spare gas cans, or an in-car fuel cell. Which is better? In-car cell, you'd say, and I agree, but what kind of time are you looking at saving with an in-car extra tank setup? Let's do a breakdown of the numbers...

One of the things I noticed about Team Charger and Mr. Angry is that they saved ALMOST NO TIME AT ALL using hand-held gas cans. Why is that? Because they still had to pump the gas from one pump, and they still had to stop to refill the tank. The only time they saved was pulling into a gas station, which compared to the time it takes to pump 40+ gallons, isn't that long.

To eliminate this wasted time, you'd have to fill up more than one tank simultaneously. Not only that, but eliminating having to stop and refill saves even more time. For about $400 in hardware, I can add a 12-gallon cell to the car, with an add-on pump and secondary fuel gauge. Twelve gallons of gas weigs 84 pounds plus the weight of the cell, which is reasonable, and wouldn't affect the handling of the car too badly, and could be offset with a fiberglass trunk, which lets me add a second filler neck and cap. But for the time I've saved, it's worth it! Now I'd have a cruising range of almost 700 miles (long enough for the longest legs of the show), and I can fill the cell at the same time as the regular tank from two pumps if they'll reach... and they're about the same size, so I'm effectively doubling my car's range and only adding a few seconds to fire up the second gas pump as a penalty. This alone would save more than 30 minutes over the teams that have to fill up every 200 miles or so.

Most people think this race is about going fast, but the truth is, it's about eliminating time wasters AND going fast when you can get away with it...

More fun to come! Stay tuned, we're just getting started.