My younger brother sent me this link….I thought it was pretty cool

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Professional motorsport is a cold, hard place. If you want to run with the big dogs, you can’t just build a car in your mom’s garage and show up, right? Wrong. One guy did just that. Here’s his amazing story.

This is the multifaceted tale of Bill Caswell, a man who bought a crapcan off Craigslist to run against the $400,000-plus rally cars in a World Rally Championship race. It is a tale of a guy who had a welder, a bunch of credit cards, and a lot of free time but no real backing or funds. It is a story of a dude who taught himself how to build an FIA-legal roll cage because he wanted to spend the fabrication fee on race tires instead. It’s the story of a gearhead who drove a rustbucket to a third-place finish in an FIA-sanctioned race.

Most of all, it is a story of hoonage.

Bill Caswell, an unemployed Chicago racing freak, entered the Mexico round of the World Rally Championship in a 1991 BMW 318i that he found on Craigslist. The car cost $500. One year ago, Caswell decided that he wanted to go rallying with Rally America. Two months later, he crashed a car and blew up an engine five minutes into his first event. Four events later, he found a loophole in the FIA rules that let him enter a twenty-year-old car in the same event as guys like Ken Block and former F1 driver Kimi Raikkonen.

The story of Caswell’s WRC entry is a story of weirdness: He entered the biggest motorsport event of his life with no crew; an untested, week-old E30 M3 engine swap and a junkyard transmission (don’t ask); a car that was still covered in dirt from the previous season’s rallies (“I’d wash it, but I gotta fix stuff instead”); and a rented panel van. His co-driver, a Rally America genius named Ben Slocum, had not spent more than five minutes in a car with him prior to the event. He did this not out of stupidity, but out of a lack of resources — he wanted to go rallying, and this was the only way he could make it happen.

Amazingly, they finished third in their class.

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