A Piece of ChumpCar... and Saab... History.

During ChumpCar's inaugural season, 2010, the CCWS circus landed in Brainerd, Minnesota, for an early June race. Dedicated readers will recall the Fart-hinder tales from that first event as disappointing. But there was another Saab that hit the track that weekend, and the story of that team's weekend was legendary.

Cougar Bait Saab takes the green flag, shortly before the engine overheated.

Team Cougar Bait, based out of the Twin Cities, had run a few events in the 24 Hours of LeMons in a Saab 9000. After a couple of less than satisfying races, they switched to a Saab 900/9-3. The later version of the 900, known to Saab aficionados as the NG900, or Next Generation, arrived in 1994, and was renamed the 9-3 in 1998. With the help of Saab dealer Marty Adams (Meyer Garage and Iowa City Saab in Iowa), the team was ready to blow the doors off the other $500 racers with a 3.0L V6 out of a Cadillac Catera. The NG900 came with a 2.5L V6 built by GM of England. A 3.0L version of the same V6 engine was used by Opel, which built the Cadillac Catera to the U.S. market.

Removing the safety gear from the disabled NG900.

About a half hour after the drop of the green flag, the Cougar Bait Saab lost a coolant hose. Their hot zoot V6 overheated and blew a head gasket.. They didn't have another V6 engine, but did have a line on a similar Saab with a good engine, a 1999 9-3S that had been in a front end accident and totaled by the insurance company. Dogfood Dave in Duluth had offered it to the team a few weeks earlier for a price well under the $500 ChumpCar limit. A quick phone call, and a pair of team members headed northeast to Duluth to fetch the Saab.

But there was a problem. The Dogfood Dave car had the 2.0L turbo engine, and a completely different fuel system. A simple engine swap would not do. Instead, the safety gear - roll cage, racing seat, harnesses, everything - would have to be transferred to the new car.

Stripping the replacement Saab to turn it into a racer.

With some team members en-route to pick up the car, the other team members began removing what might be needed from the racer. By the time the other car arrived, about 5 hours later, the racer had been mostly stripped of necessary items. Then the team had to strip the interior of the replacement car of seats, carpets, headliner, and insulation. Doors were completely removed, as the perfectly usable doors from the racer held the numbers and other required decals.

Building a race car in the paddock is not an easy job. Team Cougar Bait worked past the finish of Saturday's 7-hour race, into the evening, and well past dark. While other teams went off to dinner, and later to get a decent night's sleep, TCB were welding the roll cage into the new car into the early hours of the next morning, using a 110-volt welder running off a gasoline powered generator, in a thunderstorm.

Their work paid off. The car was ready to go with less than an hour before Sunday's green flag. The scrutineer checked it over to make sure all was safe and approved it for racing. It made the start and ran a pretty good race, but did need a top off of fuel with only a few laps remaining in the race. The team finished 9th overall, in a car that had been built at the racetrack.

On the way to a top ten finish at BIR.

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Fart-hinder Saab 900 (left) and Cougar Bait Saab 9-3 at the start.

But the story doesn't end there. A few weeks later Team Cougar Bait took the same car to Iowa Speedway in Newton for a 24-hour race. Though their Saab was not the fastest car on the track, it got better fuel mileage than the BMWs, and ended up as the race winner, less than a lap ahead of the Tubby Butterman BMW which was catching up by over a second a lap in the late stages of the race.

The Fart-hinder Saab 900 did not fare as well in the Iowa event. Though it ran in the top 10 for much of the time it was on track, it was officially classified in 12th place after succumbing to a head gasket failure in the 15th hour of the race.

Unfortunately, life intervened for the members of Team Cougar Bait ... marriage, kids, new jobs ... and the car sat unused in a covered trailer for over a year. (A tech sticker in the windshield indicates it ran a 24 Hours of LeMons race at Autobahn Speedway in Illinois in October of 2012.) A few inquiries, an offer to buy, and the same Saab 9-3 is now in the stable of Fart-hinder Racing.

It was meant to replace the reliable-but-not-so-fast 1992 900S, but a potential buyer for that car backed out so it remains with the team for now. The debut of the new car, in its red-over-white homage to the Brock Racing Enterprises championship winning Datsuns of the early 1970s, will be at The Blueberry Wars, a pair of 7-hour ChumpCar endurance races at Brainerd International Raceway on August 2-3.

Tim was able to take the newer Saab to Brainerd recently for a little testing and he reports the 9-3 has considerably more acceleration, top speed and brakes. The BMWs and Hondas had better watch out.

Test day at BIR with the former Cougar Bait 0-3 and Saab 9000 Aero tow car.