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hi there, in this tutorial i'm going todemonstrate how to create a very simple mountain scene like this as well as addsomething like the lens flare that you'll see appearing here now obviously there's a certain artistic element here as to how much less lens flare you have. i've emphasized it quitestrongly here, but it's for aesthetic, artistic reasons obviously this isn'tnecessarily a hundred percent photorealistic render, and i find to behonest that a lot of the more pleasing

renders are often not completelyphotorealistic certainly when the image is still you cansee there are elements about this that aren't completely true to real life, certainlysome in the reference images i've seen snow tends to roll down and you maywant to consider what taxes you're using before youdecide how to approach the scene. that said, i'm fairlypleased with the overall result of this and i'm gonna show you how tocreate this mountain yourself. so to begin with we need to use an add-on called the ant-landscape. if youhaven't already got it installed

it's not one that you need to download and its part of blender already so just go to user preferences and under add-ons, start typing 'ant' and there you'll see the ant-landscape is under the mesh section and just make sure that's ticked. once it's ticked you should be able to add, under the mesh, a landscape and as with many modifiers you get alittle options window on the left hand side here which we can look at. so you can zoom inand move your view around but if

you want to continue to use theseoptions don't make any changes to the land outhere. so the first thing is it's going to need to be fairly high resolution if we're going to represent landscapeand for another reason because we're going to use a displacement modifier and we need lots of vertices for that to work, so let's try 128 now this isn't gonna be enough in itselfbut we're going to add a subdivision surface on it we can subdivide it further if we need to the size you can do later or you can donow. so if you need to change the mesh

size you can update it there you'll see you need to change the geometry ifyou do that i'm gonna stick with two at the moment, and you can choose differentoptions for the shape of the terrain. you can see we've got a sort ofterraced form of terrain there. i'm going to stick with multi-fractal it looks prettyrealistic and you can use different basis and i think voronai is quite good. iquite like the ridges and we'll go with this one but perhaps weneed a little more height on it

we can increase it there. so onceyou've got the mountain looking something like what you want go with at least 128 subdivisions and thenwe can just re-scale the mountain how we want it and theoptions will disappear from the left-hand side you don't necessarily need to change the scale but ifind that easier now in edit mdoe i'm going to select allof the edges the only reason i'm doing this isbecause i did an animation and i wanted tomake sure that the squared-off

edges where out of sight. i've turned on proportional editing with 'o' and now i'mgonna drag them down and you can see this gives me a rounded edge and then just select a few random vertices going aroundthe edges particularly the corners and that will just give a bit more randomness to it and you can see the corners are nowpretty much out of sight.

so the next thing we need to do is lookfrom above go into edit mode, make sure all the vertices are selected and then press 'u' and select 'project from view - bounds' that's now very simply unwrapped the wholething and we'll very quickly just put a verybasic texture on i'm doing this all in cycles by the wayyou can do it in blender internal but obviously many ofthe material settings will be different so this is a cycles tutorial. so i'll just select new overhere and we just put

a very simple image texture on it tobegin with and we'll select an image. i think the one iused was this one here mostly because of the colour of it, and we can see that it has been very simply applied. you can tile that differently if you want to. you may notice that because i've got quite steep sideshere the sides haven't mapped so well but thosesides aren't really gonna be visible i'm not too worried about that. part ofthe reason i selected this is because it had some larger patches init and i knew they would stretch down thevertical size which would help to get that

idea of snow filling in gullies that pass downthe surface of the rock. so that's applied a very basicmaterial, i'll add a simple light now, just a sun lamp.it doesn't really matter where it is in the scene but looking from the front i think im goingto rotate my land, have it something like that and we'll see what that looks like so we've obviously got no sky yet

so that's quite good, it is illuminatingjust the one side of the mountain at the moment we'll give it a slight yellow colour and turn on multiple importance sample. i did experiment with various types of sky i think if you could get a very good highresolution hdri image that might work. have a look at somesample images as is always a good thing to do with mountains and you will find some haveactually completely empty skies and obviously that's the case where thereeither isn't a cloud in the sky, or

the clouds are below the level of the mountain that we're looking at. so it varies and i decidedfor simplicity's sake and the speed of the render to go with an empty sky,some peopledidn't like that but it worked for me. so to very quickly justadd a basic empty sky just go to the world settings with background selected which is thedefault go to sky texture and you see you getimmediately this. one issue i did have with the skytexture is

this horizon line. in the majority of cases you'vegot something going on here so it doesn't matter but because of the sort of image i've got i obviously don't want a horizon like that. you can't move it around with this ball, thischanges where the sun is in the sky so there is a way to move it. if i come to the next layer we can click on vector and select mapping, then come down tovector down here and just say generated, now it should lookexactly the same however the only difference really

is, i'm going to select texture here doesn't reallymatter i've explained what that is and anothertutorial what it means is i can i use theseparameters to alter the effective position of thesky map you can see there i can now lower thehorizon you can see there's a slight glow there so that's the effective position of the sun which is somewhere near where i needit to be. one of the reasons for doing the sky, over and above actually having a sky, is that you can see now i'm getting alittle bit of light cast over here in the

shadows so unless it's a space scene in themajority of cases you do want some sort of ambient light. you can see already that we've got a lot of sharp angles on this rock we haven't set it to smooth shading yet so wecan do that now and that helps but there's still not enough verticesfor what we need to do but you can see it's starting to look mountain-like.the next thing i'm going to do is, notice how many vertices we've got up here,i'm going to add a modifier which is a displacementmodifier

and you can see it goes all over the place. i'm goingto say new on textures and then i'm going to say rock large, for the texture, just gonna call it that and then click this little control button andthat takes me over to textures it currently says clouds, i'll change that to 'image or movie' and i'm going to use for thelarge size of the rock i'm going to use the same texture as i used originally. it looks amess at the moment but we can come back to the displacement

and we can tell it to use uv projection.we don't have to do that but it will align the texture that i'm usingfor displacement with the image texture that i'm using for colour and then tell it to use the default uv map. put the strength down to something like 0.01 at the moment, because we really don'thave enough vertices, you can't see a lot of difference betweenhaving this and not having it but if i now add a subdivision surface and ineed to push that

above the displacement modifier so that it effectively gives its additional vertices to thedisplacement modifier what we should start to be able to see is thatwe get a little bit more definition so you can now see that we've gotmuch more detail in the landscape. it's still not goodenough for my purposes because if we were gonna fly around or youcreate an image of the whole thing it would just not be good enough for most purposes. if you're gonna see this from a distance you probably don't even need to do this level

but you can see it's creating little pits inthe surface which is a start now you can either add furthersubdivisions here or very simply select the whole mesh and say 'w' and subdivide. this isgoing to start to slow it down you don't want to do it all by the root verticesbecause it's nice to be able to turn off subdivision up here in. you now see we're startingto get a lot more vertices. come out of edit mode and go into rendered mode. you can see we've got a millionvertices with the subdivision surface on there.now that's starting to look a lot

better and you can play around with howdeep you want the strength of this modifier and so on but what i'm going to do now, so you can seewe've got quite a nice, slightly worn looking surface, and there's these striationsthat i was talking about earlier, i'm actually going to add another displacementmodifier this isn't going to add more verticesbut it is going to affect the vertices that are already there which is why it takes a little while. we'll putthe strength down to 0.001 at the moment, just because it's making a mess of the mesh,

just so we can see what we're doing, and i'm alsogonna turn off the subdivision surface for the viewport for a little while because that willspeed things up a little and then i'm gonna say 'new' for the textures and we'll say 'rock small' we'll tell it to use the uv map it doesn'treally matter and then we'll go to here, and for some reason it doesdefault to using a common image, and you can see in orderto change this you need to click that little '3' there now we can change it for any other texturethat we want to. so we can have a look through here and ithink i used something like this last

time this is black-on-white high-definitionversion of these rocks, come back to themodifier and i'll turn this one off as well so we can seewhat this one is doing so it's very subtle at the moment, i'm goint to go up to 0.01 and then go back to the control of the modifier because it is essentially not doing a great deal different to what the originalone is yet and what we can do, under size, we can sayrepeat it two times. so that's made it smaller, say four times

you can see it's a higher frequency change as it were. so we'll come back here, we'll turn on bothmodifiers and then we'll turn on the subdivisionsurface. takes a moment because there's a million vertices to calculate, and you can see thatstrength's a little too high but at least you can see it's starting to add a lot ofdetail now. so we'll go with 0.001 again and see what that looks like.that's looking pretty fair now. you can see in some areas we've got high detail inothers it's lower detail. and if we render that, and it's starting towork there's still a few issues there, i think the strength of this one is stilla little bit too high

we'll go with 0.005 for that one. if itpushes the vertices too hard, as it were, you'll get the edge show up and thatreally isn't what you want so its got to be within the natural bounds so you need toplay with the strength and so on and there you go that's quite a bit better.so that's added some basic texture to our mountain and now we need to add some snowas well as improve the texture we've got there. so i've opened up a new window and we go to the node editor make sure this little sphere is selectedand this little cube is selected. this tells it that we'replaying with the materials on an object

and this tells us that it's the materials which we're changing. so at the moment we've got a simple image texture feeding into a diffuse and that's what's output into the material. so first of all, very few materials have noglossy in them at all so we need to add a mix shader and drop that there and then add a glossy shader and put thatthere make sure that it is set to white because ittends to only be metals and a few other strange materials thatreflect light in anything other than white in terms in the base glossiness, andconnect that into the other side of the mix shader,

and set this to something like 0.01and we'll go with the default roughness to start with. so we'll zoom in somewhere and see what that looks like. so wecan probably afford to go a little higher on the glossy, if i turned it all the way up here youcan see it becomes very shiny but there's one last thing we need to doto give this just a little bit more texture i'm gonna take the original image and i'm going to plug that into displacement, so it's another form of displacement. now you can see it's a bit over the top

to start with and we'll add a math node, plug that in there set it to multiply and turn the numberdown which turns the how extreme this modifier is. so you can seethere that without it, it's very smooth andpolished with this modifier we've just got a littlebit of extra detail added into the surface, and you could mix texturesas well which is especially useful if you've gottextures which are'nt big enough to cover everything.

what we might also wanna do is add some kind of colour modification i'm adding a gamma node here, drop that into there and as we turn that up, you can see it gets darker.i want the difference between the snow and the rock to be quite high and that's why i'm doing that, and obviouslyyou can put other nodes in to effect the colour. so that's our base rock done, and we now need to addthe snow on top of that. so this is still a colour effect,we're going to use the colour itself to decide whether or not there is snow here. now youcan use the same texture

or you can use a different one, itdoesn't really matter, it's up to you. we'll try it out with the same texture to beginwith. so first of all i'm going to add a colour ramp, and i'll put that there, and plug this texture into there. then i'mgoing to add a mix shader, and i'll put that there. in fact i'll bring the colour ramp down here. just move these nodes around a littlebit. i could group them of course. i'm going to makeanother set of textures so i'm going to set this over to 1 at the momentwhich is why it's gone black, and i'm going to add another image texture, i'll justcopy this one to start with

but i'll change the texture for a snow texture. i'll now add another diffuse shader, i could plugthis in up here but there is quit a bit of differencebetween the material of snow and the material of rock so this gives me a bit more control overit. i'm going to plug my snow into there now i could just plug that straight intothere like that and there's snow what i wanna do of course is i need some reflectivity or glossiness on this now

so i'm almost replicating the same setupup here, you could just copy it in fact and i think the snow is probably alittle bit more shiny than the rock, but not too shiny, so we'll put theroughness up a little bit so that it's not too wet looking. so that's our mountain coveredin snow, we've still got a displacement coming infrom the rock but that's fine it's good to have a bit of displacement on the snow. if you wanted to you could putsubsurface scattering on that as well to add a certain amount of realism but ithink it's not so necessary when you're

looking at it from a distance and you might want to change the colourbalance as well to make it slightly blue perhaps. so we can now fade between rock on oneside and snow on the other, and at 50% youcan see it's half and half. so we now need something to control whether it's rock or snow, so we can take the output of our colour ramp here and plug that into the factor, and then wecan do is start to narrow down our settingshere. you will find it's quite fine, you can see there, wesuddenly go over,

there we go, we're starting now to get adifferentiation between one colour and another at this point we start to see, one moment it's snow and then its rock. we've got a little bitas bleed across, where you can see the rockschanging to a slightly lighter color and we can playaround with different options here, 'b' spline is probably not the best one unless you really do want frost on the rock, you may even wantto consider something like constant, whichessentially it's one thing or the other

you can see there that it suddenly becomes snow-covered where these pointers are determines howmuch. but you need to find that right place which is where the texture itself flips from one to the other, if necessaryyou can change these base colors to narrow down on it and every time you do this you'll get a slightly differentdistribution of snow. and what you might wanna do isbrighten the snow here by turning the gamma down, and you can see that's a much whiter snow now. i think the rock's possibly a bit shinier than it needs to be. that really is

all there is to creating a very basicmountain simulation. at a glance that looks prettyimpressive, you can obviously render this at more samples but that is25 samples and you can see it's already not verynoisy. there's a couple of other things i'm going to show you and the first one is about the sun. you can seehow the shadow is very fuzzy. for an empty sky like this with arelatively bright sun that's not right and actually even ifyou don't notice it your brain tells you there is something wrong here

that's actually what you get with a veryovercast sky. so we'll turn the size down to 0.01 and now we start get much sharper shadows that actually highlights the detail a lotbetter and makes it much more convincing. so that's one thing we can do, we can play around with the colour af the sun, maybe it's abit to yellow. and now what we want to do is add that effect that we get once we've rendered it which is thelens flare so to start with i'm going to add a uvsphere.

we're not gonna see it in details soreally, even an ico-sphere would suffice we need to decide on a size, the further away from the mesh landscape the better, you'll get amore realistic, if you're animating anyway, because you'llget a more realistic movement of what appears to be the sun but it'sall about aethetics really more than it is realism for the most, part unless you'retrying to simulate it for the purposes of fooling someone. now i'veput the mesh over the lamp, if you use a sun lamp itdoesn't really matter if however you put your mesh over anyother kind of lamp

it will actually cast shadow. now i've still got that object selected, what you can do, under ray visibility, say 'no' to shadow now it won't cast a shadow on thelandscape or anywhere else now the material we want for it is actuallyan emission material. and we'll give it a slight yellow colour, and the other thing i'm going to do under settings is put a pass index of 1 on it and i'll put the emission strength up to 2. this isn't really the main light sourcesit will be adding somewhat to it, the main light sources is still the sun (lamp) but what it will do is give us an object to

represent the sun in the scene in order to give us our lens flare things like that, so there's a camera, what i'm gonna do is move our camera around a little bit telling it not to render the border and have a preview render of that. so that's quite good we've got the sun in the scene we can see the sun shining on this areaand we can see the sun hasn't reached this area yet so it's quite blue which givesthe scene a good cold feeling. so before we can do the next sectionwe need to be go to the render layers, under passes, we turn on mist, becausewe'll be using that in a little bit,

but we'll also turn on material index sat it to 25 samples and, because i don't have any need for it,under light paths i'm going to say no caustics and that helps to improve the level noise in the scene. and we'll render that. you can see there's our scene. it's quite nice, there's not very much noise in it at all. even though it's only 25 samples, i'm prettysure i could render it even less than that and still see very little noise. and you can see we've got a nice littlebit of detail here and the edge

the sun's just reflecting off detail here andthen it's reflecting quite well here. so we''re ready now to add some flare. so we'll click this which is thecompositor settings and then say use nodes, and immediately we can see, there's our render output which is this and there's our composited output. you can bring a viewer node so you can see it in here, but i prefer to see it in a separate windowand you'll notice that because we turned on mist and material index we get those two coming up here. so thefirst thing we want to use is the material index so we'll add a converter

which is an id mask. turn on anti-aliasing and take the index ma and put that intothe value if you just take that value and put it into the image, you can see everything's white exceptfor the sun, so what that shows is because this is set to index 0 the default is for everything to have anindex 0 and so everything is 1 it saying one, yes or true for everything except for the sun butwe actually want it the other way around, we want to select the sun,

so we do that. so now the only thing that'sgiving us a true output is the sun. so we can now use that as it'sdesigned to make a mask so we now go to colour, add a colour mix node and and we'll put our image into the bottom i we'll set the top to black, we'll take theoutput to the main image output and then use the mask to control the factor.so now you can see it looks almost the same but rather than just getting white we're getting whatever colour the sun is, now at the moment it lookswhite but of course we did set a slight

colour in it and therefore that's there so if we were to turn that purple that would have been purple so it's just like a black screen and it's made a holein it where the sun shines through. that now gives us the basis to make some modifications. we can now add a filter which is a glare filter and add that in there, set this to ghosts, and there they are and you can decide how manyiterations

and how much you want the colour of each ghost to vary. i like have a good bit ofvariation on it. it sort of simulates having lots of different lenses, now the mix, if i take that down to -1 you cansee the effect disappears if i take it up to 1 the original imagedisappears but my lens flare is the onlyremaining thing in the image i'm gonna leave itlike that but what i will do is add a gamma node out and i'm going tobrighten this up, perhaps not quite that much,just a little bit.

and this will allow me to vary how brightthat is later on so that's just my lens flare. i also needto add some blurry fog around the sun in order tomake that seem like a real sun so i know that i've got my sun coming out of here, so i'm going to add a filter which is a blur filter put that here, change it to fast gaussian, relative, we'll put 2% and 2% for thepercentages put my image into that and then just forthe moment take that straight to the output. so there is our sun. i think i want to

make the y a little larger and now what i want to do is combine the blurry image of the sunwith the lens flare. so add a colour mix node, put that on the bottom it doesn't reallymatter where because gonna change this to an add node. there you can see we've got both effects there. move this out slightly and duplicate the add node, again it doesn't mattertoo much which side you have as which as long as you know. take the original image and put that in,

and you can see that what we're now doing is we're adding this set of effects to the original image and we cancontrol just how bright that effect is by turning it down here. at zero we haven't got any of it and wecan turn it up here. we can independently control howbright the lens flare is by changing the the gamma here, a larger number means it's slightly darker. and i thinkwhat i want to do is brighten up that blurriness a little bit, i've put a gamma node in there and you can see the blurry part is brightening up nicely

i think what i'll also do is now select my object and we'll change the color, andwe'll add a little bit more colour into it. we'll render that, and that's starting to getthere. you can see it gets even whiter in the center where the two things are added together, so i'm going to turn that that up a little there and up a little there. i'm going to turnthe number samples down a bit we, we don't need that many. and so the final thing we need to do now is add the mist. back in our compositer, there are all our effects to create the sun effects,

now what we want is things to get alittle paler and hazier as they go off into the distance. so tobegin with we'll just use distance to controlhow bright the mist is. we've got a mist render pass, so i'm going to use my image here i'm going to add a colour mix node, drop that in there. set it to 50% for the moment so you canjust see what this is doing, and we'll make the mistever so slightly blue. now, if i just plug the mist output into here, you can see it's starting towork

what's going on is that as its gettingpast a certain point it is starting to fade out, butreally we don't want the whole sky turning white. if i bring my camera up, these are extra lights thati have my default settings so don't worry about those, i go to my camera settings, i could turn on the mist, and what this shows is where mist begins and where it ends, under the worldsettings the mist pass is starting at 5 meters andending at 25 meters so i could bring that a bit closer andbring it quite a bit closer there.

so if we render that, now we can see we'regetting a nice mist effect but the sky is going white outwith it because the sky is obviously a long distance away so we need some method for preventingthat. the sky is a long distance away so we canuse 'z' to mask it out.so if we add another math node set this to multiply, and we'll set this to asmall value, 0.002 we then put the 'z' value into that, then we

add another colour mix node and we take the output of our mist mixer, which we're gonnachange in a minute, because it's a bit heavy at the moment. put that into one side, take the original image and put into the other side and then take that and feed that back intoour node setup and then take the output of our, divided down really, 'z' value and put that into the factor.now to begin with, the sky has gone white so that's obviously got maximum mist and the mist has disappeared from down here so we swap them over. it's obviously doing something with the sky but it's

gone black that's to do with the ways that 'z' works but if we click 'clamp' up here on multiply we now get that working. now if you get a bit of an edge like that which i did, there's something we can do about that. under filters, add a 'dilate erode' node, put that intothe 'z' and set it to distance of 1 or 2, you can see 2 is a bit high so 1 is pretty close we can send it to a feathervalue and distance 2 now seems to be fine.

that's pretty good and now we can changethe amount of mist. we can change the color and darkness here, and we can also had a math node into the factor, change it to multiply, put the mist into it and we can then turn the mist down. and you can see the mist retreats into the distance. so with very littlemis at the front and it starts to become a visible in thedistance.that's just a subtle amount of mist and i had quite a bit to the scene so explaining those nodes again, 'z' tells blender how far away things are, this creates very large numbers

so we multiply it by a very smallnumber such that the only pixels which give a deflection arethose that are very far away such as the sky, everything else shows upas very close put that through this dilate-erode node with feather, at a distance of 2 to just smooth out the edges. it doesn't blur it, it just smooths the edge out. that's then used in the factor to mixbetween the original image so that if it's close to us it gives us a 1, theoriginal image, and the mist version of the image. by theway don't forget to turn clamp-on and otherwise the sky want work properly.

mist is created by the mist output whichyou can set to whatever depth you want whichyou can see when the camera limits are switched on. you can put that that in to one side a multiply math node which is used as thefactor on a mix node which mixes between the slightly bluish white colour and the original image. that's then fedinto one of your mix node the other of which is your original image. that basically allows us to have no mist really visible against the sky,but plenty of mist visible against the ground, and you can and varythis multiply node

to determine how i thick you want the mist.so i hope you found that useful, if you did let me know. i'm alwaysinterested in suggestions for other tutorials and i hope you've had a chanceto take a look at the first of my videos on sardi pax 2, and there'll be a link inthe description. hopefully i'll be able to find the time,not only to compile this video, the next video which shows actualprinting of the object that i've created in a blender in sardi pax 2. so, i'll see you in the next tutorial.

bye for now.

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mike spinelli: welcome to"after/drive." you may think this is "road testament." it'snot "road testament." it's "after/drive." and i've got billcaswell here, automotive adventurer, self-taughtracer, and fabricator. and we have an awesome show. right, bill? bill caswell: we do. mike spinelli: hells, yeah. stay with us.

[music playing] mike spinelli: welcome to"after/drive." [bleep] bill caswell is here. you know him as a stickerjunkie, and one of the most inspiring automotive stories ofthe last 10 years, i think. you know him from internet. @drive on twitter,facebook.com/drivetv. comments below. bill caswell--

one of the top articles onjalopnik ever was your $500 rally car experiencein mexico, whereby you took this e30. bill caswell: yep, bought offcraigslist for $500, built in my mom's garage, by me and myfriends, not professional fabricators or mechanics. and after nine months of racing,i decided i'd enter the world rally championships. mike spinelli: which--

bill caswell: whichsounds absurd. mike spinelli: i'm sureeverybody thought that that was a good idea. bill caswell: no, my friendstold me that i was stupid. and they wouldn't taketime off from work. and they wouldn'tcome with me. it's how i ended up downthere by myself. mike spinelli: right. bill caswell: they're likeyou're never going to be

allowed to race. your car-- you bought it offcraigslist for $500. we built it ourselves. it's not going topass fia tack. like you're going to waste yourtime doing 3,000 miles for nothing. i mean, you're there next to$500,000 wrc rally cars. bill caswell: yes. mike spinelli: and you pull upin this thing, and what do

people say? bill caswell: i think theylaughed a lot the first day. and there's definitely a lot ofpointing, and kind of like what is this guy doing here? but by the second day, we hadkind of a small crowd around us in service. by the third day, we hadlike a mob scene around us, and it was fun. and we also cranked music duringour service stops.

we caused a bit of a scene. we weren't kind of theproper rally drivers. but we had a lot of fun, man. mike spinelli: i mean, what wascool about that completely is that the knock on racingin general is it's too corporatist now. and it's not that much fun. and you come rolling in in a$500 car, and with the roll cage that you built yourself.

bill caswell: part of it wasthat my first ever rally was rally tennessee. and i was convinced to bringmy road race car there. and on the second stage, i putit off the road at like 90 miles an hour. now i kept it under control. i didn't damage it. punctured a radiator,and was out. but i realized i'm notreally that good at

rally driving, right? so i looked then for thecheapest version of that same car that i could find,which was a '91 318is bmw v30 chassis. and it's just like vm3 withcheaper parts, lower engine, all that kind of stuff. it doesn't look as cool,but whatever. it was a great carto practice with. so i figured i'd be stuffing itan event or two later, and

have to build a new one. but the car survived, andit's still around today. it's been to mexico threeyears in a row now. mike spinelli: wow. bill caswell: so apparentlyi got better fast. and now i'm still racing that$500 car, which was meant to be more like a practicevehicle. mike spinelli: well, it'sinteresting, because you're-- to go back to the beginning ofyour story, your story is

actually really inspiring forsomebody who wants to get away from the typical job situationand out of their cubicle, and into this world of racingand adventuring. [bleep]. bill caswell: yeah, ilearned from books. my dad's a lawyer. i grew up in the suburbs. the nearest welding supplyis 45 minutes. no one i really know buildstheir own race

cars where i live. but if you buy enough books andread enough stuff on the internet, you can kind of dowhatever you want in life. so i was an investment banker. i was doing mortgage-backedsecurities and ceos, and what they call securitization-- basically the bonds that becamethe toxic waste of our current economy. now we kept everything.

we didn't sell it to middleamerica and ruin banks like wall street gets punished for. mike spinelli: well,that's good. so karma's on your side. bill caswell: i guess. we had a huge portfolio of thestuff when the crisis hit. and the bank took awayour capital. and nine months into it,i'm like you know what? this is not that fun.

and a lot of my friends werelet go and laid off. and i'd been dating melaniefor seven years-- mike spinelli: you lookedat your hand. bill caswell: i'venow married. mike spinelli: soyour wife now. bill caswell: my wife now. i proposed to melanie. and i said give me nine monthsto go live my dreams. really i think i askedfor a summer.

in my head, it was a year. she says it was a summer. i say it was a year. right? mike spinelli: argue aboutthat one later. bill caswell: it was aboutjumping cars sideways through the woods with my friends. there was no other goal than togo check out some rallies, which take a day to getto, a couple days to

race, day to get home. and it was about running throughthe country in a rented panel van and gettingdrunk in small-town america, and having fun throwing acar sideways on dirt. i always wanted to do it. i watched it on tv since i wasa kid, like the isle of man videos and just driving. it's just so much fun. and so nine months into it,melanie is just like all

right, this is enough. it's time for you togo back to work. you got to go get a job. mike spinelli: you're an adult,man, and you got to-- bill caswell: and imean, it's not-- i'm not trying to paint abad picture of melanie. it's just that we met eachother in business school. we're both very driven people. and here i am justpartying nonstop.

mike spinelli: takinglike a 180-degree turn into the oblivion. who knew how that wasgoing to turn out. did you think you were goingto go back to work? bill caswell: oh, absolutely. mike spinelli: oh, ok. all right. bill caswell: and i stillmight have to. mike spinelli: ok.

bill caswell: right? i mean, we've been doing thisfor four years now. but back to that, she's likebill, seriously, this was supposed to be a summer. you been driving abunch of rallies. time for you to go find a job. and i'm like yeah,that makes sense. you want to start a family,this kind of thing. we're engaged.

we're supposed to get married. so i'm like all right. one last race. and i start searching theinternet for the largest race that i can find. and i realize the world rallychampionships are coming back to mexico. and i see this rallyamerica class. and i'm like oh, i racein rally america.

i didn't realize that that wasthe name of the rally prior to wrc back in 1979. that's what the eventwas called. mike spinelli: yeah. bill caswell: and they'reallowing a national class of competitors from mexicoto enter the race. they still had to befia legal cars. they still had to be proper racecars, still hundreds of thousands of dollars.

but i just assumedthat was for me. typical, self-centeredamerican. oh, it's all about-- but i decided i was goingto enter that race. and i said melanie, let me gorun this one last race. and when i come back,i'll go get a job. mike spinelli: out with abang, and there you go. bill caswell: yeah. it was someplace, right.

mike spinelli: so at one ofthe-- by the way, one of the best rallies in the world--this is like a really well known and well loved, and likea giant spectator base, and a really cool-- bill caswell: it is the coolest,most passionate race i've ever seen inmy entire life. the le mans without a doubtbigger, but it's like not everyone there'sa die-hard fan. mike spinelli: but youkind of roll in--

bill caswell: people arecrying at wrc mexico. they're so excited to seeloeb do 100 miles an hour over a jump. bill caswell: jumping upand down, freaking out. i've never signed autographsmy entire life. but because we were in the race,we signed hundreds, if not a thousand or moreautographs that weekend. it just feels big. it feels bigger to methan the indy 500.

it feels bigger than le mans,just because of the way the whole scene is opening. ceremonies at night, andturntables with confetti and underground tunnel stages. the streets are lined for miles,getting to the opening ceremonies. it's cool. mike spinelli: ok, so now thatsounds like you just sort of walked in there anddid your thing.

bill caswell: we showed up. i picked up ben slocum, myco-driver in missouri. i knew ben from rallying herein the states, but didn't really know him all that well. and he jumped in the van. and the two of us headed on downto mexico by ourselves, with no team, no crew. so it wasn't just that we ranthe full three-day wrc mexico event, but we did it withoutany service crew.

so we'd pull into our stops,and jump out and change our tires, weld the shock back in. sometimes we didn't have time. we actually just-- we'd takestuff out of the car that was broken, and we'd put it backin later at the next stop. it was a mess. it would have been nice to havea proper service crew, but no one wantedto come with. because they all said i wouldn'tbe allowed to race.

and when i got down there, theofficials were like you know? the cage looks safe. and he's got all theproper safety gear. and he's here. maybe we should justlet him race. and so we got to runthe full wrc stage miles all three days. it was the longest, largestrally i've ever run. and we finished third in ourclass, but still would've beat

wrc cars if we'd beenclassified in the proper fia wrc class. so it was cool, man. and i come back, and my textmessages to sam smith get organized into a story andpublished on jalopnik. so now sam puts that storytogether, puts it on jalopnik, and the thing explodes. and i think it could be-- ifit's not the top story-- bill caswell: it's the second.

second largest story jalopnik'sever published. mike spinelli: so whatthe hell happened? what happened after that? i mean, did the phone justring off the hook? bill caswell: nah,man, don't even-- it's like my facebook blew up. but no one called me tocome race porsches. but you know, at that point, i'mlike this is kind of fun. and maybe i should dosome more of this.

and i think really what promptedwas that i sold-- a bunch of people from hollywoodreached out to buy the life rights to the story. and i sold the story to jeremyrenner and his production company combine to turn intoa full hollywood movie production. and i'm like well, wait asecond, they're going to make a movie about me racing cars. maybe i should keep doing thisfor a little bit and see how

that movie thing shakes out. the movie needs an end. it needs a kind of characterdevelopment. bill caswell: well, the moveis about me quitting investment banking and goingafter my dream of being a rally car driver. and it's about me having funwith my friends and overcoming obstacles, and going after thedream that isn't necessarily society's dream.

and so it's thatkind of thing. mike spinelli: it'sa good pitch. bill caswell: yeah, with all theguys that lost their jobs or were laid off, or all of asudden forced into a sudden switch in their careers. and you're midlife and you takea look around you say is this really what i planned ondoing when i was a kid. i don't know. i mean, most of us were likei want to be an astronaut!

i want to be a firefighter! most just sit at cubicles andplay with spreadsheets. so it's about reestablishingwhat the dream is and going after it. and for me, it's huge, becausei've always been into racing. and i did some wheel-to-wheelracing before i got into finance. and i had a shifter car thati practiced with, and that kind of stuff.

but to me the motor sport dreamin america is broken. there's a disconnect. if you're a 15- 16-year-old kidgetting your license, want to be a pro driver? it's just not going to happen. and so the fact that someonecan take a $500 craigslist car, build it in their mom'sgarage, and go enter epic races, is kind of cool. whether you get sponsoredor not, you at

least get to go play. and that to me is awesome. mike spinelli: it is awesome. and a lot of other peoplethought it was awesome too. and thus, the caswelllegend is born. what did you do after that? this looks like baja. bill caswell: this is baja. so in the next nine months--

mike spinelli: so wait a minute,that's also an e30. tell me about what youdid to that car. bill caswell: thiswas kind of-- so the original story. you said people startedcalling. well, miller welders realizedthat like-- i happened to just walk into amiller welding store and just bought everything. because i didn't know.

i needed it all at once. so i bought miller this-- and miller called me and saidcome up and see us. and i drank too many beerswith them in the sponsor meeting thing and theysaid well, what do you want to do next? i'm like well, there's thisfrenchman schlesser, and he built his own schlesser buggyand he went to dakar. so i want to build my caswellbuggy and go to dakar.

and the room went silent, andthey kind of looked at me and like whatever. and the next morning, they'relike why don't you build that caswell buggy, but runthe baja 1000. you're going to have twoweeks to build it. it starts on thefloor of sema. and so i'd never been to sema. i tried to go the year before,but they told me i wasn't in the industry andwasn't allowed.

bill caswell: right, becauseit's like industry-only, which i thought was really funny. mike spinelli: i mean, that'sthe big aftermarket show in las vegas every year. bill caswell: correct. yes. mike spinelli: i mean,the thing is giant. it's insane. bill caswell: especiallyequipment manufacturers

association. it's every single floor spaceof las vegas is covered with cars and all the tuners andall the accessories. basically anything you buy fora car after it leaves the dealership is whathappens at sema. bill caswell: but it's notfor the general public. it's not like a northamerican auto show. bill caswell: right. so i wasn't allowed to go.

my first time there, i wasbuilding a car on the floor, which i thought wasreally cool. mike spinelli: itwas very cool. bill caswell: and i got tocall all my friends that helped me build the$500 rally car. i'm like you guys, we'regoing to sema. oh, really? how'd you get passes? well, we're goingto be working.

what are we going to be doing? mike spinelli: 24 hours a day. bill caswell: we're going totake an e30 and build it for the baja 1000. and they're like what? and i'm like, yeah,it'll be fine. mike spinelli: i love it. if i had a recording of allyour friends and how many times they've said what?

bill caswell: the emailsthat they send out. they're like, no, you'rekidding, right? i'm like no, seriously. so we dragged a e30 shell intosema, which was great, because it didn't have any wheels. it was on a forklift. it was like teeteringon the forklift. and there's niki lauda,formula one ferrari. and the guy's like going nuts.

don't move that. and they're like all these fansin the green hornet cars going, and all thesefamous cars. and we're rolling in thispile of junk, right? and in 14 days, we gave it like18 inches of suspension travel and 33-inch wheelsand kind of caged it. and we basically builtthe roll cage in and around the unibody. so the full unibody'sin there.

and the engine and thedrive line sits attached to the unibody. the occupants are a partof the unibody. but the suspension's tied intothe cage, which is then tied into the unibody. it was the only way to reallybuild the car at the show. if i did it differently,it would've looked a lot different. but i needed to build iton the floor of sema.

but then when i was done withthe four days, i had no plan. so we towed to san diego, andwe're going to finish in a walmart parking lotdown at the beach. and i swear to god, millergave us a generator. and we were just going to weldin the parking lot all night. and i realized i wasin huge trouble. by the time i towed to sandiego, i had something like eight days or something likethat to finish the car, take it to score and get the chassistag, tow to mexico and

make the start of the race. bill caswell: soi found a srd-- strategic racing designs ofvista, and these guys worked until 5:00 in the morning withthose two guys, plus my four or five friends. one guy's in marketing. one of the guys is a plumber. another guy used to be a serviceadvisor with bmw. we're all just like dudes withregular jobs welding this

thing together. and we finish. we finish the car, madethe start of the race. and sure, we ripped the steeringrack off 180 miles into the race. but i knew that'd be a problem,so i put two more steering racks behindthe seat. and we just changed them in thedesert by a campfire and kept going.

but the second rack we putin was pretty damaged. and by that point,we blew that out. we were like, we justneed to call it. and we were freezing too. you have no idea-- mike spinelli: and inthe desert, it's-- bill caswell: i didn'tthink about that. it's like mexico and baja. i've been to cabo.

it's warm. i wear flip-flops. i've never been so cold. there's no windshield. you're like 80 miles an hourthrough the desert in like 30 degree weather upover mountains. yeah, we were freezing. so yeah, this is what the carkind of turned out like. we mounted two big wheelson the back.

mike spinelli: but that'sreally cool. because baja's sort oflike that anyway. there are a lot of amateurs andpeople that have their own crews and go down there. bill caswell: yeah,but i didn't know. mike spinelli: but it's alsotrophy trucks and stuff. bill caswell: hugetrophy trucks. huge teams and helicoptersand planes supporting it. we just watched "dust of glory"like four or five times

in a row while buildingthe car. that was our only research. mike spinelli: that'sone of the best-- bill caswell: they madeit look a lot easier. there's paved roads, andthere's big pits. and the teams are everywhere. i thought it'd be ok. mike spinelli: but best-- by theway, i don't know if it's on netflix.

but "dust of glory"is a must-watch documentary about baja 1000. it's amazing. bill caswell: agree. bill caswell: totally agree. mike spinelli: all right,so you did baja. it didn't work out so great. then from there, you went--so what happened-- bill caswell: well, that wasall in the first year.

so the first year, i finishedwrc mexico. i decided we wanted to go watchpike's peak, because tajima and rhys millenwere battling for that 10 minute time. bill caswell: and when i waslooking at the spectator information, i realized i couldactually drive in the event, because there wasa class for rally cars. so i called my friends, and i'mlike hey we're going to pike's peak.

and so we took the same $500car, and it was kind of slow going up the mountain. but i went and ranpike's peak. and then the miller thinghappened, went to baja. and then from then on, i've justbeen racing and entering rallies, and having fun anddoing some wheel-to-wheel stuff here and there. like i took some of the cars andentered nasa events at the local track just for fun.

i got to tell you when you drivesideways over jumps in the woods, lapping your localracetrack becomes a little less interesting. and then one of my other bigbucket lists was targa newfoundland which i ran thisfall with vr performance out of michigan. i've known them forever. back when i was a banker,i used to go to their track days.

and horst reinhardt, jr., oneof the owners, called me and say hey, why don't you drivemy e46 m3 in targa newfoundland. i mean i don't getcalls like that. none of my friends getcalls like that. mike spinelli: that'sa good call to get. bill caswell: it's agood call to get. and not to mislead anyone,it's not like i'm a great driver and they're like we'responsoring you to drive.

i paid half the fees. it drives me nuts when peopletalk about getting the call. they get in the seat, andit's really they paid to get in the seat. i mean, i split it with horst. but he gave me a proper wellprepared modern fast car to drive, which was nice, and wefinished second in class behind acp-- andrew comrie-picard.

pro-rally driver, sponsoredby scion, racing the scion x-something or other,lunch box car. mike spinelli: yeah,the xd, right? bill caswell: it's likea lunchbox on wheels. sorry, andrew, it is. it's like a little lunchbox. mike spinelli: so had you-- i mean i'm assuming you'ddriven in a tarmac rally before, right?

or no? bill caswell: the very firstevent that i went to was a tarmac rally-- and anders green, who basicallyis the reason why i'm rallying. we showed up like two hoursbefore the race, and he still got us into it. and he said to me most roadracers never make it past the second stage.

i'm like huh. and he's like if you're havinga moment at every corner, you're going too fast, andyou need to back it down. well, i rolled the window up,and i looked at sam, my co-driver, and i'm like i don'tthink he knows what he's talking about. sure enough, second stage there,we are just sliding right off the road. so he was like spot on.

so this is my first time goingback to a tarmac rally. and it's five days acrossnewfoundland, like northeastern nova scotia. and it's wild. every year, hurricanes come in,so you can see the roads are crazy wet. you have to run onstreet tires. you can't use fancyrace tires. you get six tires for theduration of the week.

we finished second in class. we did it on the dunlopdirezza zis, which i think are cool. and i ran the lastrally in street tires too, just simply-- anyway, so finished second. we beat everyone in theunlimited class above us which was cool, saw the highhorsepower, high-turbo cars, the semi-factory fiat 500 carsthat show up in a semi truck

with samuel hubinetteand jen horsey. mike spinelli: the chryslerteam, was it-- maybe-- mike spinelli: itwas a factory-- bill caswell: to call it thechrysler team might be a little strong. but is it a semi truck with abunch of chrysler engineers? like yeah. mike spinelli: well, perhaps.

bill caswell: and so our car hadair conditioning, nav, and a co-driver who had neverraced before. tons of laps on a racetrack,but had never actually ever competed. bill caswell: and horstis great, man. the guy's been inthe military. he's as cool as can be. but the first stage, i don'tthink he said a word. he was just smiling.

but i was ripping through thesethings, like horst, you got to keep talking, man. mike spinelli: you got togive me some direction. bill caswell: even if you don'tread notes, just talk. just getting up thereand talk. tell me about the shipin the harbor. tell me about the boatthat's out there. just talk into themike, right? but he was having such agood time just smiling.

by the second day, horstwoke up just dialed. and he's reading the notes,and it was just spot on in the odo. and to give horst credit, wedidn't have a rally computer. and i've never useda rally computer. and i didn't realize how--because you have pace notes. so you have a corner and acorner and a corner, and you check the corners offas you go through. well, they give us two noteswhich would be like two miles

off is a hard right. another three milesis a hard left. and you kind of need to know,as you're clicking down that mileage till you get there. so we bought a garmin gps andstuck it to the windshield. but the odo was likeeight-point font. so horst is reading thiseight-point font odo. so we're coming up with stuff. he's like "you have acaution over crest.

jump in, in--" andi'm like horst? like now? or in like a mile?"in, in point--" and, he's like [inaudible]big shaking. he's like it's coming up, butyou're not that close, in 0.8. in 0.8, you've got the jump. all right, man, i gotit, i got it. 0.6, 0.5, 0.3, and he's readingdown the thing. i mean, we were just-- itwas really cool to--

he's a good friend of mine,and it was really cool to watch how quickly thetwo of us synced up. and by like the second daywhen the hurricane came through and started pouringrain, we were just on and it was a blast. and it's fun. it's like pouring rain. you're 120 miles an hourover mountain roads. mike spinelli: it's reallydramatic scenery too.

bill caswell: it's beautifulup there, man. absolutely-- mike spinelli: it mustbe very cool. bill caswell: it's probablyone of the most beautiful places i've ever been. it's pristine. it's clean. it's immaculate. the people are really nice.

you have these like-- you cometo these small fishing villages, and they feedyou lunch for the day. you get to hang out andsee what's going on. i mean, it is sucha good time. they breathalyze youevery morning. and i'm being serious, right? it was a big concernfor my team. i was going to say. bill caswell: but i had a planwhere every time we finished

the stage on the way back to theservice park, we went by the grocery store and filledthe trunk with beer. so we just started drinkingright at 5 o'clock, so that we could go and get a full 12-hoursleep and be rested for the next day,which was fun. mike spinelli: because peoplemake that mistake, where they'll go out-- bill caswell: oh, there'sa bunch of people-- mike spinelli: --get wayloaded at night and--

bill caswell: --that blew overthe breathalyzer, that blew the breathalyzer andcouldn't race. you're out of the race. and so to spend all the moneyand go up there, and then screw that up becauseyou drank is stupid. mike spinelli: because i meanyou're serious about the-- bill caswell: i'm deadserious about it. once i get in the car, i'mdialed and focused. it's just what happens up andto then is a problem.

so someday there'll be a proteam that'll like wall me off, and not allow me to go out andhave fun and this and that. i mean, for example, crawfordperformance. i'm now working with them, andthey're developing their turbo brz, 530-foot pounds of torque,510 horsepower. i think when he put it out indecember, it was the first fully-built internal engineturbo brz in the states. i think there might havebeen an frs in japan. that's it.

the car absolutely flies. and it's fast, man. it's one of the fastest carsi've driven, and i get good night sleeps. and i don't party beforei drive this thing. mike spinelli: but you'redriving this in time attack. bill caswell: that's correct. so it's time attack. so it's one car at a time.

fastest lap wins. mike spinelli: what eventshave you done so far? bill caswell: we did like ared-line time attack, at button willow. we've done some track days todevelop the software, we're playing cool games withthe-- we deleted out-- i don't know if i should betalking about all this. we deleted out the factory-- we deleted out thefactory traction.

controlling and programming ourown software into the ecu that calculates like wheelslip and then adjusts characteristics of the engine tomake it easier to drive as the car starts to slip, withoutgiving away too much of what's going onover at crawford. but all i can tell you isthat the first time-- mike spinelli: oh, by the way,there's your caswell sticker. bill caswell: yeah, exactly. mike spinelli: [inaudible].

bill caswell: i can tell you thefirst time we took it out, the car was a monster and wouldjust light up its wheels all the way down thestraightaway. i mean, you were slightly outof-- you hit a bump, whatever, the car just whaaaa. i mean it was likea drift machine. i think if i had to drive thiscar before doing the rally stuff, i would have beenreally concerned. but the rally sort of helpedyou with the traction.

bill caswell: thecar is sideways through most of the track. it's just makingtoo much power. and we're on street tires. and so it's just the nature oftime attack and what we're doing with the streetcar,street interior and stock seats. the next phase is a properlydeveloped-- i mean, this is a properlydeveloped chassis, but it's

not meant for a full-on race. it's not caged. it's not like crazyrace spring rates. this is meant to be a turbopackage that you can buy from crawford, drive around town,drive to work, take to the track, enter time attack inlike a street or somewhat modified class, and thendrive back home. so it's meant to be usable anddriveable and fun, not like at the limit, knife-edge,fastest car possible.

mike spinelli: not giant wing. bill caswell: butthat comes next. no, i'm serious. we have a new chassis that we'repicking up next week that is getting fully guttedwith like active aero and cage, and probably a wide bodyand full ground effects, and giant splitters and will be, iguess, my car to drive until i screw it up. mike spinelli: and crawford'shad some serious drivers.

bill caswell: yeah,it's an honor. it's actually-- for me, it's ahuge honor to be working with crawford, because his previousdriver was tarzan yamada out of japan. he's got video games in japanafter him where you get to race tarzan. tanner foust drove for himbefore signing with scion and doing drift. and prior to that, he workedwith ken block on the gymkhana

subarus before kenwent to ford. and for me, the crawford thing'skind of special, because i built my rallycar in june of '09. i then went to california,because we were looking at apartments, and i saw xgames was going on. so i went and saw my firstrally cars at x games. and then i saw somecrawford stickers. and i knew crawfordbuilt ken's car. and i wanted to be faster.

this is my practice mule. and later i was going to builda proper rally car. so i actually wentto crawford. and i went in. i stopped by his shop. and i said hey, i'mbill caswell. i built my first rally car. i haven't run itin gravel yet. but i'm going to go out tochicago, and i'm going to need

a shop to build me aproper rally car. and i know you build fastcars, and sat down and talked to them. and i said all right, i'llsee you in two years. and i'm serious. it was two and a half yearslater that crawford called me and asked if i'd come in to talkabout driving his cars. bill caswell: so it was reallywild to go there. mike spinelli: so you didthat, the babe ruth--

bill caswell: i mean,i didn't know. i thought i was going to be inthere like buying stuff, not asking to work with them todevelop these cars, which i got to tell you, dude, that isthe most fun i've had on a racetrack in a long, longtime, at the brz. mike spinelli: oh,it's got to be. it looks insane. bill caswell: it's just 01corvette fast down the straightaways.

it was just stupid fast howthe power comes on. and it doesn't let up. i mean, i'm not a turbo guy. i'm used to drivingbmws, and they're all naturally aspirated. i drive this thing, and itfirst reminded me of the stories you hear about the 930porsche race cars back in the day, where they just comeon like a cannon. straight engine, thecar just goes.

i actually love red line. because i get a second tobreathe, before i have to grab the next gear. i'm serious. just [inaudible]. ok. so yes, the crawford'sthing's cool, man. mike spinelli: so, let's talkabout the 30 for a second, because that's been yourpredominant car.

bill caswell: it has been. actually, i've just switchedthough for rallies. so i left e30, and i wentto the e36 hatchback chassis, the ti. mike spinelli: the ti that youjust ran at the-- we were going to mention this before. we forgot. and we kind of blew-- we've beengabbing this whole time. it's the empire state--

bill caswell: performancerally. mike spinelli: performancerally. bill caswell: espr. mike spinelli: notthat far from-- bill caswell: 90 minutes. mike spinelli: --wherewe are in new york. bill caswell: rockhill,new york, 90 minutes west of manhattan. running through subdivisionsin sort of a foothill.

i don't even know, hills-- it's like mountainy andhilly up there. it's by monticello raceway. yeah, it's wild. i think one stage, we wentthrough 150 driveways. seriously. i only had a couple of momentswhere i actually looked away from the road. and i thought i was putting amailbox through wyatt's side

of the car. mike spinelli: wyatt knox. bill caswell: yeah,wyatt knox. two-wheel drive, national rallychampion, rally america in 2011, i guess it was-- team o'neill chief instructor. one of the fastest guys in theus in at least a two-wheel drive rally car. i'd like to see what he can doin a proper open class car.

wyatt can drive. he's a friend of mine. he's been doing me a favor andco-driving with me, just so i can work on gettingbetter i guess. and we just have a goodtime racing together. so wyatt and i went to espr. for me, it was a differentsort of rally. i've got a trailer,and this and that. but i decided i would try todrive the race car from

chicago to the rally, rally it,and drive home, because it's a tarmac rally. mike spinelli: tarmac. it's tarmac. bill caswell: it's big roads. mike spinelli: it's[inaudible]. bill caswell: andthen of course-- am i allowed to plug-- i'm allowed to plug companiesand stuff, right?

i mean, that's like fair. am i supposed to be looking atthis camera the whole time? mike spinelli: you lookat anything you want. you're killing the floor. no, actually, i forgot. there's a caswellsticker on it. bill caswell: yeah, there is. mike spinelli: you might wantto-- yeah, just take that off. there you go.

bill caswell: so anyway-- but we did so well in targanewfoundland on those dunlops. and i loved them. they weren't full-onrace sticky tires. but they're so driveable thati was able to do things in that e46 m3 and slide andrecover it because they had a lot of feel. so i called up dunlop and waslike, hey, i'm going to run in this tarmac rally.

can i try your new zii tires? so they sent me the direzza ziiswhich are the really the newest iteration of the onesi raced on at targa. and i drove on thosesame set of tires all the way out there. i raced on it. and then i hit a littleguardrail on the end of the day saturday. that's such a minor hit.

mike spinelli: we gotto show that. bill caswell: i wasjust so tired. mike spinelli: i mean, youjust come flying in. it's so hot. and you know something'sgoing to happen. bill caswell: i nailedit the stage before. mike spinelli: you did,right, you did. bill caswell: nailed itthe stage before. mike spinelli: to yourcredit, you did.

bill caswell: i wasin california. i flew to chicago. i had like 36 hoursto prep the car. i got four hours of sleep. i then started drivingto the event. the battery died. first, i got pulled over. and it wasn't even for me. it's just the cop turnedthe lights on.

i assumed because i'm drivinga race car on the road. and it's street legal. it's got a cat, registered,insured. but i assumed he waspulling me over. i went to go restart the carand the battery was dead. yeah, i know. thanks to that batterycompany. anyway, so i don't needto nail them. it's fine.

they're good guys. but the battery dies. it's like 3:00 in the morning. we call a tow truck. i sit there for an hour. truck shows up. i bribe the tow truck driver togo through a 24-hour truck stop, where i run into the back,and i find a mechanic who gets me this likesemi truck battery.

it's the biggest damn thingi've ever seen. but luckily my wiring'sredone. i just dropped it in theback of the car, and hooked it back up. i also gave him $20 for his voltmeter in his toolbox, so i could make sure the alternatorwas running. and once i checked that in themiddle of the truck stop, i went back inside and saidhey, can you tow me to holiday inn a mile up?

so they unloaded my brokencar at the holiday inn. i got like three and a halfhours sleep, woke up, hooked the new battery up, andstarted cranking back east to new york. got into that stupidhurricane monsoon thing that rolled through. and i should have checkedthe maps. i drove with the eye of thestorm for like 12 hours all the way across.

if i'd just waited anhour, i could have driven in clean weather. but no, i stayed in thestupid eye of the storm the whole way. and thanks to dunlop-- your tires rule. the car is actually driveablein monsoon rain. i know i'm plugging them. but, dude, they'vebeen good to me.

i don't take product fromcompanies i don't believe in. so if i'm talking about aproduct, it means i would've paid money for that product. it's what i race on. it's not like i'm just whoringmyself out to sponsors. i just don't do that. so i feel comfortable. well, anyway-- mike spinelli: well, real quick,because the e30 is such

an icon car. bill caswell: yeah, i know. mike spinelli: they'regoing up in value. bill caswell: that's partof the problem. i can get the e36 ti cheaper. mike spinelli: well, yeah, butwhat was it about the e30 in general that made the carthat you were going to-- bill caswell: it's the firstcar i ever owned. it was my car in college.

bill caswell: and so back inchicago, when it would rain and snow, i'd take thecar out at 2:00 in the morning and drive. there were these bigsubdivisions being built at the time, and they hadno houses in them. and sometimes they had chainsand stuff on the front gate. i shouldn't be talkingabout this stuff. but the point is i go in thesnow and just drive this thing sideways all day long, andused to just love it.

crank the music upand have fun. and so that motor blewits timing belt. and then i went back-- i went and got my job,and i was working. i lived above a barnes noble. i was playing chess. i was playing allthese chess-- i was reading chess books. i go running on thelake front.

there's a chess pavilion. i'd play the homeless guys,and they'd beat me. mike spinelli: yeah, becausethey're great. bill caswell: andi'd giving these homeless guys my dollars. and i'm like i've got a graduatelevel education, and i can't beat the homeless guy? so i went to the bookstore, andbought a book on chess and started studying.

bill caswell: till they wouldn'tplay me anymore, and kind of ruined it. but so then one dayi got looking for anything else to read. and i found a chilton manualon how to repair cars. so i towed that e30 home, andthat was the first time i ever worked on a car. i went to sears. i bought some tools.

mike spinelli: so you'recompletely self-taught. i mean just literally youcouldn't get more self-taught than you. other than asking otherpeople and stuff. yeah, i don't know. i mean, i don't-- mike spinelli: but you didn'tgo to like lincoln tech or something-- bill caswell: no, man.

i don't even have friendsthat are mechanics. i don't know anyone-- now, i know people that workon their own cars. but at the time, my momwas like you should be playing more golf. mike spinelli: thanks, mom. bill caswell: i know. and so i got done buildingthe car. and i'm like now whatdo i do with it.

it's still worth $500. and someone's like well, youshould go autocross it. and i was like i don't wantto race through cones. and i went there and got crushedby the competition. so i bought a bookon autocross. mike spinelli: on autocross. bill caswell: i'm serious. mike spinelli: because you livedabove barnes and noble. bill caswell: soloto competition.

it was like this old 911 on thecover going around a cone. and did that for a little bit. and started doing really,really well. and then they're like you needto go to the race track. because like a local bmw shop,this guy leo franchi was like it's time for you to go to thetrack and come through my shop on saturdays. and i'll give you myold racing parts. and you can go to the track.

and that started with that. so originally, i only knewhow to work on the e30s. it's the only car i've evertouched with tools. it's what my book taughtme how to work on. so i don't reallyknow subarus. mike spinelli: so you're justcomfortable with it. bill caswell: yeah, i cantell people how to fix those over the phone. i know them cold.

bill caswell: usea 13 mill bolt. take this out. then take that. i can see the whole carin 3d in my head. so it's easy when we haveproblems to be able to repair the car. like when we hit the guardrailin espr, we had an hour to repair the car. and we just took it out,stretched the frame.

we hooked up to a truck,stretched the frame thing back out, put the radiator backin, patched the radiator. mike spinelli: and like when youwent to mexico, that was-- whenever stuff happenedin service, you guys knew what to do. you could just-- i mean, there's only a few otherguys i'd actually want helping-- that i think arefaster than me on the car. bill caswell: like,i built it.

i know the car. i know what's in it. i can tear it apart quickerthan most of my friends. so why shouldn't ibe wrenching on it, working on it. mike spinelli: and real quick,because this is-- so these stickers-- so thecaswell sticker mafia is just like really, really, really-- bill caswell: it gets startedin the baja 1000.

bill caswell: i was told thatthe guys in the service band, they were going to beroaming around baja. they needed to bring stickers,porn, and i think some beer. something like that? they're like the best thing youdo is buy a bunch of porn mags and a bunch of stickers,and fill the car with them. and as you go through all thepolice checkpoints, you just throw porn and stickers outthe window and keep going. mike spinelli: that'sa kind of bribery.

bill caswell: that'swhat all the-- that's what the oldguys told me. that's what the oldguys told me. like, bring stickers and porn. i'm like all right. we didn't actuallybring any mags. but i printed 10,000caswell stickers. and we handed those out. and people loved them.

and they went all over the bajaplacing them everywhere. and we had fun. i had no idea how much fun itwas to stick a sticker on something, like a child. it's really fun. mike spinelli: it's fununtil you got-- tell me about that time youwere in the bar and the-- was it the bar owneror the bartender? bill caswell: is thatthe missouri one?

mike spinelli: i don't know. was that missouri? where was that where youhad a little trouble. bill caswell: it wasat 100 acre woods. and one of the locals at 100acre woods, and the dude-- he also races a rally car. he runs the [inaudible] subaru car, evan cline. absolutely freaked out.

(surfer accent) so angry atyour goddamn stickers. (normal voice) i'mlike really? they're just stickers, man. they're just stickers. mike spinelli: and theypeel off fairly easy. bill caswell: yeah, they'rehigh-quality vinyl. they leave no residue. they're not like permanenttagging. but yeah, i walk into the bar,and i'm seeing all my friends,

and he just knocks me down. i get up. i'm like dude, really. and he pushes me and knocksme down again. he's like fight me! mike spinelli: stickers! bill caswell: no, he'slike fight me now! and i'm like really, evan? they're just stickers, dude.

and then his buddy is one of thelocal guys there, comes in and he's like i've beenpissing on your stickers all night. and i'm like what? and i'm like you reachedinto the urinal to put my sticker there? i'm like yo, dude, thank you. it's like one of the nicestthing anyone's ever done. you realize now everyone inthe bar has now seen the

caswell sticker? mike spinelli: yeah,a few times. that's probably the bestplace to put it. bill caswell: i'm stilllaughing, because i just can't believe someone could get soangry over the stickers. so the bar owner throwsthe local guy out. and he calls a bunchof his friends. and there's 20 of them waitingin the parking lot outside the bar.

and so the other drivers arelike, dude, i think you might have a problem. and one of the guys pulls up andsaid a guy was shot dead in the parking lot like ninemonths prior at the same bar. mike spinelli: oh, crap. yeah. bill caswell: and i'm likethere's no way and we pulled the news story. it's like "man killedat the roadhouse."

we're like holy [bleep]. yeah, so who knew? bill caswell: so i goto the bathroom, and i call state police. and i'm like yeah, there'sa posse waiting in the parking lot. i know someone was killedin this thing like nine months ago. we're ok taking ourchances, but like

you've now been warned. and if another guy gets shot,and you guys didn't do anything, it's probablylike a problem. so i hang up. and like 10 minutes later,the state police roll in. they're like who's caswell? i'm like i am! and so paul donlin, who's myco-driver at the time-- the cops walked us out.

and they're like all right,so where's your car? and paul and i lookat each other. and neither of us can drive. we were going to catcha ride out of there. so the guys are now yelling atthe police about the stickers. and the state police are likeare you guys kidding? and we just jump inthe back of this-- there's like this couple andthey've got their suv and a bunch of friends.

and we just open the doorsand get in with them. and they're like whoare you guys? you just got to take usinto town, drop us at the holiday inn. please. so we end up catching a ridewith some total strangers. we're like, dude, see all thisstuff that's going on? it's actually really stupid. it's kind of embarrassing thatpeople get so upset, they want

to start a fightover stickers. mike spinelli: over stickers. bill caswell: but imean, i get it. the issue now is that it's notreally me doing the tagging. i think i printed like 90,000 or100,000 of these stickers. so they're on the signs ofthe equator in kenya. one of the guys-- mike spinelli: that'sthe cool thing. because they're everywherenow.

i mean, they're allover the world. bill caswell: yeah they are kindof all over the world. someone's actually swears thatthey put it in one of the cargo containers andit's up in the international space station. i mean, i'm like dude,there's no way. and he's like yeah, dude, ipromise you it's on the inside of the last shipment of cargocontainer that's sitting up in the internationalspace station.

mike spinelli: so there maybe a caswell sticker. bill caswell: i know that whenwe toured the rahal letterman alms haulers, we taggedall the drivers' lockers on the inside. but they did reallywell at that race. so it's like a superstitionwith drivers. and the stickers actuallystayed up. and i think they might still bein the haulers right now. so the drivers' lockers, thefire suits, so it's like

sorry, joey, bill. but that's fun. mike spinelli: yeah, yeah. bill caswell: but no,we're just having a good time with it. it's not meant to be anythingmore than just fun. mike spinelli: cool. so what's the very next thing? so you're doing thecaldwell thing.

bill caswell: the next thing isdriving for crawford this summer in time attack. mike spinelli: didi say caldwell-- i meant crawford. bill caswell: crawford,yeah, it's all good. i'm caswell. he's crawford. caldwell's in the middle. no, so driving for crawford.

crawford's doing some coolstuff for the brz. the next event i'll be atis rally west virginia. it's 170 miles of stage milesbased out of snowshoe mountain at the top of this resortin west virginia. it's going to bea great event. so yeah, i'm kind ofexcited for that. and then we'll see whereit takes me. mike spinelli: yeah, man. bill caswell: oh.

what i am doing is next week-- i don't know when this comesout-- or next month, sorry. next month, i'm going to 24hours in [inaudible]. and then we're driving downthrough the alps to f1 monaco, all in one week. cool. bill caswell: yeah,why not, right? mike spinelli: yeah, why not? bill caswell: i can takevacations from my vacation.

mike spinelli: so you're stillon vacation, technically? or you do some work though. bill caswell: i do work,but it's all kind of behind the scenes. i sell my caswell shirts andbuild, race, party pint glasses and we'll ramp-- mike spinelli: build,race, party, by the way, is this sticker. you'll see that sticker,i'm sure.

bill caswell: so i've beenpaying rent by selling stickers, pint glasses. i have skateboards comingout, that kind of stuff. but the next goal is to finda way to monetize this lifestyle, so i can keepracing and having fun. otherwise, it means maybe goingand getting a desk job, which would be a bummer afterfour years of doing this. mike spinelli: thatwould be a bummer. bill caswell: it's ok, though.

i mean, i could sit in a cubiclefor 20 years now, just living off the memoriesof what i'm been able to do with my racing. mike spinelli: well,that's cool. that's very cool. and you do a lotof cool stuff. and i'm sure you're goingto be doing more cool stuff, mr. caswell. bill caswell: i hope so.

thanks. mike spinelli: goodto see you, man. bill caswell: good to see you. mike spinelli: i'llsee you very soon. "after/drive."facebook.com/drivetv, @drive on twitter, comments below. i will see you guys next week.

Codec Collection for Your PC

Here is list 

File Name	Size (MB)	Torrent Download	Seeder	Leecher	Status
Final Codecs 2008 (Codecs for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray)	74974042	Download	2	0	Valid Link
DVD Rebuilder Pro Pack - Full and Video - Codecs + Encoders (1-07)	64274290	Download	0	1	Valid Link
Final Codecs 2008 (Codecs for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray)	76052007	Download	0	0	Bad Link
FinalCodecs 2008 (Codecs for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Included) - New Edition	75094723	Download	0	1	Bad Link
AVS DVD Player (DVD Player With Codec)-FL	23377530	Download	0	1	Bad Link
Windows media player DVD Codecs thats work	9875818	Download	21	1	Bad Link
All Video Codecs for Mediaplayer for 2008 2007 dvd dvdrip avi mpeg[720p].exe	7520768	Download	0	1	Bad Link
Pack of codec dvd avi player	15297769	Download	0	1	Bad Link
FinalCodecs 2008 (Codecs for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray)-FL.rar	75303280	Download	0	1	Bad Link
DVD.and.Movie.Tools.Codecs.Programs[Amrodyrius]	145230743	Download	0	1	Bad Link
Divx Codec Pakage 2007 2008 dvdrip dvd windows xp.rar	4524529	Download	0	1	Bad Link
Updated Codec Pakage for all media players[dvd dvdrip avi divx].rar	8194923	Download	0	1	Bad Link
FinalCodecs 2008 (Codecs for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Included) - Updated	75039553	Download	0	1	Bad Link
Dvd codec for windows media player 10 (SILVERBLADE).rar	208253	Download	1	0	Bad Link
DVD Rebuilder Pro Pack - Full and Video - Codecs + Encoders (1-07)	64254939	Download	0	1	Bad Link
FinalCodecs 2008 (Codecs for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Included)	74957253	Download	0	1	Bad Link
DVD Rebuilder Pro Pack - Full and Video - Codecs + Encoders (1-07) rar	63002034	Download	0	1	Bad Link
FinalCodecs 2008 Codecs for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Included	74986319	Download	0	1	Bad Link
FinalCodecs 2008 (Codecs for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Included)	74976206	Download	1	0	Bad Link
Super DVD Ripper Version 1.90 Full + ACE_Mega_Codec_5.01_Pro_XP_7.zip	26481756	Download	0	1	Bad Link

sooo. i know their have been threads already concerning this but none of them addressed what i...

sooo. i know their have been threads already concerning this but none of them addressed what i wanted to know so here it goes.


my car is obd1 so from headers it joins togethor for a stretch for the o2 sensor.
im thinking if i cut it here, and weld in a Y pipe i'd only need one cutout.


image hijacked from another thread to show where i mean.

youll see the o2 sensor is after the piece i'd wana cut so i was thinking plug that hole and within the y pipe id be using just b4 it Y's tap a hole and put it there.

ideas?
opinions?

things you should know.

i dont have the money to spend on a nice exhaust,
and i really like the idea of being able to cruise around quietly and then open it up when im in the country and hearing the raw engine sound (alot of people complain about the buzzyness or w/e, that doesnt bother me i like me some raw sound)

from what i can gather for me:

pros:
can drive home quietly and not wake up people.
can drive home loudly and wake up people :evil2
ability to have on demand loud engine
cons:
space constraints
cost (around 100-200 depending how its done)
possible problems with having opening that close to headers.
sooo. i know their have been threads already concerning this but none of them addressed what i...

Hi there, I have a BMW E36 318i 1995 semi-automatic convertible. A couple of days ago my...

Hi there,

I have a BMW E36 318i 1995 semi-automatic convertible. A couple of days ago my rollover protection bars deployed on a jumpy road, luckily it was a sunny day so the top was down. I got the rollover bars reset with the aid of a katana, as the specific tool did not come with the toolkit. So far so good, but the top never worked again.

The issue is that there is no movement or noise at all when operating the top button. Things I have already tried and checked :

- changed all 3 fuses # 7, 35 and 43 in the fuse box. There is no fuse by the battery in the trunk in my car. The fuses were alright and no changes.

- Disengaged both motors as per emergency procedure (lever under back seat), folded the top into it's towaway compartment and re-engaged the motors to do the top reset procedure pushing top up with key in position 2 as shown in the famous reset video. No movement or noise.

I have top lid (tonneau) switch confirming operation locking-unlocking the trunk as I push the lid down, and the motors disengage and re-engage fine, but no power gets to them apparently.

Currently I have both motors disengaged and I am using the top in manual mode. I recently changed the top's back plastic window as in semi-auto mode it never folded evenly and it teared with the use. The problem with it is the lid (tonneau) cover which takes re-engaging the top lid motor every time one wants it fully shut, then disengaging the top lid motor again to put the top up, and opening the trunk when the top's down by pushing the lid in for the microswitch to release the trunk lock. Not quite Ivy League.

I have no way of reading the ECU and as far as I see all cables from the top control in the back seat side, motors and lid hatches are as they should. If there is a sensor not telling the top control that the rollover protection is back into starting position, I don't know where to find it or how to check it, but I get no error lights in the dashboard either.

My question is, is there something else I can do to troubleshoot this problem before I give up ? Going to the dealer is out of the question.

Thanks a pantload guys !
Hi there, I have a BMW E36 318i 1995 semi-automatic convertible. A couple of days ago my...

I am new to BMWs and interested in the 3 series and 1 series. I was wondering wherher there are...

I am new to BMWs and interested in the 3 series and 1 series. I was wondering wherher there are certain years and models that have earned a reputation for being super reliable and low / easy maintenance, that are known to go to 150k miles (or for the 1 series, expected to go) without maintenance surprises.
I am new to BMWs and interested in the 3 series and 1 series. I was wondering wherher there are...

Never-used diffuser for sale. It has been sitting in the garage. Has holes for bolts on the...

Never-used diffuser for sale. It has been sitting in the garage. Has holes for bolts on the bottom and 3m tape. $250 shipped


Never-used diffuser for sale. It has been sitting in the garage. Has holes for bolts on the...