building a SCORE Baja 1000 race car in four days. Caswell, an unemployed banker and novice welder, arrived at the big SEMA auto show in Vegas with a 22-year-old BMW, a bunch of tools and a pile of steel tubing. Over the course of the show, he and a handful of friends turned the car into, well, a sticker-slathered monstrosity wearing two of the largest tires ever stuck onto a 1988 325i.

But despite Caswell’s best efforts, the car was nowhere near completion when SEMA closed its doors at 4 p.m. Friday.

Caswell’s friends have gone home and he’s alone in a rented house in San Diego. He has a week and a half until the Baja 1000 commences. He hasn’t registered for the race but intends to make the start. Right now, his car looks like nothing so much as an pile of chromoly steel and Bavarian upchuck. It has an incomplete driveline and no front suspension, yet Caswell refuses to give up. He is, at this very moment, still welding.

Demented? Perhaps. Desperate? Maybe. But it’s also very, very cool.

As we mentioned before, Caswell was working in the booth that welding-supply company Miller Electric set up at the Specialty Equipment Market Association shindig in Vegas. He and a small band of friends — many of whom arrived without warning to lend a hand — managed to fabricate and install a roll cage, build and install a rear subframe and suspension, weld together four anvil-sized suspension kingpins and hubs and build a front subframe from scratch.

Friday night, the show over but Caswell still welding furiously, the car was dropped from its stands, wheeled outside on a dolly and lifted, rickshaw-like, onto a trailer. Caswell towed it to San Diego, where he is today, working like a madman.

The car, if and when it’s finished, will feature two-foot long suspension arms and long-travel, three-foot-long, remote-reservoir Bilstein shocks. A 3.0-liter straight six, producing roughly 240 horsepower and yanked from a 1995 BMW M3, will provide power. Other interesting hardware includes a five-speed BMW gearbox, a Speedway Engineering differential and a whole lot of bailing wire and chewing gum. It’ll look something like this:

We’ve seen a lot of weird projects and, frankly, we’re not sure how this one’s going to turn out. Conservative estimates say the car is 100 hours from being drivable, much less sorted and tested for a 1000-mile race through the desert. Most people — us included — would simply give up.

Bill Caswell is not most people. Remember, we’re talking about a guy who bought a 1991 BMW for $500 on Craigslist, made it into a rally racer and took third in his class at WRC Corona Rally Mexico competing against teams with six-figure budgets. Then he raced it in the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb.

Maybe we’re just giant weenies. Maybe we don’t have properly sized cojones, to use a Baja-appropriate term. Or maybe Caswell is a raving nutbag. Whatever the case, Caswell’s latest adventure is like watching a car crash — no matter the outcome, we can’t bring ourselves to turn away. Or to stop hoping he’ll make it.

You can follow Caswell’s progress on Facebook, where he posts regular updates. (He’s looking for donated shop space in the San Diego area. Drop him a line if you can help.) If he makes it to Baja, we’ll be right there with him, running chase and chronicling the wonderful weirdness that is Baja racing. In the meantime, if you’ve got any good karma, send it to Southern California. One guy out there needs it.

Photos: Sam Smith/Wired.com.

See Also:

• At SEMA, One Man Builds a BMW for Baja
• 15 Craziest Things We Saw at SEMA
• 15 Agonizing Automotive Atrocities
• 10 Automotive Atrocities Owned by You, Our Readers

The front subframe of Bill Caswell’s Baja BMW under construction.

A TIG-welded front suspension kingpin and wheel spindle. It was welded and assembled at SEMA.

Caswell’s team dragging his car out of the Las Vegas Convention Center at the end of SEMA.

Authors: Sam Smith

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