Then he entered the WRC Corona Rally Mexico. He had no crew. He knew squat about rally racing. And he kept the car running with little more than luck and prayers. Yet despite all odds, Caswell finished third in his class, beating cars costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now he’s at SEMA, single-handedly turning a 20-year-old BMW 3-Series into a Baja 1000 racer. To say this is crazy is like saying Tim Lincecum can throw a baseball. The SCORE Baja 1000 is a grueling sprint over roughly 1,000 miles of desert. It is not a race for the weak or the stupid. And it is just two weeks away.

At this point, Caswell has installed the roll cage and engine. Massive 33-inch tires wrapped around  bead-lock wheels lean against the car. An off-road differential the size of a dorm room refrigerator lurks in the corner. It’s worth mentioning that Caswell, who used to be a banker, is teaching himself how to weld.

Did we mention how much we love this guy?

For Caswell, the past nine months have been a whirlwind. Hollywood called, asking for the rights to tell his story. He took the 1991 BMW 318i he raced in Mexico to the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, where he tore huge holes in the chassis while flogging the car mercilessly. (“The car’s kind of falling apart, and I wasn’t the fastest guy there,” Caswell says. “But it got me out of the house.”) And sponsors beat a path to his door.

One of those sponsors, welding-supply company Miller Electric Manufacturing, sets up shop at the big SEMA auto trade show in Vegas each year. When Caswell mentioned he was planning to build a 1988 BMW 325i to tackle Baja, Miller asked him to set up shop in its booth at SEMA. It wasn’t offering any money, but it did provide welding gear and some publicity.

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, lives under the hood. It’s bolted to a five-speed BMW transmission. The rest — comprised largely of a Speedway Engineering differential, halfshafts with Porsche 930 output flanges and a whole lot of bailing wire and chewing gum — is as much a last-minute hodgepodge targeted at durability and low cost as anything else.

“I keep calling people for parts,” Caswell says, “and once I tell them what I’m doing, there’s a lot of silence. And then they tell me it’s impossible and they ask a lot of questions. And then they admit that maybe — maybe — it just might work.”

At this very moment, Caswell is quietly welding his car together on the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center. He has a little more than two days left to complete the car, and then 10 days to test it and drag it to Mexico for the start of the race. A lot of people — us included — aren’t sure he’s going to make it.

Caswell, typically (and charmingly), is not worried.

“It’s kind of weird,” he says. “We’re not going to have time to prerun the [Baja] course, which everyone does, but I don’t really care. If I make it across the starting line and fall apart five feet later, I’ll be happy. Baja’s one of those things I’ve dreamed about since I was little. I just want to go, to show people that this stuff isn’t that hard, even if the plan doesn’t take. I don’t know — what would you do? It’s better than sitting on the couch.”

Heck of an approach, isn’t it? But what would you expect from a man who raised money selling T-shirts showing little but his car and the words “It’s Going to be Awesome”?

We’ll check back with Caswell later this week and let you know how things turned out. If he makes it to Baja, we’ll be right there with him in the chase vehicle, chronicling what will undoubtedly be an awesome adventure. In the meantime, you can follow his build progress on Facebook and a webcam Miller set up.

Photos: Sam Smith / Wired.com unless otherwise noted.

Bill Caswell’s 1988 BMW 325i at the Miller Electric Manufacturing booth at SEMA.

Bill Caswell, rocking Mexico’s world in a beater BMW he bought for $500. Photo: Caswell Motorsport

Authors: Sam Smith

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