The Page of the Pumpkin

An On-line Documentation of a Very Foolish Endeavor

Welcome to the Page of the Pumpkin, a repository for all things web-worthy (or not) related to my 1994 Taurus SHO track/race car. It is an ex-Bondurant School of High Performance Driving skid car. Tom Dooley and I bought the last three SHOs that Bondurant had (well, other than Bob's #1 instructor car), in February of 2004. They were numbers 97 (mine, the Pumpkin), 98 and 99. All had automatic transmissions.

All three cars lined up for delivery at Bondurant's shop in February, 2004.

At the time I'd been using my 1995 MTX SHO, which I've since sold as a track car. I thought it was just too nice of a car to take to the next step and rip out the interior to put in a cage, so purchasing #97 provided the platform for continued development. At the time the old car had a set of Gary Morrell coilovers and Baer 12.5" brakes as well as some other nice suspension tweaks, and all of that equipment got moved over to or duplicated on The Pumpkin. That transplant followed what was the first order of business, though, which included removing most of the interior and swapping out the automatic transmission for a manual 5-spd SHO transmission with a Gary Morrell rebuild and Quaife differential installation.







The car during the removal of the original transmission. We dropped the entire drivetrain, still on the subframe, did the conversion work, then reinstalled the new drivetrain assembly as a unit. The process was documented photographically on the Arizona SHO Club site here.





This is The Pumpkin at Firebird Raceway in April, 2006. I think Tom Dooley first used the name "Pumpkin" in reference to the orange Bondurant SHOs, or at least I'll blame him for it. ;) The name seems to have stuck to my car, so that's what we call it these days. I've been competing in NASA Time Trials with it since 2006. I took second in the 2006 NASA AZ TTD championship, won the 2007 NASA AZ TTD Championship and 2008 NASA AZ TTD Championship. I hold or have held TTD and TTE track records with it at PIR, Firebird Main, and Firebird East. I was Runner Up (aka 2nd) for the NASA 2009 TTE National Championship at Miller Motorsports Park.








My class picture from Racing School. 80Kb (I'm on the right in the maroon t-shirt.)

I've managed to spend an inordinate amount of cash going to racing school at the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving. Due to the miracle of electronic publishing, you can read about my experiences learning to drive fast. I took the four-day Gran Prix Road Racing course in October, 1994. Read about the first two days, the third day, and the fourth day. Exactly a year later, I took the two-day Advanced Road Racing Course. Read about the first day, and the second day.



I was NASA Arizona's first featured driver (aka, guinea pig) for Brady Dohrmann's Who's Who in NASA column.


Since 2005 I've been using, usually, an in-car vid cam at track events. This is quite helpful since it allows me to review what happened, what I did right and wrong, from an objective record rather than from memory. Here are edited and archived copies of videos from various events since then, in reverse chronology.


Believe it or not, this page is Copyright 2008, 2009 Eric Jacobsen.
This does not, of course, include the stuff I stole from other people.

Last modified November17, 2009, although all I changed was this date.

If you'd like, you can go back to my home page. If not, don't.