Over the weekend, my Dad tagged me in a post in a dirt racing group on Facebook of a post with a guy selling another IMCA Modified. The car in the ad was a car that I watched in the early years of my racing career. The same car that dominated week after week at nearly every track it touched with a driver by the name of Sean Lias. Sean Lias built the car himself. Just a few years ago, Lias passed away after a sudden and fatal ATV accident.
Words By AJ Hunsinger // Images By AJ Hunsinger
The car was sold a few different times and was listed for only $1600 by a group that decided to make the switch to big block modifieds. Well, Dad and I went up to look at it and wrote a check for it. The car comes with everything but the engine and transmission. Along with it, they included literally everything they have for an IMCA Modified as they no longer have any use for it. We will be picking it up soon and we don’t really know exactly what all comes with it as they had to dig it all out.
We bought it for a couple of different reasons. The biggest reason was because of the price. It was worth well more than $1600 and could easily get our money back, plus a lot more, in an instant. Another reason we bought it was because we figured we still have a couple of grand worth of parts left to buy for the current modified. The car has a lot of stuff we need and would have made more sense to buy this than to buy parts individually.
But, of course we aren’t going to just strip the car down, it’s a great car so we will use it. Once we bought it, the immediate plan was for me to race this instead of the other one, then sell the other one. That isn’t going to happen either though as Dad finally got the itch he needed to climb back behind the wheel of a race car. At last, Dad and I will both be competing against each other in two great cars this season.
He and I have ran together a handful of times, a couple of times in the IMCA Modified’s and several times in the Mini Stock class. I began my racing career in the Mini Stock’s, which was a class made up of 4 cylinder RWD carbureted cars, mostly Fox Body Mustang’s with the 2.3L engine. I at one time had 3 or 4 Mini Stocks, 2 of which were race ready all the time. Dad wasn’t running anything at the time and thought he would 
suit up and run with me. I beat him every single time 😛
Anyway, it is a safe bet that we will be able to put most of the white IMCA together using the spare parts that is coming with the new black IMCA. I did finish painting the white one. Looks 10x better than it did before. We bought a new rear center with 5.29 gears as we were missing gears in our rear end. We 
still need axles and a long list of other parts for it.
We are also going to be making several improvements to the chassis of the white IMCA. There are several design flaws that we found unsafe to say the least. So we are going to be buying some pipe and adding bars and bracing.
I also made a new design for my “paint scheme”. Looks much better and…there’s purple.
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