We’ve all been here. We go to a swanky new place to have dinner with your cheap endurance racing track buddies (or your favorite bird), and the server comes over offering fine wine (or Miller, PRB, Genny, it’s all relative) and then goes over the chef’s specials. You listen to them all, your mouth waters, you look around everyone is craving it, but then the prices roll out. 40 dollars for Hand fed, free range Alaskan King Crab and some roughage? Yowza. You gasp at the price, because you really need to save up for new ball joints from eEuroparts for your ‘88 740 wagon. You think to yourself “that is just way too much for food”. The same thought process bounces amongst your friends as well (because they’re cheaping out like you), however there is always that ONE GUY who will go for the Sun Dried Rabbit meat that came from some random town in north Saskatchewan. “He’s nuts” you think as he orders the Canadian treat, and you go ahead regretfully ordering the meatloaf off the pub menu, with an extra side of beets and ranch drenched side salad.

You all end up having a great night, however the next morning you feel like crap… and it’s not because you were chasing your Two Hearted Ales with Swiftkicks* shots – it’s food poisoning. Oy vey. You’re in the bathroom every 5 seconds, feel horrible, and then you make the dreaded ‘boss, I can’t’ make it in today’ phone call, because Sideshow Bob’s famous meatloaf ruined your guts and you can’t function properly for a little while. So now, not only do you feel bad all day, you’re also sitting at home NOT BEING PAID. Sucks to suck, right?

I know, what on earth does this have to do with car parts right?

As my economics professor Brad Hoffner used to say, ‘Always consider the opportunity costs’. That is, consider the true end costs of going with option A (which may be double the initial cost) or option C (which is a third of the price up front, but the end cost is eventually triple option A).

Your pal ate the expensive 3 year old aged ham hocks, but he felt awesome the next day, went to work, and made money. You got the cheapest thing on the menu that coincidentally had been sitting in the walk fridge for over a week, and are now not only not working, feeling bad, but also spending money buying extra Charmin…ok enough with the visual. Bottom line is, you’re cheaping out, only to spend double on the big end. That’s not how to do it! This sort of thinking applies to cars as well, and it’s something we, Team Krabby Kraut, were majorly guilty of as well, until we saw the light (or maybe it was because we weren’t drinking?)

The Jetta started it’s racing being very consistent. The car would always finish the race, we’d typically podium both days, and we were happy. As the need for speed took over, we upgraded suspension/brakes/tires, and then eventually started having all sorts CV axle and wheel bearing issues. “No big deal” we all said, we’ll just carry a spare. So now we have generic parts store crap axles in the car (150 dollars total) as well as a set of spares (150 more dollars) as backups. So not bad, 300 dollars total in right? Well now we’re also carrying spare loaded spindles, because when the cheap axles break it often (always) ruins the wheel bearing and the hub. Loaded means complete, so those back ups come with wheel studs loaded in them, as well as ball joints too as they’re just easier to change this way than praying the joint doesn’t spin in the hub when you’re trying to change them in the hot pits after exploding them mid track day, because you need the laps to win right? Oh yea, and wheel speed sensors too. Oh, and you then have MORE spares, that you replace onto the original ruined spindles too. WOOF. Time = money, oh man that applies here too.

So again, lets consider the spares: 150 for axles, 150 for spare spare axles, 40 for spindles, 70 for two wheel bearings in the loaded spindles (and 70 more for spares of the spares) 50 for two ball joints, 40 for wheel speed sensors and another 30 or so for studs. That’s another 600 extra bucks for a real deal ‘spares package’ setup, atop of the current stuff in the car (but let’s call that a wash, as it’s new regardless of the axle type you have). Yes, six hundred. However it also gets worse beyond that.

Ok, so you’re rippin the Jetta at Summit point, kicking some E36 butt, and you feel it come on. No not the food poisoning, but you know that china axle is gonna fail as you can sense the vibration, and you can hear it. FAWK. You yell on the radio ‘get a axle/hub ready to go’ (which is a bad thing as you’re now SO good at it, that you have a drawer in the box with the exact tools you need, to include that slick spreader tool from eEuro for the strut!). You come in, and now you’re watching the clock. I don’t care HOW good you are (we’ve had it timed at just over 15 minutes) it’s not a fun job and you really need 2 guys do get it done in that sort of speed. So now you’re out 20 minutes total (pit in/out times too) and you’ve lost 6-8 laps depending on the track. That right there, regardless of effort, is the difference between 2nd, and 6th overall in American Endurance Racing..

Know what 6th gets? Nothing, Know what 6th gets? Less track time because you broke. Know what 6th also gets? Ridicule for all that trash talking you posted online. AND not only did you install that spare package, and you have to rebuild it again, because now you ‘need a spares’ for the next day, or for the next event. Sure those cheap life long axles seemed cheap, but the wheel bearings, and hubs, and time end up costing you.

So we did this for almost a year. We’d have SOME success, but regardless we were changing parts out on Saturday night ‘just to play it safe’. Then it started happening too often mid day, and after a horrible Watkins Glen event where we broke all of our spares, we were at the point of tossing the towel, especially after we realized what we had spent on junk and seeing how it was double+ what a set of Raxles would have cost us. (Under 800 with shipping).

So a call to Raxles goes out, and Marty goes ‘well, I could have told you the parts store stuff was junk, it’s all reground and not to spec’ – followed up with ‘I use a real CV/Porsche style inner, and a new outer, with my special grease – it won’t break. Strong words I thought, but having known of his brand for eons, and knowing their good reputation, it was worth a risk.

So we get our stuff in the car for Palmer, (a track that ate three axles and 2 wheel bearings last year)…and coincidentally place third day one, and 2nd day two, which gained us a FIRST overall for the weekend. Sweet right? So we win some swag, boast with our trophies, and drink all of Alex’s moonshine, but best of all: We didn’t have to work on the car at all! Nothing broke, no boots ripped, no nothing…glorious right? It was the first time we loaded up the car ‘wet’ and weren’t ordering parts on the ride home.

Great story right? Well success continued at AER’s New Jersey Motorsports Event where we finished third day one, first day two, and FIRST overall in class for the weekend. The same story played true, the only thing we had to change were the tires (and well, a radiator after unknown miles). No wheel bearings, no spare axles, no tie rod ends, no speed sensors, no nothing. All because we got QUALITY replacement parts (in our case axles)

All in all, I’m not saying you always need to order Filet Mignon, however if you WANT to win and not get grease all over your racing suit, you need to spend some of your team’s crusty cabbage on quality parts, from quality suppliers. So while we thought the high price tag of axles was crazy to start (sort of like the hand fed crab treat), we were, in the end, spending money on two spares of everything, and risking the time/lack of wins as well. Again, the opportunity cost of the parts played out here, and in the end, the true ECONOMICAL option, was the 800 dollar set of quality axles, because it prevented a real world 1000 dollar saving in time and labor. And this applies to any quality replacement part – the same reason we source our parts right from eEuroparts, and NOT rockauto’s discount line — because at the end of the day, I trust that OE replacement ball joint A LOT more than the brown box unit from the generic parts store. You pay to play, so why not play as much as you can for what you pay? I’m not sure about you guys, but I had shark steak the other night. Know why? Nobody likes the tuna here…

*2 parts Stoli Orange Vokda, 1 part orange juice, 1 part Redbull. Created/Originated at “Flood’s” our watering hole, in Stroudsburg PA