My buddies called a few months ago to ask if I’d like to drive down to Escondido, California just north of San Diego to attend a car show they’d discovered. At first I said sure, but then realized that this would be on Sunday of Memorial Day, the same day as the Indy 500.

“I’m not sure I want to do that,” I told them. “I’ve been watching the Indy 500 on TV forever and I won’t be able to do that.” I usually have a few friends over to watch the race live and that has become a bit of a tradition.

My buddy Doug Eisberg wasn’t willing to take no for an answer. “What if we could rig up a TV in the back of Eric’s El Camino? Would that work?” It was obvious that he really wanted me to come down so I said “Look, don’t kill yourself to make this happen. I can always record the race and watch it later.”

Just to add a little drama to this story, roughly two weeks before the Memorial Day event, I decided to completely rip apart my ’65 El Camino. It’s really the only car decent enough to take to a car show as the majority of my tribe of old cars are really more test vehicles that are constantly being abused. As a result, they’re a bit rough around the edges.

The El Camino has experienced clutch problems ever since I bolted in a new one-piece rear main seal small-block crate engine into the car about seven years ago. After the swap, the clutch never released properly and I had been putting up with this for years and putting it off in favor of more pressing projects. So now was the time to finally diagnose the source of the problem. I’ll save the Mickey Spillane detective novel drama we endured to solve the problem but suffice to say that I R&R’d the trans and clutch several times before we solved all the issues.

Just to confuse the issue further, we had promised Edelbrock that we would install one of their new Pro Flo 3 multi-point EFI systems on this car and were waiting for them to call back when they finally set up a time – the week before the Memorial Day weekend. That’s always the way things seem to work around here. Nothing happens for months and months and then three or four projects all jump in at the same time over a couple of weeks.

So we put the recalcitrant clutch back in the car, I took the El Camino down to Edelbrock and installed the system in time to return to my shop where I put about 30 miles on the car before leaving for Escondido.

We actually went to two shows, one on Saturday morning and then the big show on Sunday. One very cool thing about the Edelbrock Pro Flo 3 is it includes a wireless tablet that you can use to data log information or do simple inputs or tuning. I had shown a friend how this worked and then left the tablet on the seat of the car when we went out for a quick lap of the show. When I returned, the tablet was gone. It was my fault for leaving such a tempting item just sitting in plain view. I believe it was a lowlife spectator and not a real car person who lifted the tablet. But it was my fault for not being more careful.

So Sunday arrived and I really didn’t expect that Doug would actually have achieved live television broadcast capability. I completely underestimated my friends and their resourcefulness. Doug contacted another mutual friend Craig Campman who obviously is dialed in on all things electronic. They figured out a way to hack into Doug’s cable account so they could display a remote broadcast. Then they drove out to the golf course where the show would be held several days in advance to check on accessible wifi channels that might not be encrypted.

Amazingly, they discovered a couple of open channels they could log onto. So come Sunday after our five cars settled into our spots on the grass, Doug and Craig broke out a large box of electronic gear and placed a flat screen TV in the back of Eric Rosendahl’s big-block El Camino. His El Camino has a hinged tonneau cover that worked perfectly as shade for the TV. Craig and Doug hooked up a car battery to an inverter to supply 115volt power and with his laptop, Craig was able to call up the wifi and within a half hour, we were watching live TV.

So we circled the chairs around the back of Eric’s El Camino for the start of the race. About a half-hour after we had it up and running it all crashed. Doug went in search of a golf course employee and asked why the network was down and soon thereafter, it was back up. “I’ll bet they’re wondering who’s pirating all this bandwidth” Craig said, but it stayed up for the rest of the race.

Unfortunately, Doug and Craig had not considered audio in their quest for a video display and the volume from his laptop unfortunately wasn’t strong enough to overpower the live Fleetwood Mac tribute band playing nearby. Undeterred, they went in search of powered speakers at the small swap meet nearby. They quickly returned with four un-powered computer speakers a guy had who just gave them to us!

The unpowered speakers barely were audible until, after several other unsuccessful other ideas, Craig realized he could use the television’s amplifier if we only had a pair of mini-phone jacks. The speakers quickly gave up their wiring and mini-phone jacks and within a few minutes we had audio that we could hear when the band took a break.

The feed on our little laptop kept getting so pixilated that for a time the only way to tell the cars apart was by color, which actually added to the drama. Castroneves was driving the Penske car with Chevy power but couldn’t close the deal. Takuma Sato won the Indy 500 in a Michael Andretti team car which was nice to see. Still, I was rooting for the Chevrolet-powered car.

The best part wasn’t about the race at all. Typical of my friends, this idea became a quest in its own right and they just never gave up. They traversed all the electronic obstacles and we watched the Indy 500 live in the middle of a golf course by using invisible airwaves to make it all work. This is a race that I will remember for a long time only because my friends went to a ridiculous amount of effort to make it happen. This rates right up there on the memorable scale with the first time I ever listened to the race on the radio with my grandfather.

Just before the start of the race, another friend jokingly said, “So, about time to change to the golf channel, right?”

Not a chance, my friend. Not a chance.