This was obviously built right after "Episode 1" came out. Frankly, I was surprised that no one else thought of it.
The pod itself is made of "Sculpey", which is like Play-Doh, but bakes up as hard as a rock. It's also very heavy, so the car only needed a tiny bit of lead.
The "engines" are some 3/4" dowel, with balsa wood fins, and a pink pipe cleaner for the electrical "zap" between them (we didn't have any purple). The original pine block was cut down and painted black to pretend that it's invisible. I put the baling wire front "bumper" on so that the car would sit against the starting block fairly. I didn't really have a decent picture of the real podracer, so the decorations (colored Sharpie) are kind of faked from looking at it in the Podracer PC game.