Back in the mid-’90s, I sat and listened as Audi designer Peter Schreyer — now the man responsible for all those good-looking Kias — ran through the media briefing for the C5 Audi A6. Smooth and rounded, sporting bumpers that blended almost seamlessly into the bodywork with a determination not seen since the Porsche 928, that A6 was a striking car: original and fresh and modern, yet timeless and elegant. It still looks good 15 years later.
Schreyer’s A6, plus Freeman Thomas’ Bauhaus-inspired TT coupe that followed it onto the market a few months later, marked the turning point at which Audi truly began its transformation from a slightly obscure and faintly eccentric Bavarian automaker to a full-fledged member of the Premium Club.
Ah, yes — the Premium Club. It gives you permission to charge significantly more money for your car than the other guy can, to exploit the fact that in terms of the actual materials and labor costs, it doesn’t really take that much more money to build a BMW than it does a Chevy. Membership in the Premium Club is the modern auto industry’s golden ticket. Why? Because although premium (or luxury) cars account for just 12 percent of global vehicle sales, they generate 50 percent of global auto industry profits. No wonder everyone wants to join.
Getting into the Premium Club used to be fairly straightforward: You just built a car that was faster and sportier; or more lavishly equipped and strikingly designed; or smoother, quieter, and more robustly engineered than the run-of-the-mill stuff. Then you charged a premium price for it. And because rich people bought your cars, people who wanted to be rich wanted to drive your cars, too.
It may have been straightforward, but it wasn’t necessarily easy. The Premium Club is surrounded by the graves of carmakers that got it wrong, from Duesenberg and Hispano Suiza to Facel Vega and Bizzarini. Cadillac, a foundation member of the club, is knocking on the front door and trying to get back inside after spending most of the past four decades in the maroon velour and plastic wood wilderness. Lincoln, another former member that forgot the rules, is still shuffling along the road holding its pants up with one hand and trying to remember where the door is.
Unfortunately, the problem for any automaker wanting to join the Premium Club these days is that many of the differences in design, quality, and functional attributes that clearly defined who was — and was not — a member even 15 years ago are no longer obvious. You can now buy a Chrysler sedan with an eight-speed automatic transmission, a Chevy with 580 hp, and a Ford that looks like it was designed by Aston Martin. Everyone has anti-lock brakes and stability control and airbags and engines that are cleaner and more efficient and require little maintenance.
So what makes people pay more money for a car that does more or less the same stuff as half a dozen others? Is it simply badge snobbery?
In many cases, probably — I’ve never forgotten a California Mercedes-Benz dealer telling me a few years back about the woman who walked into his shop and said: “I have $369 a month left over. What can I lease?” Engineering technology, safety, and 125 years of history be damned. She didn’t care whether it was a C-Class, an SLK, or a G-wagen. All she wanted was to drive the three-pointed star.
Nineteenth-century Irish writer Oscar Wilde once suggested a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. I wonder what he’d say about many of today’s luxury car buyers.
We met the machines on Friday, watched them blow up on Saturday, and on Sunday we handed out trophies to the winners of the 2013 Cure For Gingervitis 24 Hours of LeMons.
Taking the win on laps and Class A trophy was Bucksnort Racing and their ’87 BMW 325i. The Bucksnorts won the Spring ’12 race at Gingerman, and they’ve contended in most of the Midwest Region events since that time. 
The Bucksnort organization is a family operation, and the whole coonskin-hat-clad clan— including babies and dogs— shows up to keep the team working at maximum efficiency. Usually we’re a bit bored by BMW E30 wins in LeMons, since we have so many of the 80s Bavarians in the series, but the Bucksnorts are all right. 
The Bucksnort car spent the entire weekend with the ’86 Volvo 245 wagon of the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers glued to its rear bumper. The Little Lebowskis’ car has neither turbocharger nor 16-valve head, its suspension is squishily stock, and it has the aerodynamic qualities of a shipping container, and yet this team whomped 66 other cars (including all the Integras, MR2s, Mustangs, Supras, and RX-7s) and finished a close second overall. For this, we awarded the team the prestigious Organizer’s Choice trophy. 
We see two kinds of Civics (and their two-seater CRX cousins) in LeMons racing. There are the cheated-up fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-gen cars with adjustable coil-overs, headers, VTEC engines, and so on… and then there are the third-gen cars with double-digit horsepower and grimly original suspension hardware. The Gutty Racing ’84 CRX belonged in the latter group, and so we put it in Class B with a bit of a lap handicap (Class B at this race had some verrrry slow cars). Next thing we knew, the Gutty drivers went out and drove perfectly clean, breakdown-free laps all weekend; the car wasn’t fast (its best lap time was a glacial 8 seconds slower than that of the Bucksnort BMW’s best), but consistency helps more than speed in Class B. Team Gutty won B by 14 laps and took P6 overall in a very impressive demonstration of good driving and un-Honda-like head-gasket endurance. 
Speaking of laughably obsolete Japanese econo-commuters with double-digit horsepower, here’s our Class C winner: Red Shirt Racing and their 1987 Nissan Pulsar NX. This automatic-trans-equipped “sport Sentra” held off five equally pokey Class C cars during the course of the weekend, finishing in P23 and boasting a best lap time ten seconds slower than that of the Team Gutty CRX. How? Zero black flags, no serious mechanical problems. 
The Most Heroic Fix award was a tough choice this time, but we finally had to hand the trophy over to the Supra Troopers. As so often happens to teams running the Toyota 7M engine in LeMons, the Supra Troopers suffered catastrophic main-bearing failure and a blown head gasket to boot. Did they give up? 
No, they did not give up. They spent most of Saturday afternoon and evening attempting to build one good engine out of two bad ones (in 29-degree weather complete with high winds and snow), then ditched that plan and ripped the engine out of a team member’s daily-driver Supra. That got the race car back on the track on Sunday morning. 
After the race, the Supra Troopers drove the race car back to Wisconsin and hauled the now-engineless street car on the trailer. That’s heroic! 
For the I Got Screwed trophy, we had to ask ourselves this not-so-rhetorical question: if you win a contest that has as its prize a weekend of racing in a 24 Hours of LeMons car, and you spend most of the weekend spinning wrenches on that car after it blows both head gaskets, what are you? 
Yep, you’re screwed! PEAK contest winner Dennis Dawe was a good sport about the whole thing, though, and he was able to turn some laps in the PEAK Mustang. 
Our special event-specific trophy for this race was the If You Can Find a Better Car, Buy It award, and it went to the NMF NSF Racing 1987 Plymouth Reliant-K wagon. This car has been handed from team to team around the country, racing in Texas, South Carolina, New York, and now Michigan, and it’s going back to Texas in a couple of weeks. For the first time in its racing experience, it ran a trouble-free (and even slower than the Pulsar) weekend. 
For the Judges’ Choice award, the great improvement between Saturday (many black flags) and Sunday (few black flags) and the inherent terribleness of the Loose Lugs Racing ’92 Chevy S10 pickup glommed the trophy for the truck drivers. 
With their truck’s 2.8 V6 power and Jack Daniel’s theme, this bunch of GM engineers made a good impression on the LeMons Supreme Court. 
For the top prize of the race, the Index of Effluency, we felt that a 1981 Isuzu I-Mark Diesel that had spent decades serving as a rusty home for acorn-stashing rodents before being revived— if that’s the word— had a good edge on its IOE competitors… provided that it could run for most of the weekend. The Zero Budget Racing I-Mark did just that, and in spite of being the slowest car on the track (its best lap time was a staggering 25 seconds slower than that of the winner, 2:10 versus 1:45) it finished 42nd out of 68 entries. 
Zero Budget brought this car for the LeMons Supreme Court to use as a Judgemobile last year, and we pleaded with them: “Please oh please, cage this fine specimen of Opel/Chevy/Isuzu engineering and race it next year!” So they did. Congratulations, Zero Budget Racing!
The lineup of cars we saw during Friday’s inspections looked like a group that would provide plenty of rod-throwingly good racing, and such turned out to be the case on Saturday. At times, most of the teams seemed to be making junkyard runs and spinning wrenches, but the surviving teams fought hard for the lead in each of the three LeMons classes. Here’s what happened.
April weather on the shores of Lake Michigan tends to be chilly and windy, and that meant that teams who broke parts (that is, most of them) experienced some real character-building, numb-fingered repairs. The snow was gone by midday, but the cold weather lingered all day. 
The fast cars compete in Class A, and we spent most of the day watching a four-way, lead-swapping struggle between a Lexus LS400, a Dodge Neon, a BMW E30 3-series, and a Volvo 245 wagon. After 9-1/2 hours of racing, the Bucksnort Racing BMW 325i owned a one-lap edge over its closest pursuer. 
For reasons that nobody can explain to our satisfaction, Volvo 240s with naturally-aspirated eight-valve four-bangers and squishy stock suspensions often manage to get around a road course just as well as cars with much sportier pedigrees. The Little Lebowski Urban Achievers ’86 245 wagon has contended in just about every Midwest Region LeMons race, and Saturday’s race session ended with the school bus looming large in the Bucksnort BMWs rear-view mirrors. One mistake by the BMW pilots on Sunday and the stodgy Swedish grocery hauler will eat up their Ultimate Driving Machine like so much lutefisk. 
Class A is a bit more interesting than usual, thanks to the Volvo brick challenging the three-time-winning Bavarian machine, but the Class B cars — the medium-fast entries— offer more entertainment to the true LeMons aficionado. Right now, the ’84 Honda CRX of Team Gutty has been pushed far beyond what you’d expect from its relentlessly original 29-year-old running gear and will start Sunday’s session at the top of its class and in P5 overall. How? Why? We can’t say. 
Even more puzzling, the 22R engine of Apocalyptic Racing’s ’78 Toyota Celica has kept its connecting rods inside the block (rather than scattered all over the Gingerman facility, which is how the typical Apocalyptic Racing weekend goes), and the car climbed all the way up to 12th overall. That’s just 11 laps behind the Team Gutty CRX. Will the Honda blow its head gasket before the Toyota drops its crankshaft on the tarmac? Time will tell! 
The cars that never belonged anywhere near a road course receive the honor of competing in Class C, and Saturday saw a true no-quarters-asked-or-given slugfest among the half-dozen C cars. Several teams spent some time in the Class C lead during Saturday, but the ’87 Nissan Pulsar NX of Red Shirt Racing held onto that lead at the end of Saturday’s session. With a 30-lap edge over its nearest competitor and 29th place overall, the Red Shirts might be feeling fairly confident right now. 
Loose Lugs Racing and their wretched Chevy S10 had opened up a fairly solid lead in Class C by midday, but then the Loose Lugs drivers got a bit too aggressive and racked up a series of black flags. While they sat in the penalty box, the Canadian Pulsar pilots ground out their slow-motion laps and built up an intimidating lead. 
Meanwhile, cars were sliding off into the weeds, crunching into berms, and trading paint with one another. Here’s the Usual Suspects Chevy Monza doing a bit of bumper-dragging after some contact with a fellow competitor. 
Popped head gaskets, bent valves, spun bearings, and shattered transmissions kept a large fraction of the cars up on jack-stands for much of the day, but most of them will be kludged back together by the time the green flag waves on Sunday morning. Check in Sunday night to see how everything sorts out!
Here at lovely Gingerman Raceway on the shores of Lake Michigan, we’re experiencing some invigoratingly brisk Upper Midwest Spring weather (in other words, howling Arctic winds driving icy needles of sleet right through our suffering flesh) and admiring the collection of 70 or so racin’ machines that have come to compete in the Cure For Gingervitis 24 Hours of LeMons. Now that your LeMons correspondent has stopped shivering long enough to work the keyboard, let’s take a look at some of the more interesting competitors.
Back from their Judges’ Choice triumph at the Chubba Cheddar Enduro last summer, the zany Canadians of Red Shirt Racing went to extraordinary lengths to obtain a genuine Sportbak for their Nissan Pulsar. Some members of the team felt that the Sportbak’s added 100 pounds of weight would be too much for their slushbox-enhanced 71-horsepower E16 engine, but the LeMons Supreme Court promised a coveted Class C berth if the team agreed to keep that crucial accessory on the car all weekend. 
That means the Red Shirt Pulsar will be battling for a class win with the NSF Racing 1987 Plymouth Reliant-K station wagon. This car was purchased and prepped by the legendary NSF and is being handed off from team to team across the country, having now traveled from LeMons races in Texas, South Carolina, and New York before washing up here in Michigan. After this race, the K-car will be heading back to Texas as part of NSF’s infamous, 2.2-engine-killing “K-it-FWD” program. 
Of all the teams that could have taken on the K-car for this race, the best possible choice had to be the Celica-killing New Zealanders of Apocalyptic Racing. Not content to shoot rods out the block of their hopelessly overcarbureted 22R engine the Apocalyptic guys have adopted the Reliant-K for the weekend. Fortunately, they picked up a spare 2.2 engine at the junkyard (a wise move for a car that has killed two engines per three races so far) and will be ready in case problems crop up with the K’s powerplant this weekend. If you can find a better car, buy it! 
Also in Class C is the Zero Budget Racing Chevy Chevette Diesel. This car won the Index of Effluency trophy here back in 2011, but Zero Budget brought another car, one that shoves the Chevette right out of the spotlight. 
Yes, it’s the incredibly rare Isuzu I-Mark Diesel that served as the LeMons Supreme Court’s Judgemobile last year. This car sat in a field for decades before being revived, caged, and readied for its racing debut this weekend. The team had to remove about 50 pounds of acorns, stashed there by squirrels who called the Isuzu home, before installing the cage. The Class C battle stands to be one of the greatest in LeMons history! 
We’ve also got some fast cars, e.g., the Lexus LS400 of Don’t Mess With Lexus Racing. This car has contended in several Midwest Region LeMons events, even leading races on occasion, and has the reliability and consistent quick laps needed to pull off the an overall win. 
The Lexus will need to beat the BMW 325 of Bucksnort Racing, among other tough Gingerman vets at this race, so we’ll be watching the leader if we can take our attention away from the Class C race. 
In spite of the gale-force winds whipping through the paddock, some teams donned their costumes for the inspections. Byte Marx Racing converted their Escort to a Spanish Inquisition carriage. 
Loose Lugs Racing brought this exceedingly terrible 2.8-powered early S10, complete with puzzling Jack Daniel’s/moonshine-running theme. These guys were using the stack exhaust pipes to warm their hands as we inspected their truck. Yeah, this is a Class C machine. 
We forced this team to remove the heavy, speaker-equipped plywood tail of their “Huey” for safety reasons, though we hated to cut off the nonstop blasting of “Ride of the Valkyries.” 
For reasons we don’t understand, LeMons teams keep finding Merkur XR4Tis and attempting to race them. Here’s a new team whose members are about to become much more experienced mechanics. 
In honor of a well-known Michigan native, we’ve created this special commemorative BRIBED stencil. 
Check in Saturday night to see how Day One of the Cure For Gingervitis 24 Hours of LeMons sorts out! 
