Because the track at Sears Point aka Sonoma Raceway can’t fit more than 175 or so LeMons cars at one time, many of the hundreds of applicants for the 2013 Sears Pointless 24 Hours of LeMons couldn’t be accepted for the race. What to do? Why, stay over through Monday and run a special one-day Sears (Even More) Pointless race, that’s what! This race featured all the same prizes as the full all-weekend-long race that preceded it, and that means we’ve got another set of winners.
Sears Point has always been hard on LeMons cars, with plenty of bent metal and obliterated engines. This jar of pickles flattened by an RV in the paddock sums up the condition of many of the cars after two or three days of racing.
Taking the Class A and overall wins once again, it’s Cerveza Racing and their 1983 BMW 533i. We impounded this car (back when it started turning some suspiciously quick lap times) and subjected it to a surprise dyno test a couple of years back, and it produced something like 120 wheel horsepower. It turns out, shockingly, that driver skill counts for more than horsepower in road racing, and the Cerveza wheelmen have used that skill to win five LeMons races… so far.
Normally, the LeMons Supreme Court puts most Volkswagen GTIs in the class for the fastest cars: Class A (yes, GTIs usually blow up in LeMons, but they can turn some quick lap times before the explosion). However, the Dirty Duck Racing GTI has been so terrible for so many years that they’ve earned a spot in Class B (it didn’t hurt that they gave your LeMons correspondent a very thoughtful gift). Finally, the Dirty Ducks were able to stay out of the penalty box and their car’s pistons were able to stay inside the block for an entire race, and they won the Class B trophy. The Class B battle was hard-fought, with the Communists-Я-Us BMW 320i hanging on about 40 seconds behind the GTI for what seemed like hours, but the Dirty Ducks held off the E21, placed eighth overall, and got their first class win.
Winning Class C was Legend of LeMons Spank’s 1962 Mini. How did a very loose, very tired Mini manage to place 15th out of 72 entries, with lap times 5-10 seconds slower than most of the other cars near it in the standings? Consistency, reliability, and clean driving.
LeMons racing features quite a few teams of the hapless-yet-lovable type, and the “IROC Maiden” Camaro drivers of Team Steam may be the most hapless, and most lovable, of the bunch. We’ve seen them changing engines the way other teams change spark plugs, and we’ve seen a lot of them in the Penalty Box. This race, we saw them finish an impossible P3 (they went and found a ringer pro driver somewhere and made him drive most of the day), and so we decided to honor Team Steam with a sort of Lifetime Achievement Judges’ Choice trophy.
The Most Heroic Fix award was also something of a Lifetime Achievement deal this time. The EASY Porsche 914 team ran their car with air-cooled Porsche (aka VW bus) power for a year or two, then decided to
ruin the carmake the car
much better by swapping in a water-cooled Volkswagen Golf engine. This decision has not paid off so far, and the team spent all three days of Sears Pointless/Sears (Even More) Pointless wearing out the highway between the race track and the nearest Pick-N-Pull. After harvesting and installing and removing and harvesting and installing and removing and installing all the engines they could find, they finally got one to work well enough to get their car back on the track for a few hours.
The flip side of the Most Heroic Fix award is the I Got Screwed award, and Crazy Mike of the -ing With Bad Ideas Volkswagen Beetle team earned at least his second IGS trophy. One dead transaxle, one sheared-off front axle shaft, one dead engine, a broken steering arm, and probably a meteorite strike through the fuel tank kept the Beetle off the track for most of the race.
The impressively boat-ized Toyota MR2 of Team Babel has been around for a few California races, but some other car always managed to one-up it and grab the Organizer’s Choice. This time, there was no contest.
The whole package was quite nautical, and the car somehow got P13 on the track.
What really clinched the OrgChoice award, however, was the furry-helmeted “waterskier” towed behind the car for the inspections.
The top prize of LeMons racing is the Index of Effluency award. There has never been a policy stating that no car may win the IOE more than one time (a number of teams have earned multiple IOE trophies, but always with a different car for each win), but it had never happened… until this race. There was no way to deny the Index of Effluency to Spank’s Mini when it finished in P15 at this race, and so this LeMons Legend now has
six IOEs on his trophy shelf.
The Mini, shown here with a Mr. Bean-style chair on the roof at the 2009 Buttonwillow race, won its first IOE four years ago and has seen some very hard racing since that time. Congratulations, Lemini Autosarcophagy!
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