The fourth annual Southern Discomfort 24 Hours of LeMons, held at Carolina Motorsports Park in South Carolina, ended up being one of the best races in the seven-year history of LeMons racin. The battles for class wins were nail-biters, the weather was pleasant, and we had an exceptionally good crop of racin’ machines. Let’s take a look at the teams that went home with trophy hardware. 
If there ever was a team that paid some serious dues before getting an overall LeMons win, it’s these guys and their wretched 1984 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. They took the checkered flag at the ’13 Southern Discomfort with a two-lap edge over the P2 car (a Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.3-16 Cosworth), after contending in many races and blowing up in many more over the years.
Usually, drivers as skilled as the ones on the Molde Carlo team will choose a vehicle known for better reliability (and fuel consumption) than the GM G-Body with a small-block Chevrolet V8 engine, but the Molde Carlos wanted to prove some sort of point about big Detroit hoopties holding their own against those annoying Neons and 3-series BMWs and Integras that most of the fast drivers choose as their LeMons steeds. Here we see the Molde Carlo dropping a couple of wheels in the dirt in 2009, a year filled with busted engine and suspension parts for the Molde crew. 
Just to make their car as different from a nice, shiny BMW as possible, the Molde Carlo team sanded off all its paint, sprayed the bare steel with salt water, and let it rust. This is what a winner looks like! 
Classing a Ford Escort, even a Mazda-based GT model, is always a dilemma for the LeMons Supreme Court. Escorts get eaten alive in Class A, but a well-driven Escort that doesn’t break can run away with Class B. That’s what happened here, with the Questie’s Ford finishing fifth overall and taking its class by a dominating 13 laps. No black flags, no mechanical problems, and lap times just a few seconds slower than the A cars spelled victory for this team.
As we’ve pointed out before, Subarus tend to do very, very poorly in LeMons racing, falling somewhere between Audi and Mitsubishi on the LeMons Unreliability Index. They blow head gaskets, they throw rods, and they develop maddening electrical-system maladies… but none of those things happened to the PBR team and their automatic-transmission-equipped ’99 Outback this time. Their car was agonizingly slow on the race track, but the drivers stayed out of trouble and their head gaskets remained miraculously intact. When it was all over, they’d stomped their closest Class C rival— a Cadillac Catera— by seven laps.
We had two 1964 model-year cars competing in this race, and so we had no choice but to create a special trophy for the one that got the most laps during the course of the weekend. The Slant-Six-powered 1964 Dodge Dart of Escape Velocity Racing (the high-school daily driver of the team’s captain) ran away with the competition, beating the 1964 Ford Fairlane of Fairlylame Racing, 173 to 56 laps.
The Fairlylame car had the bigger engine (a 289-cubic-inch V8), but overheating problems and transmission woes caused it to spend much of the weekend in the pits. We look forward to a Dart-Fairlane rematch at the South Fall race. 
LeMons racing boasts a long tradition of tiny cars with big engines shoehorned in the back, and so the Knoxvegas Lowballers decided that a Geo Metro with the 195-horse Duratec V6 out of a Ford Contour SVT would be just the ticket to LeMons glory.
The car turned out to be fairly quick (its best lap was just a couple of seconds slower than the quickest cars’ times), but the engine disintegrated early on Saturday. No problem, said the team, one of us has a Contour daily-driver! So, they pulled the engine out of that car, stuffed it into the Geo… and proceeded to get bashed by a Porsche 944 and then spent another few hours fixing stuff. 
The stoic Russians of Team Sputnik had a great run with their Nissan Stanza wagon, winning Class C and Heroic Fix in previous races. This time, however, the rusty old Nissan was too horrible even by LeMons standards, and LeMons Chief Perp Jay Lamm gave it the thumbs-down during the safety inspection.
That’s bad, but it got even worse for Alex, captain of Team Sputnik. NSF Racing, winners of the Organizer’s Choice for their 1987 Plymouth Reliant-K wagon at the ’12 season-ender, decided to give their car to another team, which would then pass it on to another team, and so on until the K-car travels to all LeMons regions during the 2013 season. For reasons that no doubt made sense to Sputnik at the time, they opted to be the first to take on the “K-it-FWD” challenge. 
Here’s the ignition-key handoff, a ritual we expect to see repeated many times this year. Did we mention that this car threw a connecting rod several hours into the race and received a quadrillion-mile junkyard engine as a replacement? Screwed! 
Dead-stock 1991 Chevy S-10 converted to a credible fire truck? That team deserves a trophy!
Actually, your LeMons correspondent (who also wears the robes of Chief Justice of the LeMons Supreme Court) wanted to give the award to Boondoggle Racing, for their great Crying of Lot 49 theme, but LeMons tradition calls for themes crafted specifically to please the judges to be denied the Judges’ Choice trophy. So, that’s what we did. 
We’ve been waiting for years to see a proper bosozoku car in LeMons racing, and the BTB guys obliged by doing this to their Nissan Sentra SE-R.
Since we’d already seen an airplane-engined LeMons car, Legend of LeMons Speedycop decided to build a car-engined airplane.
We didn’t think the Spirit of LeMons— a 1956 Cessna 310 built on a Toyota MasterAce chassis— would hold together for more than a few laps under the punitive conditions of an 84-entry road race, but the Spirit of LeMons turned 179 2.3-mile-long laps over the weekend, finishing 65th and passing a fair number of competitors in the process. It did not crash, suffered only minor mechanical problems, and looked incredible on the track. 
The Gang of Outlaws showed up wearing genuine Tuskegee Airmen flying suits or 1943-style pinup-girl dresses, and they drove down the highway to a nearby gas station whenever they needed fuel. The residents of Kershaw, South Carolina, have become accustomed to seeing some weird behavior at this gas station when LeMons is in town, but the sight of a Cessna rolling up to the pumps left a lot of dropped jaws in its wake. 
Congratulations, Speedycop & the Gang of Outlaws!
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