24 Hours of LeMons Detroit: Winners!

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!

For all your LeMons-coverage needs, be sure to bookmark the Inexplicably Sponsored By Car and Driver 24 Hours of LeMons page.