On Friday, we inspected the 121 entrants to the first-ever There Goes the Neighborhood 24 Hours of LeMons, held at the Monticello Motor Club. On Saturday, we enjoyed a great Alfa-vs-Ford-vs-(Saab-engined) Nissan battle for the lead. On Sunday, the surviving cars battled for victory. Let’s see which teams went home with new trophies!
The winner on laps, believe it or not, was a Nissan 300ZX with a goofy Saab 900 Turbo engine swap. When we saw Rust In the Wind win in New Hampshire last year, we thought the team might be a one-hit wonder (having watched the Rust In the Wind guys struggle for two years to even
finish a LeMons race), but they held off the Pro Crash Duh Nation Alfa Romeo Milano and won this race by a fraction of a lap.
Saab engines have been extremely fragile in LeMons, Nissan Z31s have been nearly as breakdown-prone, and an engine swap with this much fabrication introduces whole new
categories of failure points. Rust In the Wind paid their dues (in this photo, we see them taking the Most Heroic Fix trophy at the 2011 Connecticut race) and now they’ve got a little run of East Region LeMons victories going.
Elmo’s Revenge and their increasingly wretched-looking Saturn SL2 have been around LeMons racing since way back in 2009, and they’ve been trying to claw their way to a Class B win in race after race. Finally, they did it!
Winning Class C for the second time, we’ve got the Punisher GP Peugeot 405 Mi16. These cars present a real classing dilemma for the LeMons Supreme Court; on paper, they’re pretty quick… but in practice, they nearly always blow up. Do you class them according to potential or according to real-world experience? So, we put the team’s two Mi16s in Class C with a 15-lap handicap.
Yes, Punisher GP brought two of these cars to the race, with one towing the other to get to the track. The #917 car won its class, while its #405 sister car fired a connecting rod through the windshield of another car and oiled down the track in the most recent in a series of Peugeot 405 Mi16 engine vaporizations.
Because we had so many BMW 2002s at this race (six of them, ranging from agonizingly horrible rustbuckets to fully cheated-up hot rods), we created a special trophy for the one that got the most laps: the I Got 2002 Problems But a Win Ain’t One Award. Shockingly, the winner of this trophy was Jynweythek Engineering and their unspeakably awful 1974 2002tii.
Jynweythek Engineering has insisted on keeping their factory Kugelfisher fuel-injection system intact, which means that they averaged about 0.8 laps per race during the previous two years (the photo above shows their car in a typical pose at the 2011 Charlotte Motor Speedyway LeMons race). This time, though, their 2002tii did 298 laps, finished in P59, and beat some much faster (and Weber-equipped) 2002s.
The Most Heroic Fix trophy just had to go to the Cougar Hunters and their ’99 front-drive Mercury Cougar. This team endured a long, long weekend of near-constant wrenching, but it all paid off when they took the checkered flag at the end.
The first thing that happened to the Cougar Hunters was a catastrophic engine-compartment fire during practice on Friday. The wiring harness went up, the intake manifold melted, and the brake and clutch masters were consumed by the flames. So, the team hit every junkyard within 100 miles and found (most of) the parts they needed to (sort of) make their car run again.
Their Cougar got back on the track late on Saturday. Success! Well, until eight laps later, when the clutch went out. Then it turned out that nearly all the fasteners holding the engine to the transmission were corroded solid and snapped off. Fun with EZ-Outs ensued, and then more fun with other fire-damaged stuff that they hadn’t fixed very well the first time. In the end, though, they made the Mercury run, completed a total of 116 laps, and went home with a cool-looking trophy.
Usually, the I Got Screwed award goes to a team, but this time we felt compelled to give it to the Monticello Motor Club, whose well-heeled members had to put up with a full weekend of distressing scenes like this one.
The Organizer’s Choice trophy was earned by Fatty’s Fruit Loops and their ’97 Honda Accord. In addition to having managed to turn a pretty good car into a
really bad car (sort of the opposite of your typical silk-purse-from-sow’s-ear story), the Fatty’s Fruit Loops guys showed up with a roll cage that wasn’t even close to passing the tech inspection. No problem, they said, we’ll make a new one tonight. And they did just that.
Even with many mishaps (including a wheel falling off due to a team member forgetting to tighten the lugs) and a freezing wind howling through the paddock all weekend, the members of Fatty’s Fruit Loops kept smiling the whole time and enjoyed their race more than all the BMW E30 teams combined.
Everyone at the track was very excited about the battle between two brown AMC products, a supercharged Gremlin and a turbocharged Hornet. The Gremlin had a slightly stiffer suspension and a bit more power, finished in 60th, and the team let LeMons Supreme Court Judge Alex Vendler take a stint behind the wheel. For all these things, the Judges’ Choice award!
The Gremlin turned out to be much quicker than anyone expected (its best lap was a 1.42, just five seconds behind the best lap of the overall winner), but it suffered from a few brake-related mishaps.
The top prize of LeMons racing is the Index of Effluency, given to the team that accomplishes the most with the car that least belongs on a race track. Sometimes this choice is very difficult, but it was easy this time: the very tippy Rally Baby Racing 1975 AMC Hornet took the big trophy.
That’s a turbocharged AMC 258-cubic-inch six, complete with Carter carburetor inside an ammo-can pressure box. Amazingly, this rig functioned all weekend. Congratulations, Rally Baby!
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