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Saturday, April 6, 2013

LeMons New York Inspections: Many 2002s, Greatest Forced-Induction AMC Battle In History

Here we are at the 24 Hours of LeMons’s first visit to Monticello Motor Club, where 120 or so teams and their alleged race cars ran the gauntlet of our grueling inspection regimen. We saw a lot of old friends today, some of whom had upgraded to cars that fit the LeMons Way of Life™ so perfectly that we didn’t even notice the usual swarms of BMW E30 3-series cars that always infest races in the LeMons Eastern Region. Legend of LeMons Dave Morrow broke the monotony of a string of E30s by bringing this brown AMC Gremlin. Now, what’s the only thing that could make a Gremlin even better? Yes, a supercharged GM 3800 V6 and T-5 manual transmission! We can’t find a single weak point in this extremely rational plan for racing success. Just when we were thinking there’d be no way to top the supercharged Gremlin, this car rolled up. You’re looking at a brown AMC Hornet, a type of car that has an illustrious LeMons history. We were expecting to see a boring 304-cubic-inch V8 under the hood, or maybe even a somewhat wilder 343. Nope, Rally Baby Racing (you may remember them as the perpetrators of the first and still only Mercedes-Benz R107 in LeMons) went ahead and added a cheap Chinese turbocharger to the AMC 258 six under the Hornet’s hood. Note the blow-through setup using an ammo box to surround the stock 2-barrel Carter carburetor. This setup should be both powerful and reliable on the race track. At that point we figured, OK, we’ll have to create a special trophy for the winner of the Blown Kenoshawagen matchup. Then we realized that we were seeing more BMW 2002s than usual. Way more 2002s. We saw a dead-stock 2002tii with Kugelfischer fuel-injection. We saw a 2002 with super-cheaty suspension and M43 swap. We saw everything between those extremes; in all, we saw six 2002s. You can get rusty examples of these cars for cheap, so we believed the budget stories of some of the 2002 teams and scoffed at some others. Perhaps we need a trophy for the best-performing 2002… but it will all depend on how compelling the AMC battle turns out to be. Of course, we’d rather see bigger and more luxurious vintage BMWs. For example, this E3 2800 that showed up. It’s rusty, it’s painfully stock, and we put it in Class C with the forced-induction AMCs. The Twin-turbo taxi was back, this time with a 24″ monitor to enable the driver to be confused by even more information from the Megasquirt fuel-injection system. Incomprehensible and disturbing team costumes abounded. The Volvo 262C Bertone team has upgraded to a Bert One concept (get it?) and spent the day confusing everybody at the track. The Turbo Chevette is back! Three Pedal Mafia brought their Sea Sprite, their Sharkmobile Honda Wagovan, and their V6-powered Triumph TR7, wrapping up the whole package with a nicely executed Jaws theme. And, of course, we had one Peugeot 405 Mi16 towing another through the inspection. Check in Saturday night to see how the first day’s race session works out!

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