Spirit of LeMons: How a 1956 Cessna Airplane Became a Road-Racing LeMons Car (w/ Build Photos/Video)

A couple of weeks ago, the world as we knew it was turned topsy-turvy by the sight of a 1956 Cessna 310 airplane converted to an earthbound road-racing machine. We gave the Spirit of LeMons the top award for the 2013 Southern Discomfort 24 Hours of LeMons, and now it’s time to explain exactly how this machine came to be. This racing series has proven to be the ideal venue for a certain type of fabricating artistic genius. Before LeMons came along, these guys built their surrealist automotive masterpieces and got little recognition beyond a few befuddled neighbors. Thanks to LeMons, Jeff Bloch aka Speedycop, a Washington, D.C., police officer who built the fastest street-legal P71 Ford Crown Victoria in the country, has gone on a four-year tear of rounding up like-minded maniacs and building some of the greatest low-budget race cars in the history of motorsport. We don’t have space here to do justice to the past creations of Speedycop & the Gang of Outlaws (just skim some of these Legends of LeMons articles and you’ll get the idea), so just keep in mind that the Spirit of LeMons Cessna 310 is the culmination of a series of increasingly amazing machines from the Gang of Outlaws. The inspiration for the airplane-with-a-car-engine came, naturally enough, from a LeMons car-with-an-airplane-engine. The Crushed Red Pepper Toyota MR2, which boasted a 1940-vintage 540-cubic-inch, five-cylinder Kinner radial aircraft engine feeding a fantastically complicated Subaru-Mitsubishi drivetrain, had some reliability issues and is now—as you read this— undergoing an upgrade to a Boeing T50-8 turbine engine. (We’ll have the complete story of the Airplane-Powered Car for you in the near future.) This really upped the ante for all Legends of LeMons and got Speedycop looking at airplane junkyards . . . . . . where he found this 1956 Cessna 310. The Cessna hadn’t flown since 1973 and had been stripped of its engines, tail assembly, and many other components necessary for flight. Speedycop knew that he’d be able to sell off some unneeded parts and the excess aluminum to get the build’s budget below the LeMons-mandated $500 limit (although, really, we aren’t going to be sticklers about the nickels and dimes on a project this epic), and so he bought the airplane. Because of space limitations in the Cessna’s fuselage, Speedycop knew he’d need a chassis-donor vehicle with a short wheelbase, narrow track, and driver position as far forward as possible. The Toyota Van (also knowns as the MasterAce, VanWagon, or Space Cruiser) was the obvious choice. To make the van’s guts fit within the confines of the Cessna, a lot of cutting and slicing was needed. Here’s a video roundup of how that process went at Chez Speedy:

The entire body of the Space Cruiser had to go, while still preserving all the running gear. This task alone was an overwhelming sweat-fest, but it barely scratched the surface of the man-hour needs this project would be imposing on the Gang of Outlaws. Speedycop isn’t so big on meticulous planning, but he makes up for that minor weakness by being a master of recruiting and motivation. Meanwhile, the Cessna needed to be shorn of its wings and landing gear before it could be loaded onto a trailer and hauled to Speedycop Global Headquarters. The Gang of Outlaws descended on the old aircraft and got to work. As tough as this job looks in photographs, the reality was even more exhausting. Room would have to be cleared for the MasterAce’s instrument cluster, and the long-term plan called for selling off a few of the more valuable Cessna instruments, but the plane’s debut would need to include as many functioning—or at least illuminated—aircraft gauges as possible. The Gang of Outlaws put two car batteries together in series to create aircraft-grade, 24-volt DC current and did their best to get those mysterious airplane gadgets working.

By this time, the VanWagon had been hacked down to essentially a wheeled platform. 24 Hours of LeMons rules mandate a seriously stout full roll cage, and so that would be the next step for the Outlaws. Because even the narrow Toyota Van is much wider than a Cessna 310 fuselage, it was necessary to offset the fuselage to the right on the van chassis. This meant building an oddball offset cage. While dismantling and preparing the Cessna fuselage for attachment to the van chassis, the airplane had to be subjected to a tool-wielding frenzy:

And to clear the roll cage and the various protuberances of the Toyota chassis, while providing mounting locations to mate the two, much more gutting and fabrication work had to be done on the Cessna:

Endless busted knuckles and worn-out Sawzall blades later, the time came to lower the fuselage onto the chassis. Here’s the video of that process, for those of you who want to see the gory details:

Success! Because the Cessna arrived with no tail, one was created to preserve the proper airplane-ness of the Spirit of LeMons. Once the Cessna fuselage was joined to the Toyota Van’s chassis, the roll cage conformed very nicely to the contours of the aircraft interior. Hinged “jet engines” were added to serve as rear wheel covers, and winglets were created and mounted in the original Cessna wing locations in order to camouflage the van’s wheels. (We’re glossing over thousands of small and large tasks needed to get the Spirit of LeMons to this point, but we’re sure you get the general idea.)

The Toyota instrument cluster, steering wheel, and shifter ended up integrating nicely with the Cessna hardware.

It wouldn’t be right for the Spirit of LeMons to show up for its first race wearing dull, drab oxidized aluminum skin, so the Gang of Outlaws began a seemingly endless metal-polishing marathon. Finally, after more than six months of agony, the Spirit of LeMons was ready for the Southern Discomfort 24 Hours of LeMons. We knew it was coming, and we’d been knocked on our collective asses by spectacular Speedycop projects many times in the past, but nobody was ready for what rolled into the Carolina Motorsports Park paddock that day. The Spirit of LeMons, gleaming in the sun, looked jarringly like a real airplane. The male Outlaws had donned vintage–style flying suits, while the female outlaws were done up in full 1940s-era pinup-girl outfits. A huge crowd gathered around the Spirit of LeMons, and all inspections of other, lesser race cars ground to a halt as everyone on the premises stopped and stared in disbelief. Well, we all thought, this is really cool, but there’s no way this thing will actually survive in a real road race. When the Spirit of LeMons hit the track the next morning (note the offset wheels visible above), most folks in the paddock assumed it would limp around apologetically for a few laps, break something, and then spend the rest of the weekend as a pit decoration. Not so! The Spirit of LeMons wasn’t particularly quick, but it suffered only a few minor (and easily fixed) overheating problems over the course of the weekend. Only in LeMons could you have a Cessna-based race car dicing with another race car equipped with major aircraft components: Here’s the Spirit of LeMons about to get passed by the Our Lady of Perpetual Downforce Honda Civic, which features a Cessna 172 wing section on the roof. The Spirit of LeMons looked exactly like a taxiing airplane on the track, at least when viewed from the side, and it managed to pass quite a few cars during the race. Fuel stops were done at the gas station next to the track, leading to many very confused residents of Kershaw, South Carolina. The sight of “the airplane car” on the track never got old:

Racing legend Randy Pobst, a shameless LeMons fan, showed up to watch the race, and, of course, we talked him into taking a stint behind the wheel of the Spirit of LeMons. Here’s what he had to say about the experience:

As I taxied the gleaming fuselage back to Speedycop’s paddock area, my girlfriend Jennifer ran up and breathlessly exclaimed, “Randy, you were flyin’ out there!” We laughed until we cried. This crazy Cessnacar is so outrageous and unexpected. Like the apple in the face of the English businessman in Magritte’s surreal painting. It drove like a normal car, pretty much, but with a severe corner weight issue. Instant inside-rear wheelspin resulted from the slightest right turn. The little Toyota platform could generate another surprise: 90 MPH if I chose to thrash it down the straight. “Good aero” said Speedycop, and again we laughed to tears.

In the end, the Spirit of LeMons finished 65th out of 84 entries, with better lap times than quite a few cars. For this, we felt compelled to give Speedycop & the Gang of Outlaws the top prize of LeMons racing: the coveted Index of Effluency trophy.

When was the last time you saw a Cessna do a celebratory burnout?

What’s next for the Spirit of LeMons? Speedycop plans to add headlights and taillights, get license plates, and drive the Spirit of LeMons on the street. He says there’s no way he’ll ever be able to top this project, but we know better!

Photographs courtesy of Murilee Martin, Jeff Bloch, Ron Vickers, Doug Kirchberg, Damion Jedlicka, and James Aguanno.

Want even more 24 Hours of LeMons madness? We’ve got it for you right here!