24 Hours of LeMons Utah: The Winners!

We saw an exceptionally good field of LeMons vehicles inspected on Friday, watched 3 European cars take class leads on Saturday, and now the checkered flag has signaled the finish of Sunday’s race session and we’ve got the winners of the initial annual Return of the LeMonites 24 Hours of LeMons for you.

Getting the most all round laps and taking the Class A win in the procedure, we have the first-ever Volvo-engined Volvo to get an general 24 Hours of LeMons win (a Ford 302-powered Volvo 244, built by a group that incorporated your LeMons correspondent back in 2008, won the 2009 Arse Sweat-a-Palooza race). In fact, the Too Stupid To Know Better Volvo 740 Turbo could be the first Volvo 700 Series to climb out of the mud of the bottom portion of a LeMons race’s standings.

The Too Stupid To Know Much better drivers ran a near-best race and their car suffered not a single hiccup. Their 740 wagon wasn’t the quickest point on the track, but a mixture of reliability, take-no-possibilities driving, and excellent fuel discipline gave the team a win with a 5-lap cushion. Congratulations, Also Stupid To Know Much better!

The Class B prize went to Dirty Duck Racing, who ultimately took a suitable LeMons class win after 5 years of attempting. They spent the weekend locked in a deadly battle with the Pinto Beans Ford Pinto, sooner or later taking the win by 6 laps.

Soon after many California races in which their Porsche 914 struggled to climb into the leading half of the standings, Team Village Folks managed to annihilate the Class C competition in Utah. When the race ended, the Village People had a ludicrous 95-lap lead more than the nearest class challenger, which indicates that the Porsche could have exploded a lot more than 3 hours prior to the checkered flag and still won.

Welcome to Class B, officer!

The Most Heroic Repair trophy went to a team that repaired main, crippling failures in their tow automobile, their trailer, and their race vehicle. The list of difficulties and fixes is far to extended to enumerate in any detail here, but the condensed version of obstacles surmounted by The New York Rock Exchange involves the following: RV ignition-program failure, trailer suspension failure, RV exterior panels torn off, RV interior destroyed by unintended Television-antenna deployment, race auto transmission failure, RV engine fire, and (we’re assuming here) the tires gnawed off the trailer by rabid skunks.

Not only did the New York Rock Exchange guys surmount each a single of these troubles, they kept their sense of humor and even managed to feed a massive percentage of their fellow racers on Saturday night.

What truly made their fixes heroic, in our eyes, was the use of 24 Hours of LeMons stickers as part of the RV-siding repair.

Generally, when you are the very first team to bring a Rover SD1 to a LeMons race, and it (sort of) runs for considerably of the weekend, you can just about count on receiving a major trophy.

The Flaming A-Holes spent the weekend fighting electrical fires and fuel-program woes, and their Rover turned a miraculous 261 laps, but they had the misfortune to bring their car to a race with a large glut of spectacular vehicles. For obtaining the Index of Effluency and Organizer’s Option trophies snatched from their grasp (a lot like British Leyland workers getting their positive aspects axed by Maggie Thatcher), the Flaming A-Holes received the not-quite-coveted I Got Screwed award.

For our region-certain trophy at the Return of the LeMonites race, we took inspiration from a neighborhood legend: the Miracle of the Gulls. When the Bangers N Mash team’s Jensen-Healey threw a connecting rod early on Saturday, the chances of locating a super-uncommon Lotus 907 replacement engine seemed about nil. You may well locate a few of these super-uncommon motors squirreled away in garages in Los Angeles or Detroit, but in Utah on a Saturday? No way.

But Bangers N Mash produced a few inquiries and identified that a neighborhood racer had a working Lotus 907 stashed below a workbench in a garage about 50 yards from the stricken Jensen-Healey. They bought it, swapped it, and raced all day Sunday.

8-Bit Racing killed the engine in their uncommon Subaru RX about 25 seconds into the race, which produced your weird-80s-Japanese-auto-loving LeMons correspondent quite sad.

Nonetheless, the 8-Bit guys rounded up a junkyard quick-block— not a turbocharged one, so the compression ratio was too high and the oiling program was all wrong, but they didn’t let that quit them— and spent several hours swapping it into their Subaru. It worked! For that accomplishment, the LeMons Supreme Court gave 8-Bit Racing the Judges’ Selection award.

Choosing the Organizer’s Decision winner wasn’t challenging this time. Just appear at the box flares on the Joseph the Amazing Technicolor Dream Auto BMW E21!

An additional quite easy selection came when we had to pick the winner of the top prize of 24 Hours of LeMons Racing: the Index of Effluency. The Grumpy Cat Racing 1950 Dodge pickup was the oldest automobile ever to compete in a LeMons race, it raced with its original 216-cubic-inch Chrysler flathead I6 engine and granny-gear non-syncromesh transmission, it had sat dead for many decades prior to the race, and it looked beautiful. Even if it had gone about the track a mere dozen times, these elements would have created it the top IOE contender… but the old Dodge racked up an astounding 250 laps, which comes to 560 miles of complete-throttle abuse on a truck that no one anticipated to survive more than about 15 minutes.

Just 2 weeks ago, this truck was an inert, forgotten hulk in the weeds behind a Denver auto-repair shop. The owner’s teammates abandoned him when they realized the magnitude of their task, and all seemed lost. Then, thanks to the really supportive LeMons community and the massive-hearted members of Denver-primarily based Speed Holes Racing and Rocket Surgery Racing, an all-out thrash in the days prior to the race got the ancient Dodge running, turning, stopping, equipped with a roll cage, fuel cell, race seat, and all the other issues a race vehicle demands.

The truck passed the tech inspection the initial time by way of, which was impressive. Even a lot more impressive, nevertheless, was the fact that this 64-year-old derelict ran all weekend without having a single significant mechanical dilemma these of you who have followed LeMons racing for a even though know that even a brand-new auto would have a hard time surviving an entire race weekend, and that it generally requires numerous races to operate the reliability bugs out of any LeMons race machine. Yes, it burned a lot of oil. Yes, it was extremely, quite slow (even though the drivers were capable to pass a handful of no-doubt-startled competitors). Yes, the spectators cheered each time they saw it lumbering into view.

P43 out of 67 entries, no black flags, drivers from Colorado, California, and Texas, plus an unprecedented show of durability add up to the easiest Index of Effluency choice in 24 Hours of LeMons history. Effectively done, Grumpy Cat Racing!

24 Hours of LeMons Utah: The Winners!