24 Hours of LeMons Sears Point: The Winners!

The Svengalis at the 24 Hours of LeMons have managed to cloud the minds of Race Sonoma‘s management to the point where they look at their beautiful wine-nation race track getting befouled by horrible, LeMons cars dropping bumpers and spewing oil… and see a real race going on. Perhaps the hypnotism has them imagining shiny new Mustangs instead of this and wailing Porsche GT3s as an alternative of, properly, this. What ever the case, we’re undertaking 3 races at The Track Formerly Recognized As Sears Point inside a 4-month span, and the second a single just wrapped up final weekend. The climate was perfect, the battles have been tough-fought, and we witnessed more Sesame Street characters driving race vehicles than anyone had ever observed just before. Right here are the winners of the 2015 Good Effort Grand Prix.

We’ll start with the least important prize first: The Class A prize plus the win on laps had been taken by Eyesore Racing and their hideous-but-quick “ghettocharged” Mazda Miata. The Eyesores were amongst the earliest teams to create the puzzling costumes and projects-of-questionable-sanity for which LeMons racing has turn out to be identified, and— prior to the group members became parents, got actual jobs, purchased homes, and so on.— were the dominant West Coast team for many years.

They hadn’t won a LeMons race since 2012, however, and so final weekend’s win was (to place it in the East Bay parlance of LeMons HQ) Hella Sweet for Eyesore Racing.

One particular of the factors that Los Eyesores have been obtaining all those P2 and P3 finishes in recent years has been that their strange-o automobile develop delivers no safe place for a massive fuel cell, limiting their car’s fuel capacity to the factory 10-gallon fuel tank and condemning the group to one much more fueling stop than the competition. Another purpose has been the rise of the team pictured above, the 1st LeMons team to figure out how to hold a Porsche 944 from exploding into a million not possible-to-reassemble pieces in our race. Formerly known as Porch Racing and now referred to as Depend, this group ended the Very good Effort Grand Prix less than a lap behind Eyesore. The 3 penalty laps handed to them during the automobile inspections by a LeMons Supreme Court justice who smelled a hint of cheatonium in their automobile couldn’t be overcome by Depend’s longer stints, and Eyesore clawed out their first win in 3 years.

In Class B, the LeMons Supreme Court justices were faced with a dilemma: how can you place a breakdown-prone ’89 Chevy Cavalier with 3.1 liter V6 and terrible suspension into Class A, even right after ONSET/Tetanus West Racing won the class in Washington last summer? We couldn’t do it, and then ONSET/Tetanus won the class by 6 laps more than the John Galt Racing BMW 2002.

Even even though ONSET/Tetanus team captain Anton Lovett has more LeMons races below his belt than any other driver and brings his Cavalier to the track inside a former bread truck, that vehicle goes in Class A from now on (unless it gets an Iron Duke engine swap, of course). For more of the wonderful race-automobile-transporter rigs of this race, verify out LeMons Supreme Court Justice Tim Odell’s piece on Hooniverse.

Class C gave the judges another classing dilemma the Aqua Volvo Volvo 242 has been around for quite a even though and had often been miserably slow and profoundly unreliable, but a stock Volvo 240 can be a potent Class B or even Class A LeMons racer in the hands of a team whose members know what they’re carrying out. Properly, it looks like the Aqua Volvo folks finally figured it out, grabbing a Class C victory by a single lap more than the POS Angry Bird Datsun 200SX (yet another fairly excellent car handicapped by hapless-but-lovable team personnel). Welcome to Class B, Aqua Volvo!

The designed-just-for-the-occasion trophy this time was awarded to Zero Below Racing, for taking a not-very-good-to-start off-with Chevrolet Corvair and generating it even worse with the swap of a mid-mounted Buick 215 aka Rover V8 engine. In a lot the identical way that the remake of Gone In 60 Seconds was even worse than the extremely cheezy original, Zero Under has earned the Gone In 60 Seconds Poor Remake Trophy.

We’re positive that Corvair fans about the globe are rejoicing at this news.

The Sunday Funday Honda CRX team races with a transvestite/transexual theme, like a pink fringe on the automobile and the ugliest, most hirsute trannies ever inflicted upon the eyes of race organizers (and, think me, we’ve seen lots).

So, naturally, when the transmission failed on their vehicle and the group fixed it, we had no choice but to award the Most Heroic Repair trophy to the tranny-fixing trannies of Team Sunday Funday, just so we could make a clever joke at the awards ceremony.

The I Got Screwed award went to Altar Boy Racing for the purgatorial travails they underwent even though attempting to get their 1985 Mazda 626 race-legal and then operating.

The team brought about 20 crew members and place collectively a fantastic “Evolution Is Okay” theme, but the auto suffered from a long list of safety problems (such as a rear suspension with 0° of camber on the left and about 40° on the correct). The team thrashed away at those issues and ultimately got the car onto the track late in the 1st race session… at which point the automatic transmission refused to shift out of very first gear. That lap didn’t count (the tow truck didn’t pull the Mazda past the commence/finish line), the team in no way did get the transmission functioning, and so Altar Boy Racing took home the I Got Screwed trophy.

Due to the fact LeMons HQ gave admission precedence to teams that weren’t accepted to the overbooked Arse Freeze-a-Palooza race last month, we had more than the usual number of teams recognized for becoming a bit too spinny and crashy with their race automobiles. Since of this, the LeMons Supreme Court’s judges decided that the Judges’ Selection award would go to the ideal redemption story of the weekend, the team that got their act collectively and went from black-flag magnet to super-clean racers. That team was Expendable and their BMW E30 3-series, frequent penalty-box visitors and sent-home-in-shame racers at all their previous LeMons events but startlingly clean competitors this time.

It didn’t hurt that Group Expendable’s drivers operate at Vintage Electric Bikes and loaned us one particular of their exceptional American-created bikes as pit transportation for the weekend. This bike can haul even the greatest-fed judge up the steepest hill at Race Sonoma at a great clip, and permitted us to enable Hush Mode and sneak up on unsafe fuelers and jack-stand-significantly less wrenchers for some righteous paddock security-violation busts.

Group OMShenanigans had some sort of Obama’s Black-Helicopter-flying FEMA Camp Enforcers theme on their BMW E23 7-series final time we saw them, and— apparently inspired by TARP Racing’s Cookie Monster Warlord BMW— this time they raced with a vehicle turned into a gigantic googly-eyed Cookie Monster.

Due to the fact OMShenanigans did this, we have been able to watch an Alfa Romeo Milano with a giant Pepperidge Farm Milano cookie on the roof duking it out with a 4,000-pound Cookie Monster on a legendary race track. For that, OMShenanigans earned a nicely-deserved Organizer’s Decision trophy.

The Index of Effluency, LeMons racing’s best prize, went to Spank the Builder for his Mini Moke-turned-Caterpillar backhoe, which completed an incredible 34th spot overall and created a credible run at Class C.

This car ran the third-slowest best lap occasions of the complete 93-entry field, and so finishing so high in the standings is an remarkable accomplishment. On Sunday, Spank did an iron-man 6-hour solo driving stint with no stops, which would have been a flag-to-flag run if he hadn’t run out of gas 5 minutes prior to the checkered flag.

Somehow, Spank and his teammates discovered the energy to re-theme their auto as a John Deere tractor in time for Monday’s race session. A effectively-deserved Index of Effluency for Spank to add to his massive collection of LeMons trophies!

We race once more in a couple of weeks, this time at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama, so check in right here for all your LeMons news if you can not make it to the track.

24 Hours of LeMons Sears Point: The Winners!