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!

24 Hours of LeMons New Jersey: The Winners!

At the second annual There Goes the Neighborhood 24 Hours of LeMons (and our sixth check out to New Jersey Motorsports Park given that our 1st race there in 2011), we saw several movie-themed teams and our very first 4-billion-lap penalty on Friday, German vehicles pushed entirely out of the upper reaches of the standings on Saturday, and a bunch of teams go property with trophies on Sunday. Here’s what occurred.

Whilst cold, hard statistics prove that the Volvo 240 is the best 24 Hours of LeMons automobile, and numerous of the beloved Swedish bricks have finished in the leading 5 of the standings in our races, only 2 have ever stood at the top of the heap when the checkered flag waved: the Mustard Yellow Volvo Doing 45 In the Quickly Lane, which took the win at the 2009 Buttonwillow Histrionics with the most dramatic finish in LeMons history… and the winner of the 2014 There Goes the Neighborhood race on Sunday: the Keystone Kops and their ’79 Volvo 242.

The Kops have been around given that the very early days of the 24 Hours of LeMons, generating their debut at the first-ever East Coast event and the eighth LeMons race all round (we’re now on #117): the 2008 New England 24 Hours of LeMons. They run a 244 sedan with a turbocharged Volvo engine and a 242 coupe with a Ford 302 swap, and they’ve had at least one automobile in the single-digit portion of the standings in just about every race considering that they started. Lastly, the 2-door “Jew-Wop-E” (so named, in quite East Coast style, because all of its drivers are of Jewish or Italian ancestry) managed to avoid blowing up and/or obtaining buried in black flags at a race, and the Keystone Cops took the Class A and overall wins by 4 laps over the Toyota Solara of Team FRS’s Ugly Uncle. After 6 years, the Kops have carried out it!

In Class B, we have another Volvo feelgood story: Quick Al’s Race Group, running a Volvo 745 with automatic transmission, had been pursing an elusive class win for years— maybe not quite as many years as the Keystone Kops, but a lengthy, extended time.

Every race, it seemed, F.A.R.T. would hold off the Class B challengers by a lap or 2 for most of the weekend, then throw a connecting rod or scatter a transmission or melt the wiring harness (the Volvo 740 has been far less dependable than its 240 predecessor in our races). Then, ultimately, the Quickly Al’s wagon squeezed previous the other Class B cars and stayed there, taking the win by a not-so-comfy few hundred yards over the Massholes and their Ford Escort. Congratulations, Quick Al’s Racing Group!

Class C went to the team DeCuzzi Racing Gulf a Fiero and their ’86 Pontiac Fiero. This vehicle set down some great lap occasions, managing to keep away from the standard Fiero fate of blowing up and requiring in depth and time-consuming repairs, and completed P35 overall and 10 laps up in its class.

The Most Heroic Repair trophy was awarded to Scuderia Regurgito (Dom’s Racing Group) for repairs created to the completely destroyed engine in their 1992 BMW 325i. In the words of LeMons Supreme Court Justice Matt Adair: “Car is smoking massively on track, they pull over and attempt to turn it off. It won’t turn off. Track goes red flag although it’s sorted out and towed into the paddock (even though operating). They end up cutting the battery cables…still operating. They reduce the alternator wire…still running. They reduce the wires to the coil packs…still running. Ultimately they reduce all the wires to the harness…still operating. Ultimately they empty a fire extinguisher into the intake and it shuts off. That night, they source a new motor, set up it, re-wire the automobile, and somehow make it back out and run most of Sunday.”

Often the I Got Screwed award goes to a team… and often it goes to an person. In this case, Team G-Tron hired a nearby mechanic named Mattie to prep a trio of matching 1995 Audi 90s for the race. When the cars showed up for the inspections, they failed the gear check on numerous counts apiece, and so Mattie had to be hired to come back to the track and thrash the automobiles into sufficiently very good shape to pass the tech inspection. Then he had to invest the weekend in an Audi-wrenching frenzy to maintain the cars (sort of) running, even though the racers— described by Chief Perp Jay Lamm as “a group of Audi Club D-bags”— hovered over him. For this, Mattie brings residence the I Got Screwed trophy.

For the Judges’ Choice award, how could the LeMons Supreme Court offer this trophy to any group that didn’t race a 2000 Nissan Quest minivan? Sputnik Racing— yes, the exact same Sputnik Racing that shepherded the Worst Automobile In LeMons History for much of its travels about the continent last year— pleased the judges extremely a lot with their choice of racin’ machinery.

The Game of Crumplezones Acura Integra and team costumes earned the Organizer’s Decision trophy, for clear reasons.

For each race, we produce a special regional and/or race-particular trophy. This time that trophy was the Best Non-Team Team Theme, for this extremely precise “London Bus” constructed by a group of race spectators.

The prime prize of LeMons racing, the Index of Effluency, goes to the group that achieves far beyond any affordable expectations with a automobile that never belonged anywhere close to a race track. In this case, Team Prompt Crucial Racing managed to flog their 1974 Mk1 Ford Capri (number 235, naturally) all the way up to P44 (out of 126 entries starting the race), practically taking the Class C prize in the process. Regardless of what European Capri fans may inform you, this is one of the worst attainable automobiles to enter in a LeMons race (specifically with the deeply flawed Cologne V6, which is what powers the Prompt Essential auto), and a practically-in-the-top-third finish for this auto is therefore an astounding achievement. Properly completed, Prompt Crucial Racing!

Photographs by Matt Adair, John Abronski, Murilee Martin, Kim Harmon, and Nick Pon

24 Hours of LeMons New Jersey: The Winners!