24 Hours of LeMons Yee-Haw It’s Texas BS Inspections
This weekend's race is the fourth annual Yee-Haw It's Texas 24 Hours of LeMons, and the first to take place at College Station's Texas World Speedway. All day Friday, the tech inspectors checked the entrants for safety violations, while the LeMons Supreme Court looked for violators of the LeMons $500 spending limit. We saw some fast cars, some slow cars, endless hooptified Miatas, and a couple of cars that will live on in LeMons legend.
The veteran racers on Team Sensory Assault have been running extremely terrible Mazda RX-7s (equipped with exhaust-heat-powered moonshine still and generator-powered household air-conditioner) in LeMons for a few years now, but now they've taken their game to an even higher level: a 1972 Mazda RX-2, complete with 13B engine swap.
The RX-2 was a barn find, and by that we mean that it had an abandoned barn collapse on it 20 years ago. The suspension remains untouched, down to the original factory shocks, so doubling the horsepower should make for some interesting laps on Saturday.
The RX-2′s main rival for the Class C victory, and probably the Index of Effluency (the top prize of LeMons racing, earned by the team that accomplishes the most with a car that never belonged anywhere near a race track) is the Team Turbo Style Chevy Sprint. Yes, our first-ever Turbo Sprint, featuring 993 screaming cubic centimeters of pure Suzuki turbocharged power!
The IROC Maiden team dragged their IROC-Z Camaro all the way out from California for this race, and they have an ambitious plan to enter nearly every 2012 LeMons event, regardless of location. Run to the hills!
We've got Texas pride on display here, with this former Index of Effluency-winning Toyota Tercel EZ now converted into a credible Alamo replica. In honor of Ozzy Osbourne's infamous early-80s micturating-on-the-Alamo incident, we see "Davey Crockett" exacting some vengeance on The Ozz.
Another LeMons first: an allegedly sub-$500 Porsche 911, in this case a 1971 911 Targa. It's a fairly rusty and generally beat example, allegedly given to the team by a neighbor who no longer wanted his project car… but the LeMons Supreme Court takes a skeptical view of "free" stuff that's worth well over five Benjamins (e.g., the "free" 500-horse aluminum Chevy small-block that someone "gave" Pratt & Miller's LeMons team a couple years back) and we ended up hammering this Porsche with 5,000 penalty laps.
Which isn't to say we take a dim view of all rear-engined, air-cooled German cars.
From the "good idea on paper" department comes the Blue Oval Cult SHOStang, a Fox Mustang with Taurus SHO V6 flipped sideways and mated with a Ranger transmission. This car sounds great and should be very fast, but so far it has suffered from reliability problems. Perhaps this will be the SHOStang's race!
The car to beat this time will be the tough Team BenzGay Mercedes-Benz 300E, a past Texas race winner and always a strong contender.
With 60 entries, the easiest way to see most of them is to watch a timelapse video of the day's BS Inspection action. Check in Saturday night for a roundup of the first session's race results!
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